Maverick Philosopher

The Enemies of Liberty "Will not go Quietly into the Night"

On the morning of November 6th, I wrote, "But this is no time to gloat over the defeat  of our enemies. They will not give up or give in."  Here is how Peter Boghossian makes the point. (A little over six minutes.) 

Now that we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable (my title not Boghossian's) have gained momentum, we must not rest on our laurels, but fight even harder, as Boghossian puts it, "to drive the final nail into the coffin" of our enemies. One drives a nail with a hammer. But hammers have other uses as well. 

I am reminded of the subtitle to Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols: Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert, "How one philosophizes with a hammer." Nietzsche's hammer is an icon-buster. (There is a passage, however, in which he likens his hammer to a tuning-fork with which the sounds out the idols for their soundness, and finds them hollow. My way of putting it, not his.) 

We patriots have an iconoclastic task before us: the smashing of the idols of the leftist tribe.

Nietzsche on Conviction

Top o' the Stack

The Childless as Anthropological Danglers

Top o' the Stack. 

The Austrian philosopher and Vienna Circle member Herbert Feigl wrote about nomological danglers.  Mental states as the epiphenomenalist conceives them have causes, but no effects. They are caused by physical states of the body and brain, but dangle nomologically in that there are no laws  that relate mental states  to physical states.

The childless are anthropological danglers.  They are life's epiphenomena. They have ancestors (causes) but no descendants (effects). Parents are essential: without  them we could not have come into fleshly existence.  But offspring are wholly inessential: the individual, though not the species, can exist quite well without them.

I mention pros and cons of dangling anthropologically.

Anti-Natalism Article of Mine Now in Print and Online

Vallicella, William F.. "Is the Quality of Life Objectively Evaluable on Naturalism?" Perichoresis, vol.21, no.1, 2023, pp.70-83. https://doi.org/10.2478/perc-2023-0005

Abstract

This article examines one of the sources of David Benatar’s anti-natalism. This is the view that ‘all procreation is [morally] wrong.’ (Benatar and Wasserman, 2015:12) One of its sources is the claim that each of our lives is objectively bad, hence bad whether we think so or not. The question I will pose is whether the constraints of metaphysical naturalism allow for an objective devaluation of human life sufficiently negative to justify anti-natalism. My thesis is that metaphysical naturalism does not have the resources to support such a negative evaluation. Metaphysical naturalism is the view that causal reality is exhausted by nature, the space-time system and its contents.

The gist of my argument is that the ideal standards relative to which our lives are supposed to be axiologically substandard cannot be merely subjective expressions of our desires and aversions; they must be (i) objectively binding standards that are (ii) objectively possible in the sense of concretely realizable. The realizability condition, however, cannot be satisfied on metaphysical naturalism; ergo, failure to meet these ideal standards cannot show that our lives are objectively bad.

Keywords

• anti-natalism
• procreation
• naturalism
• metaphysical naturalism
• human life

The entire issue is available here.

The Truth of Life and the Art of Life

We must face reality to learn the truth of life. But the art of life requires that we sometimes turn away, look away, shrug our shoulders, peremptorily dismiss, ask not why, and acquiesce in a jaded ignoramus et ignorabimus. Prudent folk often acquiesce in such an unreflective understanding.  They sense the difference between the true and the life-enhancing. But the tension does not much concern them; perhaps they feel that to fret over it would be the opposite of life-enhancing and get them into trouble. Not for them the examined life.

The tension is left to the philosophers to reflect on. Their sort of life is enhanced by the paradoxical, the antinomian, and the absurd. Desirous of Sense they will wander to the edge of Nonsense and peer over the edge into an Abgrund, risking Nietzsche's warning that  "if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." (Beyond Good and Evil, sec.146.)

The weak among them will shrink back and take comfort in the smiley-faced nihilism of the Last Man of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The resolute will weather the Great Doubt and press on with faith and determination.

Nietzsche, Salvation, and the Question of the Value of Life

Substack latest.

Do You Value This Life? How Much?

It is the hour of death.  You are informed by an utterly reliable source that you have exactly two options.  You can either accept death and with it utter annihilation of the self, or you can repeat your life with every last detail the same.  But if every last detail is to be the same, and you decide to sign up for another round on the wheel of becoming, you realize that you are signing up for an infinity of rounds.

So which will it be?  Has your life been so valuable that you would be willing to repeat it, and indeed repeat it endlessly? Noch einmal? If you say yes, you are at the upper limit of life affirmation. For me, once is enough. Up or out! This life has point only as prelude. The wheel of samsara is  the wheel of Ixion, and an eternity of re-turning is a shabby and indeed horrifying substitute for true eternity.

Nietzsche was a genuine instance of homo religiosus, but possessing as he did the bladed intellect of the skeptic, he could not bring himself to believe.

Nietzsche to his Friend Overbeck

"I am grieved by the transitoriness of things." So he preached the Eternal Recurrence of the Same,  letting an ersatz Absolute in through the back door. Becoming became enshrined as Being. Thus was an attempt made to fix the flux and assuage the metaphysical need. 

Addendum

After penning the above observation, I stumbled upon the following entry in Theodor Haecker's Journal in the Night (tr. Alexander Dru, Pantheon Books, 1950, p. 31, #127):

The most radical denial of need of redemption in this world seems to me to lie in the phrase, 'the eternal recurrence of the same' (Nietzsche). Logically it represents a fantastic confusion  thought, since quite evidently everything points in the very opposite direction. Theologically, it is at an infinite distance from God, and it turns everything upside down. At this point discussion is no longer possible.

Haecker is on the right track, The eternity of Recurrence is a paltry substitute for true eternity and in the end no true redemption.

The Decisive Difference between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (Pantheon, 1950, tr. Dru), #689, p. 212, written in 1944:

The endless chatter about Nietzsche and Kierkegaard is quite hopeless. Outward similarities set up a superficial sphere of comparison that is utterly meaningless, for they are localised and limited by a decisive difference at a deeper level; the one prayed, the other did not. 

 

Nietzsche, Truth, and Power

Nietzsche's conflation of truth with power is one source of Critical Race Theory.

Substack latest.

 

Can the Humanities be Saved?

Excerpts from, and commentary on, John Gray, Why the Humanities Can't be Saved.  HT: Karl White.

It is hard to see why any sensible person would enroll in a humanities degree at the present time. A common argument used to be that the humanities taught students how to think. [. . .]

This is not an argument that can be made today. “Critical thinking” has become a cluster of progressive dogmas, which are handed down as if they were self-evident truths. Students learn an intra-academic argot – intersectionality, hetero-normativity and the like — that has zero utility in the world in which they will go on to live.

They also learn that disagreement in ethics and politics is illegitimate. Anyone who departs from the prevailing progressive consensus is not just mistaken but malevolent. When enforced in universities, this is a prescription for censorship and conformism. What is being inculcated is not freedom of mind, but freedom from thought. Losing the ability to think while attending a university may be considered a misfortune. Incurring fifty or sixty thousand pounds of debt in order to do so looks like carelessness.

It looks more like stupidity.

The decline of the humanities is one of the defining facts of the age. Yet there has not been a great deal of serious discussion of its causes. In the Eighties and Nineties, an influential critique argued that universities had been co-opted by “tenured radicals”—the title of a provocative book published by the American art critic Roger Kimball in 1990.

As Kimball saw it, an academic nomenklatura controlled sectors of higher education and used its position to attack the values of the societies that funded it. Any version of a western canon was discredited, and its origins in classical philosophy and Jewish and Christian religion disparaged.

There is some truth in this critique. Though they remain ineffably redolent of the bourgeoisie at their most sanctimonious and self-deceiving, academic radicals define themselves by their opposition to the bourgeois civilisation that produced and now supports them. Kimball’s critique also identifies a key feature of tenured radicalism: it is self-reproducing. Through their powers of patronage, the nomenklatura decide the prospects of new entrants, and exclude anyone who deviates from the party line. No young scholar who fails to genuflect to it has any prospect of a future in academic life.

So far, so good.

What this analysis fails to explain is the appeal of the ideology this class has adopted. Marx may be worth re-reading in a time when capitalism is entering another of its recurrent crises. But how could a turgid mishmash of Heidegger, Derrida and Lacan have gained such a stranglehold on institutions of higher learning?

The metamorphosis in liberalism that has occurred over the past generation has played a role. From being a philosophy of tolerance aiming at peaceful coexistence among divergent world-views, it has become a persecutory orthodoxy that tolerates no view of the world other than its own. If the contemporary academy is hostile to liberal values as they used to be understood, one reason is the rise of a new liberalism that dismisses these values as phony and repressive. But this only pushes the question one step back. Why has illiberal liberalism become so popular?

Gray notes correctly that "persecutory orthodoxy" has replaced the classically liberal philosophy of tolerance and then asks a very important question. Why has this illiberal liberalism taken hold?   His answer follows.

Part of the answer may be found in a short, strange and inexhaustibly interesting volume that was published nearly a century and a half ago. The chief subject of Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy(1872), is the nature of Greek tragedy, which he interpreted as an art-form that overcame the lack of meaning in human life by reframing it as an aesthetic spectacle.

The most celebrated aspect of Nietzsche’s interpretation is his claim that Greek drama turns on an interaction between an Apollonian striving after reason and order, and a Dionysian yearning for chaos and frenzy. But the most important section of the book, to my mind, comes when he applies his account of Greek tragedy to the secular faith of modern times, which he calls “Socratism” — the belief that the world becomes properly intelligible only when the human mind has rid itself of myth.

“Socrates is the archetype of the theoretical optimist,” Nietzsche writes, “who in his faith in the explicability of things, attributes the power of a panacea to knowledge and science, and sees error as the embodiment of evil.” [. . .]

The end-result of Socratism for the West is “a resolute process of secularization, a break with the unconscious metaphysics of its previous existence”. In turn, the triumph of Socratism leads to a violent rebirth of mythic thinking, inspiring the frenzied totalitarian movements that Nietzsche saw coming and which, ironically, he was blamed for inspiring.

Writing when Europe’s high bourgeois civilisation seemed unshakably secure, Nietzsche foresaw the present crisis of the humanities. Deconstruction is Socratism in an extravagant form, an all-out effort to subvert the myths and metaphysics that underpinned western civilisation — not least Socrates’s own faith in reason. [. . .]

Like Plato, Socrates was the mouthpiece of a mystical faith. It was this—not any process of ratiocination—that allowed him to assert that the true and the good were one and the same. The ideology of deconstruction aims to demystify this Socratic faith, along with everything else. As Nietzsche understood, once Socratism knocks away its metaphysical foundations it becomes a type of nihilism.

Gray is asking an important question. How did "persecutory orthodoxy" come to replace the classically liberal philosophy of tolerance? This philosophy includes belief in free speech, open inquiry, and acceptance of dissent, all underpinned by the belief that at least partial insight into the truth is possible by dialectical means, that is, by dialog, discussion, and friendly competition in a 'free marketplace of ideas.'  On classical liberalism, dissent is not hate, as it for the persecutorily orthodox, but a goad to inquiry. If you disagree with me, I don't hate you for it; I try to see what I can learn from you. I take your disagreement as a reason to examine my beliefs more carefully.  I assume that there is a truth beyond both of us.

The assumption, of course, is that the world is intrinsically intelligible, and that it is possible to know something about it as it is in itself.  Logos can and must supplant mythos as the guide to truth and to life.  There is an impersonal truth, a truth that is not perspectival and merely expressive of the interests and the will to power of individuals and tribes, but is instead objective and absolute.  And again, this truth is assumed to be knowable, to some extent at least.

Gray, leaning on Nietzsche, is in effect telling us that these assumptions about intrinsic intelligibility, truth, and knowability are part of a "mystical faith," Socratism, according to which "the belief that the world becomes properly intelligible only when the human mind has rid itself of myth." This faith in reason, in the value of critical examination, and in its efficacy at getting at the truth, then gets turned upon the very project of rational inquiry.  The upshot is that the Enlightenment project, which begins with Socrates, undermines itself.  Skepticism and nihilism result.  Faith in reason wanes when reason cannot secure life-guiding results acceptable to all.

The critical assault on the dogmatism of tribal traditions and myths having failed, new dogmatisms arise:  people need to have life-guiding beliefs.   Only the rare Pyrrhonian skeptic can live adoxastos, and even for him that is arguably only a rarely attained ideal. The vast majority cannot live belieflessly. Thus arise dogmatisms that persecute other dogmatisms. There is, for example, the dogmatism of the hate-America leftist with his slanderous talk of systemic racism.

The question again, is: How did "persecutory orthodoxy" come to replace the classically liberal philosophy of tolerance? It is not clear to me what Gray's answer is.  He may be telling us that the "mystical faith" in reason is as groundless and mythical as any other myth, and that once this was appreciated suspected late in the history of the West by Nietzsche, it was just a matter of time before that the "mystical faith" was de-mystified and a sort of perspectivism arose that at once privileges its own tribal perspective while denying that there is any absolute 'perspective' (e.g. a God's eye point of view or that of an ideal spectator hovering above the flux and shove of history).

This privileging of a mere perspective seems definatory of the contemporary culturally Marxist Left.  It is at once both relativistic and dogmatic. It denies that there is objective truth by holding that truth is relative to tribal interests while at the same time dogmatically asserting those interests as if they were absolutely valid.

What is unclear to me is whether or not Gray agrees with Nietzsche that there are no facts, only interpretations; no truth, only power; that Being has no intelligible bottom, that, in the end, Die Welt is der Wille zur Macht und nichts anders! (From the eponymous and posthumous book.)  If such a view is accepted, then there is no saving the humanities.

If Nietzsche’s diagnosis is even half-way sound, some awkward conclusions follow for the future of the humanities. Many lament the collapse of standards of truth and evidence in higher education. But what is their remedy? To restore rationality, no doubt. It seems not to have occurred to them that this may not be possible. For the most part, those who lament the condition of the humanities are evangelists for the Socratism that has led the humanities to where they are now.

But how does Gray know that there is an inevitable slide from "Socratism" to "persecutory orthodoxy"?  That the former must lead to the latter? It could be that the faith in reason is a true faith and nothing 'mythical' or 'mystical,' and that the loss of that faith was a grave mistake sired by decadence. Or better: Socratism was never a mere faith but a rational insight into the importance of reason and its power to lead us toward truth. Our falling away from that insight would then condemn us, not reason.

The claim that the Enlightenment Project undermines itself is a mere claim from one perspective among others. Those who make the claim privilege their perspective for no good reason: that a belief enhances one's power over others is no good reason for believing it to be true.  Those who reject that perspective have been given no good reason to accept it. The defenders of "Socratism" are entitled to stand their ground and assert: You Nietzscheans are wrong, and indeed non-perspectivally wrong.

For "Socratism" to undermine itself, it would have to be non-perspectivally true that it bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction.  That is something a sort of inverted Hegelian could maintain, but not a Nietzschean.

But suppose now that I assert that I have rational insight into the objective, non-perspectival, truth that the world is intrinsically intelligible, and knowable to some extent at least, and that what I know is true non-perspectivally  -- what stops that claim from being a dogmatic assertion? I cannot prove it. I can of course presuppose it. My opponent, however, can presupposes the opposite. The specter of groundless and ungroundability arises.

 

Is Life Good? Questioning the Question

I do not begrudge the man who exults: Life is good! For it is good for some at some times and in some places. Such a one is living and exulting, not philosophizing. He is expressing his experience of his particular life: he needn't be trying to be objective, even if he expresses himself in objective terms.  He is offering us his slant, the view from his perspective.

Nor do I begrudge the man who complains: Life is hell! A joke! A business that doesn't cover its costs! Absurd! A tale told by an idiot! A mistake! Not worth perpetuating! Wrong to perpetuate! For he too is expressing his experience of his particular life. That's the view from his perspective.  

The question that arises for the philosopher, however, is whether there is a question here that admits of an objective answer. Does it makes sense to seek a non-perspectival answer to the question whether human life is good?

The only life that can be lived is the life of the situated individual bound to his perspective. The species does not live except in a derivative sense; it is the individual that lives.  One might be tempted by the Nietzschean thought that human life cannot be objectively good or objectively bad because the quality or value of life cannot be objectively evaluated at all, either positively or negatively. As Nietzsche writes in The Twilight of the Idols, “The Problem of Socrates,”

Judgments, judgments of value, concerning life, for it or against it, can, in the end, never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they are worthy of consideration only as symptoms; in themselves such judgments are stupidities. . . .the value of life cannot be estimated. (Der Wert des Lebens nicht abgeschaetzt werden kann.) Not by the living, for they are an interested party, even a bone of contention, and not judges; not by the dead, for a different reason. For a philosopher to see a problem in the value of life is thus an objection to him, a question mark concerning his wisdom, an un-wisdom. Indeed? All these great wise men -- they were not only decadents but not wise at all?¹

As I read Nietzsche, he is telling us that life is in every case an individual's life. There is no human life in general and no fact of the matter as to whether or not human life is objectively more bad than good. Judgments of the quality of life are all essentially subjective, reflecting as they do nothing more than the quality of the particular life that is doing the judging. The negative evaluations of the weak and decadent are merely symptoms of their weakness and decadence. And similarly for the positive evaluations of the strong and healthy. The affirmations of the robust are not objectively true; they are merely expressions of their robustness. Life is the essentially subjective standard of all evaluation; as such it cannot be objectively evaluated. One cannot sensibly pronounce it either good or bad in general. There is nothing outside of it against which to measure it and find it wanting.

As a philosophizing gastroenterologist might say, “The quality of life depends on the liver.” Pessimism and anti-natalism are merely symptoms of physiological-cum-cultural decadence on the part of those who advance such doctrines.

.....................................

1 Kaufmann, W. ed. and tr., The Portable Nietzsche, New York: The Viking Press, 1968, p. 474)

 

Equality is a Norm, not a Fact. Does it Have a Ground or is it Groundless?

As a matter of empirical fact, we are not equal, not physically, mentally, morally, spiritually, socially, politically, or economically.  By no empirical measure are people equal.  We are naturally unequal.  And yet we are supposedly equal as persons.  This equality of persons as persons we take as requiring equality of treatment.  Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), for example, insists that every human being, and indeed very rational being human or not, exists as an end in himself and therefore must never be treated as a means to an end.  A person is not a thing in nature to be used as we see fit.  For this reason, slavery is a grave moral evil.  A person is a rational being and must be accorded respect just in virtue of being a person.  And this regardless of inevitable empirical differences among persons.   Thus in his third formulation of the Categorical Imperative in his 1785 Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant writes:

Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.  (Grundlegung 429)

In connection with this supreme practical injunction, Kant distinguishes between price and dignity. (435)  "Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has dignity."  Dignity is intrinsic moral worth.  Each rational being, each person, is thus irreplaceably and intrinsically valuable with a value that is both infinite -- in that no price can be placed upon it -- and the same for all. The irreplaceability of persons is a very rich theme, one I explore, with the help of the great Pascal, in Do I Love the Person or Only Her Qualities?

These are beautiful and lofty thoughts, no doubt, and most of us in the West (and not just in the West) accept them in some more or less confused form.  But what do these pieties have to do with reality?  Especially if reality is exhausted by space-time-matter?

Again, we are not equal by any empirical measure.  We are not equal as animals or even as rational animals.  We are supposedly equal as persons, as subjects of experience, as free agents.  But what could a person be if not just a living human animal (or a living 'Martian' animal).  And given how many of these human animals there are, why should they be regarded as infinitely precious?  Are they not just highly complex physical systems?  Surely you won't say that complexity as such confers value, let alone infinite value.  Why should the more complex be more valuable than the less complex?  And surely you are not a species-chauvinist who believes that h. sapiens is the crown of 'creation' just because we happen to be these critters.

If we are unequal as animals and equal as persons, then a person is not an animal.  What then is a person?  And what makes them equal in dignity and equal in rights and infinite in worth?

Now theism can answer these questions.   We are persons and not mere animals because we are created in the image and likeness of the Supreme Person.  We are equal as persons because we are, to put it metaphorically, sons and daughters of one and the same Father.  Since the Source we depend on for our being, intelligibility, and value is one and the same, we are equal as derivatives of that Source.  We are infinite in worth because we have a higher destiny, a higher vocation, which extends beyond our animal existence: we are created to participate eternally in the Divine Life.

Most of the educated cannot credit the idea of a Supreme Person.

But if you reject theism, how will you uphold the Kantian values adumbrated above?  If there is no God and no soul and no eternal destiny, what reasons, other than merely prudential ones, could I have for not enslaving you should I desire to do so and have the power to do so?

Aristotle thought it natural that some men should be slaves.  We find this notion morally abhorrent.  But why should we if we reject the Judeo-Christian God?  "We just do find it abhorrent."  But that's only because we are running on the fumes of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  What happens when the fumes run out?

It is easy to see that it makes no sense, using terms strictly, to speak of anything or anybody as a creature if there is no creator. It is less easy to see, but equally true, that it makes no sense to try to hold on to notions such as that of the equality and dignity of persons after their metaphysical foundations in Christian theism have been undermined.

So here you have a Nietzschean challenge to the New Atheists.  No God, then no justification for your classically liberal values! Pay attention, Sam Harris.  Make a clean sweep! Just as religion is for the weak who won't face reality, so is liberalism.  The world belongs to the strong, to those who have the power to impose their will upon it.  The world belongs to those hard as diamonds, not to those soft as coal and weak and womanish. Nietzsche:

Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation - but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped?

Beyond Good and Evil, Chapter 9, What is Noble?, Friedrich Nietzsche    Go to Quote

More quotations on strength and weakness here.

If it is all just a tale told by an idiot . . .

. . .why begrudge ordinary folk their retreat into the warm bosom of  average everydayness (Heidegger's durchschnittliche Alltaeglichkeit) with its vapid socializing?  I do not begrudge them, nor do I try to change them. But there is something base and contemptible about a life without questioning and seeking, a life sunk in divertissement.

Here is something Pascal and Nietzsche can agree on -- despite their wildly different conclusions.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book One, Section Two (tr. Kaufmann):

. . . to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors [discordant concord of things: Horace, Epistles, I.12.19] and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing -- this is what I feel to be contemptible . . . .

Philosophy between the Impersonal and the Personal

Philosophy aspires to the impersonal truth but, like a rocket that fails to achieve escape velocity, it remains forever in orbit around the personal, tied to it, expressive of it.  This ineluctable tie-in to the personal works against philosophy's pursuit of the universal. And so, while in aspiration one, in execution philosophy is many, which is to say that there is no philosophy, only philosophies. There is no philosophy except in aspiration and in the drive to the truth that breaks free from the personal. In execution, philosophy does not break free; it breaks apart into philosophies.

And so I cannot disagree with Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) who, in Part One of Beyond Good and Evil, "On the Prejudices of the Philosophers," tells us that "every great philosophy" has bisher, hitherto, been eine Selbsterkenntnis ihres Urhebers, a confession or self-cognition of its author, and eine Art ungewollter und unvermerkter mémoires, a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.

That's right. But what did old Fritz mean by 'hitherto'? That he was an exception? But he was surely no exception. His philosophy was just  another confession of its author, just another rocket aimed at truth that failed to achieve escape velocity and fell back into orbit around the personal-all-too-personal.

What a rich specimen of humanity he was. He did a lot of damage, but he dug deep and he dug fearlessly and at personal cost. We honor him for that.

The Consistent Nihilist

The consistent nihilist will hold that it doesn't matter that nothing matters. He is Nietzsche's Last Man for whom nihilism ceases to be an issue.  This distinguishes him from the militant or 'evangelical' nihilist for whom it matters that nothing matters and who feels called to preach this truth and set people straight. It also distinguishes him from the nihilist who seeks to overcome nihilism like Nietzsche himself.

The Last Man: There is no truth and it doesn't matter. God is dead, the funeral is over, and the Old Man in an unmarked grave. Forget about it and pass the popcorn!

Dark Nietzschean Thoughts

The serious thinker is self-critical: his examination of life, without which his life is not worth living, is a self-examination, even unto a painful thinking against himself.  He has the courage to entertain, which is not to say endorse, dark thoughts. He is not an apologist for a ready-made worldview. He toes no party line. His watchword is 'inquiry,' not 'worldview.' He would have a worldview if he could, but he must inquire to find one.

The world is just power and brutality at bottom. The healthy human animal, sensing this in his guts, exercises his power for his own pleasure and to his own advantage without moral scruples. The sick human animal moralizes and reflects and hesitates, having hobbled himself with moral codes and an excess of thinking. The sick human animal's reasoning and spirituality, quest for Transcendence, pursuit of the Good, thirsting after justice and righteousness are nothing more than expressions and legitimations of his weakness. And part of his sickness are these very reflections on whether he is a sick animal unfit for life in the only world there is, and morality buncombe. The healthy human animal does not entertain dark Nietzschean thoughts.

Christianity has civilized us but also weakened us. No longer is our penology unspeakably brutal. We have gone to the other extreme: we oppose capital punishment for even the worst miscreants and absurdly debate whether death by lethal injection is "cruel and unusual punishment" and thus unconstitutional.

Time's Alchemy

Nietzsche is more for his present admirers than he ever could have been for Rohde, Deussen, or Overbeck. Time transforms the merely superior into heroes. Some idols are born posthumously.

Nietzsche

It is ironic that Nietzsche, an ascetic of sorts, died of the disease of a libertine.

Nietzsche, Truth, Power, and the Left

According to Victor Davis Hanson, the following is one of the tenets of contemporary leftism as represented by the Democrat Party:

Truth is not universal, but individualized. [Christine Blasey] Ford’s “truth” is as valid as the “Truth,” given that competing narratives are adjudicated only by access to power. Ford is a victim, therefore her truth trumps “their” truth based on evidence and testimony.

To understand this adequately you need to understand Nietzsche. Old Fritz has posthumously insinuated himself into our politics, and Democrat politicians, though they are too dumb to know it, are Nietzscheans.  So take a gander at Nietzsche, Truth, and Power.  It concludes thusly:

What Nietzsche wants to say is that there is no truth 'in itself'; there are only various interpretations from the varying perspectives of power-hungry individuals and groups, interpretations that serve to enhance the power of these individuals and groups. At bottom, the world is a vast constellation of ever-changing power-centers vying with each other for dominance, and what a particular power-center calls 'true' are merely those interpretations that enhance and preserve its power.  For the essence of the world is not reason or order, but blind will, will to power.

But if that is the way it is, then there is an absolute truth after all. Nietzsche never extricates himself from this contradiction. And where he fails, his followers do not succeed.  We are now, as a culture, living and dying in the shadow of this contradiction, reaping the consequences of the death of God and the death of truth.

I now add that I count it as one of Nietzsche's great insights to have perceived the link between God and truth, and that between the death of God and the death of truth. For Nietzsche, no God, no truth; no God; ergo, no truth.  For me, no God, no truth;  truth; ergo, God. Nietzsche's  modus ponens is my modus tollens.

I believe it is in De Veritate where the doctor angelicus says something along these lines: If, per impossibile, God did not exist, then truth would not exist either.

Now God cannot die, nor truth. But the disappearance among the educated elites of the God-belief brings with it the disappearance among the elites of the belief in truth which, by its very nature is universal and absolute. 

It is important to appreciate that the statement that truth is perspectival only masquerades as a statement of the nature of truth; in reality it is a denial that there is truth.  Truth simply cannot be perspectival; to call it such is therefore to deny its existence.  The attempt at identification collapses into elimination. Perspectivism is an eliminativist theory of truth.

So all is lost if we allow talk of 'Ford's truth' and 'Kavanaugh's truth' where each has his own truth in the measure that he is 'empowered' by it.

That way the abyss.

A Similar Pattern of Argument in Buddhism and Benatar

On Buddhism the human (indeed the animalic/sentient) condition is a profoundly unsatisfactory predicament from which we need extrication.  The First Noble Truth is that fundamentally all is ill, suffering, unsatisfactory, dukkha. That there is some sukha (joy, happiness) along with the dukkha is undeniable, but the little sukha is fleeting and unsatisfying and leads to dukkha  which is primary. Desire breeds desire endlessly with no satisfaction being finally satisfactory. You may satisfy your sexual craving, but the satisfaction is impermanent and gives rise to further desires upon desires and temporary satings upon temporary satings which become increasingly habitual but never finally satisfactory.  So not only is frustration of desire unsatisfactory, satisfaction of it is as well. Either way dukkha is the upshot. This is the deep and radical meaning of the First Noble Truth.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.

The Second Noble Truth is that suffering has its origin in desire or craving (tanha). The natural pursuit and possession of the ordinary objects of desire such as name and fame, pleasure and pelf, property and progeny, power and position  all breed attachment, and this attachment breeds misery. Why? Because the ordinary objects of desire are impermanent (anicca) and insubstantial (anatta).  They lack the power to satisfy us. Desire or craving (tanha)  drives us to cling to the fleeting and unreal that cannot last and cannot ultimately satisfy.  In this sense sukha, which is derivative, leads to dukkha which is primitive and fundamental.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to re-becoming, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there; that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for becoming, craving for disbecoming.

Should we then re-direct desire to what is permanent  and possesses self-nature, God for example? You would think so, right?

No!

For on original, radical, Pali Buddhism nothing is permanent and nothing possesses self-nature. All is impermanent and insubstantial. This is the nature of things and cannot be otherwise. The task cannot be to re-direct desire to the Eternal in the manner of a Christian Platonist such as St. Augustine who turns away from this deceitful world of time and change and misery and seeks salvation in God.  The problem is desire itself, not mis-directed desire. The task, then, must be to uproot desire. The task is to step off of the wheel of samsara and achieve cessation or nirvana.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and  cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, non-reliance on it.

How do we extirpate desire and end our delusive attachment to the insubstantial and unreal and unsatisfactory? 

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering: it is this noble eightfold path; that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.

Critical Question

How can the entire samsaric realm, including us and the manifold objects of our desire, be devalued  relative to a  nonexistent and indeed impossible standard? If nothing is permanent and nothing can be permanent how can impermanence be a negative axiological feature of what alone exists? And if nothing is and can be a self or substance, how is it any argument against samsaric items that they are devoid of self-nature?

I am assuming that there cannot be impossible ideals. Either an ideal is realized or it is not. If the former, then it is possible. If the latter then it must be realizable.  Ideals must be realizable if they are to be ideals.  What is realizable is possible. So if permanence is an ideal, then it must be possible. But it is not possible on early Buddhist principles. So it is not an ideal. Since it is not an ideal, nothing samsaric falls short of it.  It follows that ordinary objects of desire cannot, all of them, be unsatisfactory on the ground of their impermanence.

To appreciate my point, suppose God as classically conceived exists. Think of the God of Augustine and Aquinas. He is permanent, a self (in excelsis) and absolutely and finally satisfying to himself and to those who share his life. If such a God exists, then it makes perfect sense to consider of lower or even of no value the objects of ordinary mundane desire such as money and property and the paltry pleasures of the flesh.

The great Spanish mystic, St. Teresa of Avila, is supposed to have said to the nuns in her care, "Sisters, we have but one night to spend in this bad inn."

To liken the world to a bad inn makes sense as a claim purporting to be objectively true only if there is a heavenly home to which it is possible to go. But if there is no God, no soul, and this life is all there is, then this world of time and change cannot be objectively assessed to be of little or no value.  Any such assessment could then be subjective only, and if Nietzsche is right, a slandering of life  that merely reflects the physiological decadence of the sick slanderers who are too sick to face reality and must in compensation invent hinterworlds.

As Nietzsche remarks in Twilight of the Idols, in the section entitled "The Problem of Socrates," if there is no true world, then there is no merely apparent world either :  this world objectively lacks plenary reality and value and is rightly assessed as lacking such only if there is a true world  it falls short of.

I spoke to a hermit monk a couple of summers ago. I said, "This world is a vanishing quantity." He agreed wholeheartedly, having abandoned  a millionaire's life as a super-successful Wall Street bond trader  for the austerities of a monkish, and indeed eremitic,  existence with its vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. But my assertion and his agreement could make no sense as an objective negative appraisal of the reality and value of this world except on the assumption that there is an Unseen Order that is not impermanent to its core, but the opposite, the source of all intelligibility, reality, and value, and the summum bonum, the highest good, of human striving.  And if the assumption is true, then the negative appraisal is true.

 

 

 

A Similar Pattern in Benatar

One source of David Benatar's anti-natalism is his conviction that human life, on balance, is objectively bad for all despite how well-placed one is. There is some good, of course, but the bad so preponderates that it is morally wrong to perpetuate this life by procreation. But the standards and ideals Benatar invokes to show the objectively bad quality of human life are impossible as I try to show in this preliminary draft. My thought is that to fall short of an impossible standard is not to fall short. Benatar's radical pessimism and anti-natalism do not comport well with his naturalism.

To this extent my critique of Pali Buddhism and of Benatar is 'Nietzschean.' Impossible standards do not permit a devaluation of what actually exists. 

But I share Nietzsche's naturalism and atheism as little as I share Benatar's. And of course I reject Nietzsche's psycho-physiological reductionism: the deep sense of philosophers and sages from time immemorial that this life is no good cannot be dismissed as a merely subjective response of the sick and decadent.  Thus a No to Nietzsche's reading of Phaedo 118:

Concerning life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is no good. Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths -- a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life. Even Socrates said, as he died: "To live -- that means to be sick a long time: I owe Asclepius the god of healing a rooster." Even Socrates was tired of it. [. . .] "At least something must be sick here," we retort. 

If the appearance of life's low quality is real, because life falls short of the ideal, then the ideal must itself be real -- elsewhere, not here below, but in the Unseen Order. 

The Childless as Anthropological Danglers

The Austrian philosopher and Vienna Circle member Herbert Feigl wrote about nomological danglers.  Mental states as the epiphenomenalist conceives them have causes, but no effects. They are caused by physical states of the body and brain, but dangle nomologically in that there are no laws  that relate mental states  to physical states.

The childless are anthropological danglers.  They are life's epiphenomena. They have ancestors (causes) but no descendents (effects). Parents are essential: without  them we could not have come into fleshly existence.  But offspring are wholly inessential: one can exist quite well without them.

There is a downside and an upside to being an anthropological dangler. 

The downside is that it unfits one for full participation in the life of the community, removing as it does weight and credibility from one’s opinions about pressing community concerns. As Nietzsche writes somewhere in his Nachlass, the man without Haus und Hof, Weib und Kind is like a ship with insufficient ballast: he rides too high on the seas of life and does not pass through life with the steadiness of the solid bourgeois weighted down with property and reputation, wife and children.  What does he know about life and its travails that his say should fully count?  His counsel may be wise and just, but it won't carry the weight of the one who is wise and just and interested as only those whose pro-creation has pro-longed them into the future and tied them to the flesh are interested.  (inter esse)

The upside to being an anthropological dangler is that it enables one’s participation in a higher life by freeing one from mundane burdens and distractions. In another Nachlass passage, Nietzsche compares the philosopher having Weib und Kind, Haus und Hof with an astronomer who interposes a piece of filthy glass between eye and telescope. The philosopher's vocation charges him with the answering of the ultimate questions; his pressing foreground concerns, however, make it difficult for him to take these questions with the seriousness they deserve, let alone answer them.

Someone who would be "a spectator of all time and existence" ought to think twice about binding himself too closely to the earth and its distractions.

Another advantage to being childless is that one is free from  being an object of those attitudes of propinquity -- to give them a name -- such as embarrassment and disappointment, disgust and dismissal that ungrateful children sometimes train upon their parents, not always unjustly.

The childless can look forward to a time when all of their blood-relatives have died off.  Then they will finally be free of the judgments of those to whom one is tied by consanguinity but not by spiritual affinity.

This opinion of mine will strike some as cold and harsh.  But some of us experience more of the stifling and oppressive in our blood relations than the opposite.   I do however freely admit that the very best human relations conceivable are those that bind people both by ties of blood and ties of spiritual affinity.  If you have even one blood relation who is a soul mate, then you ought to be grateful indeed. 

Related: SEP entry on Herbert Feigl

On this Date in 1844

Friedrich Nietzsche was born on this date in 1844.  He died on 25 August 1900.  You must attend to him if you would understand our current spiritual/cultural situation. His great aphorism, "Some men are born posthumously" applies to him, and I am sure that when he penned it he was thinking of himself.

What makes it a great aphorism? Economy of expression; penetrating insight; literary quality.  An aphorism must be short, but not merely clever: it has to set a truth before us. And it has to do that in an arresting and memorable way. 

My

Some men die before they are dead

is good but does not achieve quite the same level.  For one thing, it is derivative as the converse of the Nietzschean saying. 

Aphoristic discourse is not argumentative discourse. Like a thunderbolt that does not bring in its train any explanation, a good aphorism is an assertion bare of reasons. It is fitting that Nietzsche should aphorize given his aversion to dialectics:

With Socrates, Greek taste changes in favor of dialectics. What really happened there? Above all, a noble taste is thus vanquished; with dialectics the plebs come to the top. Before Socrates, dialectic manners were repudiated in good society: they were considered bad manners, they were compromising. The young were warned against them. Furthermore, all such presentations of one's reasons were distrusted. Honest things, like honest men, do not carry their reasons in their hands like that. It is indecent to show all five fingers. What must first be proved is worth little. Wherever authority still forms part of good bearing, where one does not give reasons but commands, the dialectician is a kind of buffoon: one laughs at him, one does not take him seriously. Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what really happened there?

One chooses dialectic only when one has no other means. One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive. Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect: the experience of every meeting at which there are speeches proves this. It can only be self-defense for those who no longer have other weapons. One must have to enforce one's right: until one reaches that point, one makes no use of it. The Jews were dialecticians for that reason; Reynard the Fox was one -- and Socrates too? (Twilight of the Idols, "The Problem of Socrates.") 

Mark Anderson kindly sent me his book, Zarathustra Stone.

I am impressed by how sympathetically he has entered into Nietzsche's mind and spirit. 

God, Truth, Reality Denial: A Response to Some Questions

It is always a pleasure to get a challenge from a professional philosopher who appreciates the intricacies of the issues and knows the moves.  The comments below address things I say here. My responses are in blue.

A few questions about this idea:

"As Nietzsche saw, if there is no God, then there is no truth.  And if no truth, then no intrinsic intelligibility. Next stop: perspectivism, Nietzsche's central epistemological doctrine."

1) Suppose that if p, nothing is true.  Does that make sense?  Surely whatever p is, if p then at least p itself is true.

BV: What you are saying is something I agree with, namely, that it is incoherent, indeed self-refuting, to maintain that nothing is true.  For either it is true that nothing is true or it is is false. (Assume Bivalence to keep it simple.)  If true, then false. If false, then false. Therefore, necessarily false. 

Now could it be true that if there is no God, then there is no truth? Easily. A true conditional can have a false antecedent and a false consequent. We have just seen that the consequent is false, indeed, necessarily false. That the antecedent is true is not excluded by anything we know. So assume it true. Where's the problem?

2) A related problem:  How do we understand or reason about anything in some scenario where, supposedly, nothing is true?  How do we understand things like 'if ... then ...' except in terms of what is or would be true given the truth of the antecedent?

BV: Well, can't we reason about incoherent ideas, among them necessarily false propositions?  Consider the following subjunctive conditional

A.  If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then there would be no truth.

Both antecedent and consequent are necessarily false; yet the conditional is (arguably) true! The antecedent is necessarily false because God is a necessary being.  I accept Anselm's Insight (but not his Ontological Argument). The Insight is that nothing divine can have contingent modal status: God is either necessary or impossible. 

Surely we can argue, correctly, to and from necessarily false propositions such as Nothing is true.  Of course, when we engage in such reasoning we are presupposing truth. If that is your point, then I agree with it. 

3) If there's a 'total way things are', and that's 'the truth' or the truth about the actual world, then surely there has to be a truth about a world where God does not exist--there's a total way things are, including various states of affairs but not including the existence of God.  How are we to understand the idea that, if the actual world is Godless, there's some total way things actually are, and yet no truth?  What more is needed for there to be truth, or the whole truth, in a Godless world?  Or do you mean to say that in a Godless world there is no 'total way things are'?  But then how would that even count as a world, or a scenario?  (Is there even a less-than-total-way-things-are, at least?  And in that wouldn't there have to be some particular truths, if not total truth or Truth?)

BV: I accept Anselm's Insight: If God exists, then he exists in every metaphysically possible world; if God does not exist, then he exists in no metaphysically possible world.  I also accept Nietzsche's Insight that if there is no God, then there is no truth. no total, non-relative, non-perspectival  way things are independent of the vagaries of human belief and desire. So I disagree when you say "surely there has to be a truth about a world where God does not exist." 

4) In some of your other entries on this topic you are suggesting that truth might be a property of God's thoughts, or maybe just the totality of His thoughts.  (Is that right?)  But intuitively there is a distinction between the truth of a thought and the thought itself, so that even though God's thoughts are necessarily true, those same thoughts could have been false thoughts (though not while being His thoughts, of course).  Suppose this is right.  Then, in a Godless world, there is some totality of thoughts--merely possible thoughts, maybe, for lack of a suitable Thinker--that fully characterizes that world.  Why can't we say that there's truth in that world simply in virtue of the totality of thoughts that would have been true if God had existed there?  

BV: Let's distinguish some questions:

a) Is there truth? Is there a total way things are that is not dependent upon the vagaries of human (or rather ectypal-intellect) belief and desire? Answer: Yes, truth is absolute, hence not a matter of perspective.

b) What is the truth? This is the question about which propositions are true. Obviously, not all are. It presupposes an affirmative answer to the first question. Only if there are some true propositions or other can one proceed to ask which particular propositions are true.

c) What is truth? This question concerns the property -- in a broad sense of 'property' -- the possession of which by a truth-bearer makes it true.  If a truth is a true proposition, then all true propositions have something in common, their being true; what is this property?

Frege uses Gedanke, thought, to refer to what we refer to by 'proposition.'  Let's adopt this usage. A proposition, then, is a thought, not an act of thinking, but the accusative or direct object of an act of thinking. Frege held that thoughts have a self-subsistent Platonic status. That's dubious and can be argued against. Arguably, there is no thought without a thinker. Thoughts/propositions, then, have a merely intentional status. But some thoughts are necessarily true. It follows that there is need for a necessary mind to accommodate these thoughts. I lay this out rigorously in a separate post to which I have already linked. 

I don't say that the truth is the totality of God's thoughts since some of these thoughts are not true. Socrates dies by stangulation, for example, is false, but possibly true. And yet it is a perfectly good thought. God has that proposition/thought before his mind but he doesn't affirm it. This is equivalent to saying that God did not create a world in which Socrates dies by strangulation.

Of course, I distinguish between the thought and its truth value, and I don't think every thought is necessarily true. Why do you say that God's thoughts are necessarily true?   Of course, God, being omniscient,  knows everything that it is possible to know.  But only some of what he knows is necessarily true. He can't know false propositions, but he can think them by merely entertaining them (with or without hospitality).

Think of a possible world as a maximal proposition, a proposition that entails every proposition with which it is logically consistent. God has an infinity of these maximal propositions/thoughts before his mind. He entertains them all, but affirms only one. After all, there can be only one actual world.  I of course reject David Lewis' theory of actuality.

If God does not exist, then God is impossible. (Anselm's Insight again.) He then exists in no world including the actual world.  But then there are no truth-bearers in the actual world, and hence no truths.  But if no truths, then no total way things are.

You speak of "merely possible thoughts." But that's ambiguous.  Do you mean a thought/proposition that actually exists but is merely possibly true?  Or do you mean that the proposition itself is merely possibly existent?  I am assuming that there are all the propositions there might have been; that some are true and some false; and that among the false propositions some are necessarily false (impossibly true) and that some are possibly true.  

5) If there is no truth, how could that rationally support perspectivism?  Maybe I just don't understand perspectivism, but suppose this is the idea that any old thought can be true (perspectivally, at least) just in case it seems true to someone, or enhances their feeling of power, or whatever...  In a truth-less world, THAT is also not true:  it's just not true that any old thought can be true or be rationally considered true under circumstances x, y or z.  Perspectivism isn't true, or isn't any truer than anti-perspectivism.  In other words I don't understand why granting that God is necessary for truth justifies Nietzsche in affirming some other, merely perspectival concept of truth; he should just be a nihilist about truth, I guess.

BV: I insist that truth, by its very nature, is absolute and thus cannot be perspectival. I reject perspectivism. So there is no question of rationally supporting perspectivism. It is an irrational and self-defeating doctrine. 

You say, "I don't understand why granting that God is necessary for truth justifies Nietzsche in affirming some other, merely perspectival concept of truth; he should just be a nihilist about truth, I guess."

I am not claiming that Nietzsche rationally justifies his perspectivism. But one can understand how he came to the doctrine.  He has a genuine insight: no God, no truth. (By the way, for me 'insight' is a noun of success in the way that 'know' is a verb of success: there are no false insights any more than there is false knowledge.) There are no truths, but there are interpretations and perspectives from different power-centers; these interpretations and perspectives are either life-enhancing and 'empowering' or not.  This can be (misleadingly) put by saying that truth is perspectival. 

Is perspectivism identitarian or eliminativist? Is Nietzsche saying that there is truth but it is perspectival in nature, or is he saying that there is no truth?  I would say that the identity collapses into an elimination. Truth cannot be perspectival; so to claim that it is amounts to claiming that there is no truth. So I agree that one could say that he is a nihilist about truth.

What makes this all so relevant is that cultural Marxism is heir to Nietzsche.  To understand the Left you have to understand Nietzsche and his two main claims, one ontological the other epistemological. "The world is the will to power and nothing besides." Truth is perspectival. This sires the leftist view that everything is power relations and social construction. Reality and its intrinsic order are denied. 

Social Constructivism, Denial of Reality, and the Role of Religion

John Derbyshire gives the following as examples of reality denial:

All but a very tiny proportion of human beings are biologically male (an X and a Y chromosome in the genome) or female (two X chromosomes). A person who is biologically of one sex but believes himself to be of the other is in the grip of a delusion. That is what everybody would have said 50 years ago.

Some of those who said it would have followed up with an expression of disgust; some with unkind mockery; some with sympathy and suggestions for psychiatric counseling. Well-nigh nobody would have said: “Well, if he thinks he’s a gal, then he is a gal.” Yet that is the majority view nowadays. It is a flagrant denial of reality; but if you scoff at it, you place yourself out beyond the borders of acceptable opinion.

It is, of course, the same with race. I still blink in disbelief when I hear or read someone saying, “There is no such thing as race.” It falls on my ears much like “There are no such things as mountains,” or “There is no such thing as water.” Of course there is such a thing as race. Until recently, everyone knew this. As I like to remind people, the founder of the modern biological sciences surely knew it.

[. . .]

Reality denial is rampant on the Left.  Part of the explanation, according to Derbyshire, is the decline of religion. The rise in reality denial is due to the decline in religion!

 

Derb's idea is that in the past religion functioned like a lens to focus our wishful thinking on one nonexistent object, God, or rather on one set of nonexistent objects (God, angels, devils, incarnate, pre-incarnate, and dis-incarnate spirits) to the exclusion of all other nonexistent objects.  But with the decline of religion, the urge to deny reality becomes unfocused and can take almost any object, including denizens of the sublunary:

Religion as a lens: When people stop believing in God, the old quip goes, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.

Very serious, practical people—statesmen, generals, industrialists, engineers—often used to be deeply religious, holding the unreal—the transcendent, if you want to be polite—corralled in one part of their mind while the rest grappled with reality. Religion focused wishful thinking—kindly Sky Fathers listening to our prayers, wisps of immortal spirit-stuff in our heads—into a coherent set of ideas and habits.

With that focusing lens gone, wishful thinking runs amok. “I feel female/black, so I am female/black!” “Race creates tensions we don’t know how to manage, so let’s pretend it doesn’t exist!”

Nothing is real

And nothing to get hung about.

Strawberry Fields Forever . . . .

 An Alternative Theory

 

As a theist, I cannot of course accept Derbyshire's partial explanation of leftist reality denial. I of course agree that people engage in reality denial and wishful thinking, and I accept the examples given above as examples of reality denial. 

 

So here is an alternative partial explanation.

 

Atheists presuppose truth. That is, they presuppose that there is a total way things are that does not depend on the vagaries of human belief and desire. (An atheist will be quick to point out that desiring that there be a Heavenly Father is a very bad reason for thinking there is one.)  The characteristic atheist claim is that the nonexistence of God is a part of the way things are.  Theists, most of them anyway, also presuppose that there is a way things are. Their characteristic claim is that the existence of God is a part of the way things are.  The common presupposition, then, is that there is a total way things are. The question is not whether there is truth, but what the truth is.  The question is not whether there is a total way things are; the question is which states of affairs are included in and which excluded from the total way things are.

 

The death of God, however, brings in its train the death of truth as Nietzsche himself fully understood. The loss of belief in the Christian God calls into question whether there is truth at all.  For God is not just another being among beings, but the source of the Being of every being other than God, as well as the source of the intelligibility and value of every being other than God. But nothing is intelligible unless there is truth to be discovered. As Nietzsche saw, if there is no God, then there is no truth.  And if no truth, then no intrinsic intelligibility. Next stop: perspectivism, Nietzsche's central epistemological doctrine.  (The God-truth linkage can be rigorously argued in various ways; here is one.) 

 

Once truth goes by the boards, then nothing counts as true or real except what we want, desire, interpret in line with our interests, socially construct, or what enhances the feeling of power in us, 'empowers us' to use a leftist-POMO turn of phrase with roots in Nietzsche's perspectivism. As Nietzsche writes in The Will to Power #534:

Das Kriterium der Wahrheit liegt in der Steigerung des Machtgefühls.

The criterion of truth resides in the heightening of the feeling of power.

Once we get to this point in the history of the death of God/truth, a boy can choose to become a girl, and a white a black. Hell, a white boy could choose to become a black girl! Why not?  You just identify yourself that way, there being no fact of the matter to prevent you from choosing any self-identification you like.  Hence the absurdities decried by Derbyshire and the rest of the coalition of the sane, the absurdities of transgenderism and transracialism.

 

God, I am urging, is the support of the way things are. Kick away that support and Being dissolves into a Heraclitean flux of opinions and perspectives.

 

Summary

 

The fact that wants explaining is the fact of leftist reality denial. Two different explanations:

 

Derbyshire:  Time was when wishful thinking was focused on God and other nonexistent objects of religion. But God is now dead culturally speaking, among the elites of the West. (And this is good because, in fact, there is no God.) The need for wishful thinking, however, remains strong. It gets shunted onto sex and race and the results are the reality-denying absurdities of transgenderism ansd transracialism.  

 

Vallicella: God is real, but no longer believed to be real by the elites in the West. Man, seduced by the life-extension consequent upon advances in medical technology, and mesmerized and held in thrall by his 24/7 all-invasive and -pervasive communications technology, can no longer bring himself to believe in anything beyond the human horizon. The human horizon seems to extend limitlessly. The  death of God, however, brings with it the death of truth, and this opens the floodgate to any and all perspectives which are 'true' only in the sense that they reflect the identities and the power demands of those who are the subjects of the perspectives.

 

In short: God is not the focus of our  wishful thinking in such a way as to keep the rest of out thinking focused on reality; God is the support of truth and reality and thus the presupposition of the distinction between wishful thinking and reality-oriented thinking.

 

Salvation and the Value of Life

 Patrick Toner comments:

. . . as I'm reading your post on Nietzsche, you make a mistaken claim about salvation's implications: namely, that "If we need salvation from our predicament in this life, then human life, taken on its own terms, and without appeals to hinterworlds, is of negative value."  

Professor Toner's criticism offers me a welcome opportunity to develop further some of my thoughts on this topic.

1) The logically first question is whether human life is a predicament. I say it is. A predicament is not just any old situation or condition or state but one that is deeply unsatisfactory, extrication from which is both needed and difficult to attain. There are of course predicaments in life.  For example, you are hiking in a slot canyon with sheer walls when it begins to rain.  You are in a dangerous mundane predicament. But my claim, as you would expect, is philosophical: human life as such is a predicament. I take that to be a datum, a given, a starting point. If you don't experience human life as a predicament, your life and that of others, then what I have to say on this topic won't mean anything to you.

2) Now if human life is a predicament as I have defined the term, then it follows straightaway that some sort of extrication, solution, rescue, or relief is needed, whether or not it can be had.  That is, someone in a predicament needs to be saved from it. He needs salvation.  Considerations anent salvation are called soteriological. Soteriology, as I use the term, is the general theory of salvation in some appropriately spiritual or religious or mystical sense. Our canyon hiker may end up needing to be physically saved.  But the salvation under discussion here, though it may involve some sort of physical transformation, as in bodily resurrection, is very different from being saved from drowning. 

3) Now distinguish three questions that any soteriology worth its salt would have to answer: What is saved? From what is it saved? For/to what is it saved? A schematic Roman Catholic answer would be that the soul is saved from venial and mortal sin and the just punishment for such sin (purgatory and hell) so that it may live for all eternity in the presence of God.  Toner quotes the Catholic Encylopedia:  "As sin is the greatest evil, being the root and source of all evil, Sacred Scripture uses the word 'salvation' mainly in the sense of liberation of the human race or of individual man from sin and its consequences."

4) On a Roman Catholic soteriology, then, sin is what makes our human predicament deeply unsatisfactory, and such that we both need relief, but will have a hard time attaining it.  (I should add that on Roman Catholicism, salvation cannot be attained by our own efforts: grace is also needed.) Sin explains why our condition is deeply unsatisfactory.  But of course other explanations are possible. Please note that unsatisfactoriness is the datum; sin is the explanation of the datum.

For Buddhists it is suffering that makes our predicament deeply unsatisfactory.  Buddhist soteriology is accordingly very different from Christian soteriology.  For Buddhism it is not the soul that is saved since there is no soul (doctrine of anatta), and it is not saved from sin since sin is an offense against God and there is no God (anatta again). And of course the salvific state is not the visio beata  as on Thomist Catholicism, but nibbana/nirvana. 

And of course Nietzsche's aesthetic soteriology is different from both of these.  For more on that I refer you to Giles Fraser.

5) I do not understand why Toner balks at my claim quoted above, namely, that "If we need salvation from our predicament in this life, then human life, taken on its own terms, and without appeals to hinterworlds, is of negative value." This strikes me as obviously true. If this life were wholly satisfactory, we would not seek salvation from it.  It is precisely because it is of negative value that we seek salvation in the various ways humans have sought salvation by the practice of austerites, sacrifice, good works, prayer, meditation, and so on.  It is precisely the realization that this life is marked by sickness, old age, terrible physical and mental infirmity and suffering, greed, delusion, ignorance, war, folly, torture, death . . . that sets us on the Quest for nirvana, moksha, eternal life. What drives monks to their monasteries and nuns to their nunneries is the realization that ultimately this life has nothing to offer that could truly satisfy us.

Why does Toner fail to understand my simple point?  It is because he accepts Roman Catholicism in toto and accordingly he takes the Roman Catholic soteriology to be the last, and perhaps only, word.  On this view, this world as we experience it in this life, though fallen, is a divine creation. As the product of an all-good God, it is itself good. This is why he doesn't like my talk of this life as of negative value.  He ignored my qualification: "taken on its own terms, and without appeals to hinterworlds."

That is: taken apart from its interpretation in the light of an antecedently accepted worldview such as Roman Catholicism.  An appeal to a hinterworld -- Hinterwelt is a term Nietzsche uses -- is an appeal to a world behind the phenomenal scenes, a true world in whose light the horrors of this world are redeemed.   Absent that appeal, this world is obviously of negative value.  

I am sure Patrick is capable of understanding my point since he  himself invokes the classic Catholic phrase "vale of tears." It is because we experience this world as a vale of tears  that we seek salvation from it.  Obviously, to see it as a vale of tears is to see it negatively.

6) As for Nietzsche, he was indeed a homo religiosus who experienced our way through this life as a via dolorosa. The horror of existence tormented him and he sought a solution. What my post exposed was the tension between Nietzsche's negative assessment of life, which motivates his ill-starred attempts at salvation, and his doctrine that life, as the standard of all evaluation, cannot be objectively evaluated.

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Nietzsche, Salvation, and the Question of the Value of Life

Giles Fraser in his provocative Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief (Routledge 2002) maintains that "Nietzsche is obsessed with the question of human salvation" and that his work is "primarily soteriology." (p. 2)  I don't disagree with this assessment, but there is a tension in Nietzsche that ought to be pointed out, one that Fraser, from what I have read of his book, does not address.  

If we need salvation from our predicament in this life, then human life, taken on its own terms, and without appeals to hinterworlds, is of negative value. But how can life be of negative value if, as Nietzsche maintains, the value of life is inestimable?  This is the problem. Let us now delve into it.

1) Talk of salvation presupposes, first,  that there is some general state or condition, one in which we all find ourselves, from which we need salvation, and second, that this general condition is profoundly unsatisfactory.  In The Birth of Tragedy, section 3, Nietzsche invokes "the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus" who, when asked by King Midas about that which is most desirable for man, replied that the best of all is utterly beyond human reach: not to be born.  The second best, if one has had the misfortune of being born, is to die soon.

Now it seems clear that some such negative assessment of life, or of human life, is a precondition of any quest for salvation, no matter what form it might take, whether Buddhist, Stoic, Christian, whatever.  The negative judgment on life as a whole need not be as harsh as the Silenian one, but without some negative judgment or other as to the value of life the question of salvation  makes no sense.  To take the question seriously one need not believe that salvation to some positive state is possible; but one has to believe that the general state of humanity (or of all sentient beings) is deeply unsatisfactory, to use a somewhat mild term. 

2) But here's the rub.  Nietzsche maintains that the value of life is inestimable.  As he puts it in Twilight of the Idols ("The Problem of Socrates," sec. 2) : der Wert des Lebens nicht abgeschaetzt werden kann.  His point is that objective judgments about the value of life are impossible.  Such judgments can never be true; they count only as symptoms.  Saying nothing about life itself, they merely betray the health or decadence of those who make the judgments.  Buddha, Socrates, and all those belonging to the consensus sapientium who purport to say something objective about this life when they pronounce a negative judgment upon it, as Buddha does in the First Noble Truth (sarvam dukkham: all is suffering) merely betray their own physiological decline.  A negative judgment shows a lack of vitality, a deficiency of will power and a privation of the  will to power, which is what everything is at bottom.  There is no fact of the matter as to the value or disvalue of life itself.  There is only ascending and descending life with the value judgments being no more than symptoms either of life ascending or life descending.  Thus spoke Nietzsche.

3) The tension, then, is between the following two Nietzschean commitments: (a) Man needs salvation from his  predicament in this life; (b) The value of life cannot be objectively assessed or evaluated.  The claims cannot both be true.  The need for salvation implies that our predicament in this life is of negative value, when this cannot be the case if there is no fact of the matter concerning the value of life. 

4) Finding contradictions in Nietzsche is not very difficult, and one could even argue that the conflicting trends of his thought show its richness and its proximity to the bloody bone of the predicament in which we find ourselves; my present point, however,  is that Fraser's essentially correct claim that Nietzsche's work is "primarily soteriology" needs to be qualified by his fundamental thesis  about the inestimability of life's value, which thesis  renders soteriology impossible.

Is the value of human life objectively inestimable?

5) Can the value of life be objectively evaluated?  Does it make sense to maintain that for all of us it would have been better never to have been born? Or the opposite? Schopenhauer claims that "Human Life must be some sort of mistake." ("The Vanity of Existence" in The Will to Live, ed. R. Taylor, Frederick Unger, 1975, p. 232.) Is there a fact of the matter here? Or is Nietzsche right at Will to Power #675 where he speaks of the "absurdity of this posture of judging existence . . . It is symptomatic." Symptomatic of what? Of decay, decline, world-weariness.

Does the project of judging human life with an eye to establishing that it either is or is not worth living make sense? Is there a standard apart from life in the light of which the value of life can be assessed?  Or is life itself the standard? A most vexing series of questions.

The questions are logically prior to questions about the morality of procreation. David Benatar has famously argued for anti-natalism according to which it would be better if there were no more humans, and that therefore all procreation ought to be opposed as morally wrong, the deontic claim following from the axiological one. (David Benatar and David Wasserman, Debating Procreation, Oxford UP, 2015, pp. 12-13)

This is one tough nut to crack, and I am not sure my 'nutcracker' is up to the job. But here we go.

One relevant fact is that life is always an individual life, mine or yours or his or hers.  Heidegger spoke of the Jemeinigkeit des Daseins; I will speak of the Jemeinigkeit des Lebens.  Life has the property of 'mineness.' There is no living in general; it is always a particular affair, from a particular perspective, in a particular set of circumstances.  Lived life is always mine or yours, etc. What's more, every individual life is stretched on the rack of time:  one does not live one's individual life all at once but bit by bit.  If there is a problem about how any given individual life can judge the value of life in general, then there will also be a problem about how any phase of an individual's life can judge the value of that individual's life as a whole.

A second relevant fact, related to but distinct from the first, is that he who evaluates life is party to it. An interested party. The judger is not a mere spectator of his life, from the outside, as if it were someone else's, but a liver of it, an enactor, an actualizer of it. So it is not just that lived life is always a particular life, but also that a particular lived life is not an object of disinterested observation but a living in which the observing and evaluating are inseparable from the living.

Life judges life and Nietzsche's thought is that negative judgments are negative verdicts on the quality of the life that is judging. There is no  standard apart from life, and indeed apart from the life of the individual, by which the value of life could be measured.  No standard apart from life does not imply no standard: individual life is the standard.  The value of life's being objectively inestimable therefore does not imply that its value is merely subjective.  The implication seems to be that the individual life is an absolute standard of value in which subjective and objective coalesce.

6) "But aren't there certain general considerations that show that no life is worth living or that no life is worth very much?"  And what would those be? 

a) Well, there is the fact of impermanence or transience.  In a letter to Franz Overbeck, Nietzsche himself complains, "I am grieved by the transitoriness of things."  I feel your pain, Fritz.  Doesn't universal impermanence show that nothing in this life is worth much?  How important can anything be if it is here today and gone tomorrow?  How can anyone find value in his doings and strivings if he faces up to the universality of impermanence?  Does not the certainty of death mock the seriousness of our passions and plans?  (Arguably, most do not honestly confront impermanence but vainly imagine that everything will remain hunky-dory indefinitely.  They live in illusion until driven out of it by some such calamity as the sudden death of a loved one.) 

But on the other hand, how can impermanence be taken to be an argument against worth and importance if there is no possibility of permanence?  As Nietzsche says in Twilight, if there is no real world, if there is no world of Platonic stasis, then there is no merely apparent world either.  Is it an argument against this life that it fails to meet an impossible standard?  And is not the postulation of such a world a mere reflex of weakness and world-weariness?  Weltschmerz become creative conjures up spooks who preside over the denigration of the only world there is. 

b) And then there is the fact of misery and affliction.  (Simone Weil is one of the best writers on affliction, malheur.)  Don't we all suffer, and doesn't this universal fact show that Silenus was right after all:  better never to have been born, with second best being an early death?  But again, and taking the side of Nietzsche, is it not the miserable who find life miserable, the afflicted who find it afflicting?  The strong do not whine about pain and suffering; they take them as goads to richer and fuller living.  Or is this just Nietzschean romanticism, a failure to fully face the true horror of life?

These questions are not easy to answer!  Indeed, the very posing of them is a difficult and ticklish matter.

In the end, Nietzsche seems torn. He loves life and wants to affirm it on its own terms. And yet he seeks an ersatz salvation in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. "For all joy wants eternity, wants deep, deep eternity."

Nietzsche on Pyrrho: Sagacious Weariness, a Buddhist for Greece

Will to Power #437 contains a marvellous discussion of Pyrrho of Elis.  A taste:

A Buddhist for Greece, grown up amid the tumult of the schools; a latecomer; weary; the protest of weariness against the zeal of the dialecticians; the unbelief of weariness in the importance of all things. (tr. Kaufmann)

Years ago I noted the strange similarity of some arguments found in Nagarjuna and the late Pyrrhonist, Sextus Empiricus. (Memo to self: blog it!)

Philosopher's Calendar

Friedrich Nietzsche was born on this date in 1844.  He died on 25 August 1900.  His great aphorism, "Some men are born posthumously" applies to him, and I am sure that when he penned it he was thinking of himself.

Mark Anderson writes to tell me that his book, Zarathustra Stone, has been published.

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Sadness at the Transience of the World

"I am grieved by the transitoriness of things,"  wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in a letter  to Franz Overbeck, dated 24 March 1887. (Quoted in R. Hayman,  Nietzsche: A Critical Life, Penguin, 1982, p. 304) 

What is the appropriate measure of grief at impermanence?

While we  are saddened by the transience of things, that they are transient shows that their passing is not worthy of the full measure of our sadness.  You are saddened by loss, but what exactly did you lose?  Something that was meant to last forever?  Something that could last forever?  Something that was worth lasting forever? 

Sadness at the passing of what must pass often indicates an inordinate love of the finite, when an ordinate love loves it as finite and no more.   But sadness also bespeaks a sense that there is more than the finite.  For if we had no sense of the Infinite why would we bestow upon the finite a value and reality it cannot bear? 

Sadness thus points down to the relative unreality and unimportance of the world of time and change while pointing up to the absolute reality and importance of its Source.

 

But Nietzsche, of the tribe of Heraclitus, could not bring himself to believe in the Source.  His bladed intellect would not allow it.  But his heart was that of homo religiosus. So he had resort to a desperate and absurd measure in reconciliation of heart and head:  the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, as if the redemption of time could be secured by making it cyclical and endless. 

This is no solution at all.

The problem with time is not that it will end, but that its very mode of Being is deficient. The problem is not that our time is short, but  that we are in time in the first place. For this reason, more time is no solution. Not even endlessly recurring time is any solution. Even if time were unending and I were omnitemporal, existing at every time, my life would still be strung out in moments outside of each other, with the diachronic identifications of memory and expectation no substitute for a true unity.

To the moment I say, with Faust, Verweile doch, du bist so schön (Goethe, Faust) but the beautiful moment will not abide, and abidance-in-memory is a sorry substitute, and a self diachronically constituted by such makeshifts is arguably no true self. Existing as we do temporally, we are never at one with ourselves: the past is no longer, the future not yet, and the present fleeting. We exist outside ourselves in temporal ec-stasis. We are strung out in temporal diaspora. The only Now we know is the nunc movens.

But we sense and can conceive a nunc stans, a standing now. This conception of a standing now, empty here below except for the rare and partial mystic fulfillments vouchsafed only to some, is the standard relative to which the moving now is judged ontologically deficient. Time is but a moving and inadequate image of eternity. 

So we of the tribe of Plato conceive of the divine life as the eternal life, not as the omnitemporal or everlasting life.

We too weep with Heraclitus, but our weeping is ordinate, adjusted to the grade of reality of that over which we weep.  And our weeping is tempered by joy as we look beyond this scene of flux.  For as Nietzsche says in Zarathustra, "all joy/desire wants eternity, wants deep, deep, eternity."  All Lust will Ewigkeit, will tiefe, tiefe, Ewigkeit!

This longing joy, this joyful longing, is it evidence of the reality of its Object?  Great minds have thought so.   But you won't be able to prove it one way or the other.  So in the end you must decide how you will live and what you will believe.

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Nietzsche, Truth, and Power

Nietzsche is culturally important, but philosophically dubious in the extreme. Some of our current cultural woes can be ascribed to the influence of his ideas. Suppose we take a look at Will to Power #534:

Das Kriterium der Wahrheit liegt in der Steigerung des Machtgefühls.

The criterion of truth resides in the heightening of the feeling of power.

A criterion of X is (i) a property or feature that all and only Xs possess which (ii) allows us to identify, detect, pick out, Xs. 'Criterion' is a term of epistemology. So one could read Nietzsche as saying that the test whereby we know that a belief is true is that it increases or enhances the feeling of power of the person who holds the belief. To employ some politically correct jargon that arguably can be traced back to Nietzsche, if a belief is 'empowering,' then it is true; and if a belief is true, then it is 'empowering.'

A second way to read the Nietzschean dictum is to take it not as offering a criterion (in the epistemological sense) of truth, but as stating what the nature of truth is. Accordingly, truth just is the property of increasing the feeling of power: to say that a belief (statement, representation, etc.) is true is just to say that it increases the feeling of power in the one who holds the belief.

Now suppose we ask a simple question. Is it true that the criterion of truth is the heightening of the feeling of power? If it is, then every truth empowers, and every belief that empowers is true. But surely not every truth empowers. You find out that you have some medical condition, hypertension, say. The truth that you have hypertension does not increase your sense of power; if anything it diminishes it. Or the report comes in that you have pancreatic cancer and will be dead in six months. I should think such news would have a depressing effect on one's vitality. And yet it is true. So some truths do not enhance the feeling of power. Nor do they enhance one's power if you care to distinguish power from the feeling of power.

On the other hand, there are empowering beliefs that are not true. Hitler's belief in his invincibility was surely empowering, but it was false as events showed. Believing that he was invincible, he undertook to do what Napoleon failed to do, subjugate the Russians. Like Napoleon, he failed, and it was all down hill from there.

One can multiply such counterexamples ad libitum. Of course, in constructing such counterexamples, I am relying on the ordinary notion of truth, as old as Aristotle, that truth implies correspondence with reality, correspondence with the way things are independently of our beliefs, desires, and feelings.

Do I beg the question against Nietzsche by recurring to the old understanding of truth? If I do, then so does Nietzsche. For what is he doing with his dictum if not telling us how it is with truth? Is he not purporting to tell us the truth (in the old sense) about truth?

What Nietzsche wants to say is that there is no truth 'in itself'; there are only various interpretations from the varying perspectives of power-hungry individuals, interpretations that serve to enhance the power of these individuals. At bottom, the world is a vast constellation of ever-changing power-centers vying with each other for dominance, and what a particular power-center calls 'true' are merely those interpretations that enhance and preserve its power.  For the essence of the world is not reason or order, but blind will, will to power.

But if that is the way it is, then there is an absolute truth after all. Nietzsche never extricates himself from this contradiction. And where he fails, his followers do not succeed.  We are now, as a culture, living and dying in the shadow of this contradiction, reaping the consequences of the death of God and the death of truth.

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Nietzsche and the New Atheists

The following quotation from a very interesting Guardian piece by John Gray entitled What Scares the New Atheists (HT: Karl White):

[1] The new atheists rarely mention Friedrich Nietzsche, and when they do it is usually to dismiss him. [2] This can’t be because Nietzsche’s ideas are said to have inspired the Nazi cult of racial inequality – an unlikely tale, given that the Nazis claimed their racism was based in science. [3]The reason Nietzsche has been excluded from the mainstream of contemporary atheist thinking is that he exposed the problem atheism has with morality. [4] It’s not that atheists can’t be moral – the subject of so many mawkish debates. [5] The question is which morality an atheist should serve.

Five sentences, five comments.

1. Yes.

2. Granted, the Nazis claimed their racism was based in science. But this is consistent with their racism having other sources as well.  So it doesn't follow that it is an "unlikely tale" that the Nazis drew inspiration from Nietzsche.  I say it is very likely.  See Nietzsche and Nationalism Socialism.

3.  Spot on!

4.  Agreed, atheists can be moral.  Indeed, some atheists are more moral that some theists — even when the moral code is the Decalogue minus the commandments that mention God.  The question whether an atheist can be moral, however, is ambiguous.  While it is clear that an atheist can be moral in the sense of satisfying moral demands, it is not clear that an atheist can be moral in the sense of recognizing moral demands in the first place.  It is an open question whether an atheist, consistent with his atheism, could have justification for admitting objective moral demands.

5.  Before one can ask which morality an atheist should serve, there is a logically prior question that needs asking and answering, one that Gray glides right past, namely,

Q. Is there any morality, any moral code, that an atheist would be justified in adhering to and justified in demanding that others adhere to?

If  a negative answer is given to (Q), then Gray's logically posterior question lapses.

Most of us in the West, atheists and theists alike, do agree on a minimal moral code.  Don't we all object to child molestation, female sexual mutilation, wanton killing of human beings, rape, theft,  lying, financial swindling, extortion,  and arson?   And in objecting to these actions, we mean our objections to be more than merely subjectively valid. When our property is stolen or a neighbor murdered, we consider that an objective wrong has been done. And when the murderer is apprehended, tried, and convicted we judge that something objectively right has been done.  But if an innocent person is falsely accused and convicted, we judge that something objectively wrong has been done.  Let's not worry about the details or the special cases: killing in self-defense, abortion, etc.  There are plenty of gray areas.  The existence of gray, however, does not rule out that of black and white.  Surely, in the West at least, there is some moral common ground that most atheists and theists, liberals and conservatives, stand upon.  For example, most of us agree that snuffing out the life of an adult, non-comatose, healthy human being for entertainment purposes is objectively wrong.

What (Q) asks about is the foundation or basis of the agreed-upon objectively binding moral code. This is not a sociological or any kind of empirical question. Nor is it a question in normative ethics. The question is not what we ought to do and leave undone, for we are assuming that we already have a rough answer to that. The question is meta-ethical: what does morality rest on, if on anything?

There are different theories. Some will say that morality requires a supernatural foundation, others that a natural foundation suffices.  I myself do not see how naturalism is up to the task of providing an objective foundation for even a minimal code of morality.

But of course one could be an atheist without being a naturalist. One could hold that there are objective values, but no God, and that ethical prescriptions and proscriptions are axiologically grounded.  (N. Hartmann, for example.) But let's assume, with Nietzsche, that if you get rid of God, you get rid of the Platonic menagerie (to cop a phrase from Plantinga)  as well.  It needs arguing, but it is reasonable to hold that God and Platonica stand and fall together.  That is what Nietzsche would say and I think he would be right were he to say it.   (The death of God is not an insignificant 'event' like the falling to earth of a piece of space junk such as Russell's celestial teapot.) 

No God, no objective morality binding for all.  Suppose that is the case.  Then how will the new atheist, who is also a liberal, uphold and ground his 'enlightened' liberal morality?  John Gray appreciates the difficulty:

Awkwardly for these atheists, Nietzsche understood that modern liberalism was a secular incarnation of these religious traditions. [. . .]  Nietzsche was clear that the chief sources of liberalism were in Jewish and Christian theism: that is why he was so bitterly hostile to these religions. He was an atheist in large part because he rejected liberal values. To be sure, evangelical unbelievers adamantly deny that liberalism needs any support from theism. If they are philosophers, they will wheel out their rusty intellectual equipment and assert that those who think liberalism relies on ideas and beliefs inherited from religion are guilty of a genetic fallacy. Canonical liberal thinkers such as John Locke and Immanuel Kant may have been steeped in theism; but ideas are not falsified because they originate in errors. The far-reaching claims these thinkers have made for liberal values can be detached from their theistic beginnings; a liberal morality that applies to all human beings can be formulated without any mention of religion. Or so we are continually being told. The trouble is that it’s hard to make any sense of the idea of a universal morality without invoking an understanding of what it is to be human that has been borrowed from theism.

Gray is right.  Let me spell it out a bit.  

Consider equality.  As a matter of empirical fact, we are not equal, not physically, mentally, morally, spiritually, socially, politically, economically.  By no empirical measure are people equal.  We are naturally unequal.  And yet we are supposedly equal as persons.  This equality as persons we take as requiring equality of treatment.  Kant, for example, insists that every human being, and indeed very rational being human or not, exists as an end in himself and therefore must never be treated as a means to an end.  A person is not a thing in nature to be used as we see fit.  For this reason, slavery is a grave moral evil.  A person is a rational being and must be accorded respect just in virtue of being a person.  And this regardless of inevitable empirical differences among persons.   Thus in his third formulation of the Categorical Imperative in his 1785 Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant writes:

Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.  (Grundlegung 429)

In connection with this supreme practical injunction, Kant distinguishes between price and dignity. (435)  "Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has dignity."  Dignity is intrinsic moral worth.  Each rational being, each person, is thus irreplaceably and intrinsically valuable with a value that is both infinite -- in that no price can be placed upon it -- and the same for all. The irreplaceability of persons is a very rich theme, one we must return to in subsequent posts. 

These are beautiful and lofty thoughts, no doubt, and most of us in the West (and not just in the West) accept them in some more or less confused form.  But what do these pieties have to do with reality?  Especially if reality is exhausted by space-time-matter?

Again, we are not equal by any empirical measure.  We are not equal as animals or even as rational animals. (Rationality might just be an evolutionary adaptation.)  We are supposedly equal as persons, as subjects of experience, as free agents.  But what could a person be if not just a living human animal (or a living 'Martian' animal).  And given how bloody many of these human animals there are, why should they be regarded as infinitely precious?  Are they not just highly complex physical systems?  Surely you won't say that complexity confers value, let alone infinite value.  Why should the more complex be more valuable than the less complex?  And surely you are not a species-chauvinist who believes that h. sapiens is the crown of 'creation' because we happen to be these critters.

If we are unequal as animals and equal as persons, then a person is not an animal.  What then is a person?  And what makes them equal in dignity and equal in rights and infinite in worth?

Now theism can answer these questions.   We are persons and not mere animals because we are created in the image and likeness of the Supreme Person.  We are equal as persons because we are, to put it metaphorically, sons and daughters of one and the same Father.  Since the Source we depend on for our being, intelligibility, and value is one and the same, we are equal as derivatives of that Source.  We are infinite in worth because we have a higher destiny, a higher vocation, which extends beyond our animal existence: we are created to participate eternally in the Divine Life.

But if you reject theism, how will you uphold the Kantian values adumbrated above?  If there is no God and no soul and no eternal destiny, what reasons, other than merely prudential ones, could I have for not enslaving you should I desire to do so and have the power to do so?

Aristotle thought it natural that some men should be slaves.  We find this notion morally abhorrent.  But why should we if we reject the Judeo-Christian God?  "We just do."  But that's only because we are running on the fumes of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  What happens when the fumes run out?

It is easy to see that it makes no sense, using terms strictly, to speak of anything or anybody as a creature if there is no creator. It is less easy to see, but equally true, that it makes no sense to try to hold on to notions such as that of the equality and dignity of persons after their metaphysical foundations in Christian theism have been undermined.

So there you have the Nietzschean challenge to the New Atheists.  No God, then no justification for your liberal values! Pay attention, Sam.  Make a clean sweep! Just as religion is for the weak who won't face reality, so is liberalism.  The world belongs to the strong, to those who have the power to impose their will upon it.  The world belongs to those hard as diamonds, not to those soft as coal and weak and womanish. Nietzsche:

Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation - but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped?

Beyond Good and Evil, Chapter 9, What is Noble?, Friedrich Nietzsche    Go to Quote

More quotations on strength and weakness here.

The Pig, the Fool, and Socrates

A reader opines:

I like animals because I think they're a higher form of life. They have no pretenses about what they are; a dog can achieve levels of serenity and fulfillment of which I cannot conceive by merely being a dog and doing dog things. Myself, on the other hand, I could be the next Einstein with the face of James Dean and still very likely be miserable all my life.

I like animals too, but not because they are a higher form of life.  They are lower forms of life.  The ascription of pretentiousness to a cat or dog is of course absurd, but equally so is the ascription of serenity and fulfillment to them if these words carry the meaning that we attach to them. It is because man is a spiritual being that he can pretend and fake and dissemble and posture and blow up his ego like a balloon to blot out the sun.  And it is because man is a spiritual being that he can know serenity, fulfillment, and in rare cases the peace that surpasseth all understanding.  Man has not only the power of thought but also the mystical power to transcend thought.  All of this is beyond the animal.  If you disagree, then I will ask you to produce the mathematical and metaphysical and mystical treatises of the dolphins and the apes. Who among them is a Paul Erdös or a Plato or a Juan de la Cruz?  As Heidegger says somewhere, "An abyss yawns between man and animal."

On the other hand no animal knows misery like we do.  Barred out heights, they are also barred our depths of wretchedness and despair. 

So while I have many bones to pick with John Stuart Mill on the score of his utilitarianism and his hedonism and his psychologism in logic and his internally inconsistent attempt at distinguishing higher from lower pleasures, his is a noble soul and I agree with the sentiment expressed in this well-known passage from Utilitarianism, Chapter II:

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied  than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they know only their own side of the question.  The other party to the comparison knows both sides.

I wonder if Mill can validate  this noble thought within his paltry hedonist scheme.  It is in any case a value judgment and I am not sure I would be able to refute someone who preferred the life of a cat or a dog or a contented cow to that of a man, half-angel, half-beast, tormented, crazed, but participant in highest bliss.   But I agree with Nietzsche that man is something to be overcome, though not along the lines he proposes. He needs perfecting.  I cannot forbear to quote his marvellous jab at the English hedonists from The Twilight of the Idols:

If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how.  Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does. ("Maxims and Arrows," #12, tr. W. Kaufmann.)

Why do We Obsess Over Ultimate Meaning?

Or if not literally obsess, care deeply?  Karl White passes on the following from one of his correspondents:

Why are we all so obsessed with infusing things with meaning anyway? Isn't this craving a mere artifact of being brought up under systems of belief that insist on the fact that life has to serve some purpose? Maybe if we hadn't been presented with such presumptions from the beginning, we wouldn't have such a hard time accepting existence?

These are reasonable questions.  Perhaps we cannot be satisfied with finite meanings and relative satisfactions and cannot accept the utter finality of death only because we have have been culturally brainwashed for centuries upon centuries into thinking that there is some Grand Purpose at the back of things that we participate in, and some Final Redemption, when there is none.  Perhaps we have been laboring under a God Delusion or a Transcendent Meaning Delusion for lo these many centuries.   But now these delusions are losing their grip.  One sort of person responds to the loss despairingly and pessimistically.  Call it the Woody Allen response.  Allen laments the absurdity of life and makes movies to distract himself and others from the dismal reality.  Another sort of person digs in his heels and frantically tries to shore up the delusions by concocting ever more subtle metaphysical arguments when he knows deep down, as Allen would insist, that it's all "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." 

The cure for both is the same: drop the delusions.  Stop measuring reality against a nonexistent standard.  To paraphrase Nietzsche,  when the supposedly Real World falls, then so does the Apparent World.  (See The Twilight of the Idols.) The erasure of the Transcendent abrogates the denigration of the Immanent.  The Immanent, now no longer immanent, is the sole reality.  Live it, love it, affirm it.  The finite suffices.  Its finitude is no argument against this life if the only alternative is an Infinity that doesn't exist.  Death is no argument against life if this is all there is.  Drop the delusion and its hinterworlds and you will neither despair nor hope.  You will learn to be true to the earth, your natural and only home.

The above considerations don't sway me. 

What explains the origin of the systems of belief whose appropriation makes us hanker after Transcendence?  Is the longing an artifact of the belief, or the belief an artifact of the longing? 

I would say that the longing explains the belief.  The belief cannot explain the longing since the belief had to first be there to explain anything, and what explains it is the longing.   From time immemorial, people have experienced a deep dissatisfaction with the here and now and with it a longing for a better, truer, higher life.  These experiences are real, though not had by everyone, and not equally by those who have them.  Outstanding individuals translated these recurrent and widely-distributed experiences of  dissatisfaction and longing into systems of belief and practice of various sorts, Buddhism being one example, with its sarvam dukkham.  These systems were developed and passed on.  They 'resonated' with people, all sorts of people, from every land, at every time.  Why?  Because they spoke to some real inchoate longing that people everywhere have.  They answer to a real need, the metaphysical need.  (Cf. Schopenhauer, "On Man's Need for Metaphysics" in WWR vol. II)  So it is not as if people were brainwashed into accepting these symbolic forms; they express and articulate real dissatisfaction with the mundane and ephemeral and real longing for lasting beatitude.

In sum: the experiences of deep dissatisfaction and deep longing are real; they come first phylogenetically, ontogenetically, temporally, logically, and epistemically.  They give rise to systems of belief and practice (and not the other way around).   Both the experiences and the beliefs are evidence of a sort for the reality of that which could remove the dissatisfaction and assuage the longing.  Of course, it takes some careful arguing to get from longing for X to the reality of X.

This leads us to the topic of Arguments from Desire, a topic to be pursued in subsequent posts.

Since I mentioned Nietzsche above, I will end with Zarathustra's Roundelay, which never fails to bring tears to my eyes.  It shows that Nietzsche, though possessing the bladed intellect of the skeptic, had the throbbing heart of a  homo religiosus.  In his own perverse way he testifies to the truth above suggested.  "All joy wants eternity, wants deep, wants deep eternity!"

Zarathustra's Rundgesang

Oh Mensch! Gib acht!

Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?

»Ich schlief, ich schlief—,

Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht:—

Die Welt ist tief,

Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht.

Tief ist ihr Weh—,

Lust—tiefer noch als Herzeleid:

Weh spricht: Vergeh!

Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit—,

—will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!«

Walter Kaufmann trans.:

O man, take care!

What does the deep midnight declare?

"I was asleep—

From a deep dream I woke and swear:

The world is deep,

Deeper than day had been aware.

Deep is its woe;

Joy—deeper yet than agony:

Woe implores: Go!

But all joy wants eternity—

Wants deep, wants deep eternity."

 Adrian del Caro trans.:

Oh mankind, pray!

What does deep midnight have to say?

"From sleep, from sleep—

From deepest dream I made my way:—

The world is deep,

And deeper than the grasp of day.

Deep is its pain—,

Joy—deeper still than misery:

Pain says: Refrain!

Yet all joy wants eternity—

—Wants deep, wants deep eternity."

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Lake Sils, Upper Engadin, Switzerland

Mark Anderson, presently on a sort of Nietzsche pilgrimage, sent me this panoramic shot.  Left-click to enlarge.  Mark explains:

The photo shows lake Sils. The little settlement below is Isola. Further to the right, where the lake ends, is Sils-Maria. The large patch of green that may look like an island right up against Sils is the Chasté peninsula, one of Nietzsche’s favorite places. He even fantasized about building himself a hermit’s hut there.

Nietzsche's Madness Letters

Hier sind die Wahnbriefe Nietzsches.  Auf Deutsch.  (Das ist ja richtig was ich jetzt geschrieben habe. Vgl. Auf deutsch oder auf Deutsch?)

Nietzsche on Prose and Poetry

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book II, sec. 92, tr. Kaufmann:

Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.  For it is an uninterrupted, well-mannered war with poetry: all of its attractions depend on the way in which poetry is continually avoided and contradicted.

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For the New Year

Nietzsche and the Genetic Fallacy

Nietzsche and the Genetic Fallacy

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Daybreak:  Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, Book I, sec. 95:

Historical refutation as the definitive refutation. -- In former times, one sought to prove that there is no God -- today one indicates how the belief that there is a God could arise and how this belief acquired its weight and importance:  a counter-proof that there is no God thereby becomes superfluous. -- When in former times one had refuted the 'proofs of the existence of God' put forward, there always remained the doubt whether better proofs might not be adduced than those just refuted:  in those days atheists did not know how to make a clean sweep.

This passage, which is entirely characteristic of Nietzsche's way of thinking, strikes me as a text-book example of the genetic fallacy.  

Every (occurrent) belief has an origin:  it comes to be held by a person or a group of persons due to certain causes.  Thus I came to believe that there are nine planets by reading it in a book as a child.  Is Nietzsche suggesting that every belief is false just in virtue of its having an origin?  That would be absurd.  Is he suggesting instead that only false beliefs have origins?  That too would be absurd.  My belief that our solar system consists of  nine planets, counting Pluto, orbiting one mediocre star is true despite its having an origin.    

Given that both true and false beliefs have origins, it follows that one cannot refute a belief, i.e., show it to be false, by tracing its origins.  To think otherwise is to commit the genetic fallacy.

People who commit this fallacy fail to appreciate that questions as to the truth or falsity of a belief and as to the reasons for its truth or falsity are logically independent of questions as to the origin (genesis) of the belief in question.  Herr Nietzsche is therefore quite mistaken in thinking that accounting for the genesis of a belief renders "superfluous" (ueberfluessig) the question of its truth or falsity. 

Far from being the definitive refutation, historical refutation is no refutation at all.  A belief's loss of widespread acceptance and existential importance says nothing about its truth.

Nietzsche was subjectively certain of the nonexistence of God.  But this was merely a fact about his psyche, a fact consistent both with the existence and the nonexistence of God.  Similarly, the "death of God" -- in plain English:  the waning of widespread belief in God among educated people -- is merely a cultural fact, if it is a fact.  As such, it is consistent both with the existence and the nonexistence of God.

What Nietzsche and his followers do is presuppose that there is a way things are:  There is no God, no moral world-order; truth is a matter of perspective, a "vital lie"; the world at bottom is the will to power; and so on.   Armed with these unargued presuppositions, they set out to debunk countervailing positions.  What they seem not to appreciate is that debunkers can be debunked and psychologizers psychologized; bullshitters of the decadent French form can themselves be bullshat.  Deny truth and you presuppose truth.  Turn everything into flux, and you flux yourself up as well.  The river into which you can step only once turns out to be a river into which you cannot step at all.  Logic, rendered super-fluous, gets its revenge in the end.

To Doctor Empiric

When men a dangerous disease did 'scape
    Of old they gave a cock to Aesculape
Let me give two, that doubly am got free
    From my disease's danger, and from thee.

Ben Jonson (1753?-1637) from Epigrams and Epitaphs (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 27.

At the very end of the Phaedo, having drunk the hemlock, Socrates is reported by Plato as saying to Crito, "I owe a cock to Asclepius; do not forget to pay it." (tr. F. J. Church) Asclepius is the Greek god of healing.  Presumably, Socrates wanted to thank the god for his recovery from the sickness of life itself.

Nietzsche comments at the the beginning of "The Problem of Socrates" in The Twilight of the Idols:

Concerning life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is no good.  Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths -- a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life.  Even Socrates said, as he died: "To live -- that means to be sick a long time: I owe Asclepius the Savior a rooster." (tr. W. Kaufmann)

Nietzsche and the Appeal of the Verifiability Criterion

A long-gone blogger once asked:

Has anyone ever seen an argument - or even a plea - in favor of the verification principle? I mean, beyond anything that just goes, "Hey, now this is cool. We can bash the ethicists, metaphysicians,
and theologians quite thoroughly with this."

As a preliminary stab at an answer, consider the Nietzsche quotation that Richard von Mises uses for the motto of his book Positivism (Harvard University Press, 1951, p. xii):

. . . die kleinen, unscheinbaren vorsichtigen Wahrheiten, welche mit strenger Methode gefunden werden, hoeher zu schaetzen als jene weiten, schwebenden, umschleiernden Allgemeinheiten, nach denen das Beduerfnis religoeser oder kuenstlerischer Zeitalter greift.

. . . to value more highly the little, unpretentious, cautious truths, arrived at by rigorous methods, than those vast, floating, veiling generalities for which the yearnings of a religious or artistic era reach.

A plea for the Verifiability Principle (VP) might just consist of an invocation of the above value judgment: precise, verifiable knowledge about matters of empirical fact is of higher value than broad and uncertain theories about ultimates like God and the soul.

Of course, no (classical) metaphysician shares this value judgment -- a judgment which, nota bene, must be merely subjective on good positivist principles -- and will hasten to point out that the Principle is self-vitiating in that it implies its own lack of cognitive significance. (Exercise for the reader: 'verify' that for yourself.)

Of course, Hume, whose famous Fork is a conceptual precursor of the VP, faces a similar difficulty: What is the epistemological status of the principle that every significant idea derives from a sensory impression? Does that express a matter of empirical fact? No. A mere relation of ideas? No.

Then consign it to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion!

Giles Fraser Credits Nietzsche with Making a Christian of Him

Two things I like about Fraser's Guardian piece are that he appreciates Nietzsche's deep religiosity and the role that his worship of power played in the development of Nazi ideology.  Both of these points should infuriate leftists which of course constitutes an excellent recommendation of them.

See Nietzsche and National Socialism.  Soteriology in Nietzsche and the Question of the Value of Life contains some discussion of Fraser's Nietzsche book. 

As for Nietzsche's religiosity, here is the way I put it in one of my aphorisms: "His was the throbbing heart of the homo religiosus wedded to be bladed intellect of the skeptic."

A Failed Defense of Nietzsche's Perspectivism

Prowling the Web for material on Nietzsche and the genetic fallacy, I stumbled across this passage from Merold Westphal, "Nietzsche as a Theological Resource," Modern Theology 13:2 (April 1997), p. 218:
  
     Perspectivism need not be presented as an absolute truth; it can be
     presented as an account of how reality looks from where one is
     situated. It does not thereby cease to be of value. The account of
     the game given by the winning coach cannot claim to be THE truth
     about the game: other accounts must be taken into account,
     including those from the losing coach, the players, the
     referees,.... But that does not mean that we do not listen with
     attention to what the winning coach has to say about the game.
   
Perspectivism is the proposition P: All truths are perspectival.  Either (P) applies to itself or it does not. If the former, then one  must conclude that (P) is itself perspectivally true. Call this perspectivized perspectivism (PP). If the latter, if (P) is not taken to apply to itself, then (P) is nonperspectivally true. Westphal mentions, but does not take, this tack, so I shall ignore it here. His position appears to be perspectivized perspectivism. Unfortunately, his example shows that he does not understand it. He   confuses (PP) with a quite different doctrine that could be called alethic partialism.

What the latter says is that the whole truth about a subject cannot be captured from any one perspective. Take a quart of 10 W 30 motor oil. From the perspective of a salesman at an auto parts
store, it is a commodity from the sale of which he expects to make a profit. From the perspective of a motorist, it is a crankcase lubricant. From the perspective of a chemist, the oil's viscosity and other such attributes are salient. From the perspective of an eco-enthusiast, it is a potential pollutant of the ground water. And so  on. But note that these partial truths add up to the whole truth about the oil. (By a 'partial truth' I do not mean a truth that is only partially true, but a truth that is wholly true, but captures only a part of the reality of what it is about.)

Alethic partialism sounds reasonable. But that is not what the perspectivized perspectivist is saying. What he is saying is that  every truth is merely perspectivally true, and that this thesis itself is true only from his, and perhaps some (but not all) other, perspectives. Unfortunately, this allows a nonperspectivist such as  your humble correspondent to say: "Fine! Truth is perspectival for you, Fritz, but for me it is absolute, and one of my absolute truths  is that you are mistaken in your theory of truth." Clearly, the  perspectivized perspectivist is in an uncomfortable position here. He  wants to say something that is binding on all, but he cannot given the self-limiting nature of his position, a self-limitation demanded by  logical consistency.  

Pace Westphal, perspectivism is not "an account of how reality looks from where one is situated," but an account of the nature of truth, an  account that implies that there is no reality. For truth is the truth of reality. A truth-bearer (a belief, say) is true just in case it corresponds to what is the case independently of anyone's beliefs, desires, or interests. To speak of truth as perspectival is to dissolve reality along with truth. From this one can see how obtuse Westphal's account of perspectivism his. He fails to grasp its  radicality. And failing to grasp its radicality, he fails to appreciate its utter incoherence.

Boethius Contra Nietzsche on Time and Transition

Like Nietzsche, "I am grieved by the transitoriness of things."  (Letter to Franz Overbeck, 24 March 1887, quoted in R. Hayman,  Nietzsche: A Critical Life, Penguin, 1982, p. 304) Unlike Nietzsche, I
appreciate that the Eternal Recurrence of the Same is no solution.

The problem with time is not that it will end, but that its very mode of being is deficient. The problem is not that our time is short, but   that we are in time in the first place. For this reason, more time is no solution. Not even endlessly recurring time is any solution. Even if time were unending and I were omnitemporal, existing at every time, my life would still be strung out in moments outside of each other, with the diachronic identifications of memory and expectation no substitute for a true unity. To the moment I say, Verweile doch, du bist so schön (Goethe, Faust) but the beautiful moment will not abide, and abidance-in-memory is a sorry substitute, and a self diachronically constituted by such makeshifts is arguably no true self. Existing as we do temporally, we are never at one with ourselves: the past is no longer, the future not yet, and the present fleeting. We exist outside ourselves in temporal ec-stasis. We are strung out in temporal diaspora. The only Now we know is the nunc movens.

But we sense and can conceive a nunc stans, a standing now. This conception of a standing now, empty except for the rare and partial mystic fulfillment, is the standard relative to which the moving now is judged ontologically deficient. Time is but a moving and inadequate image of eternity.  So we of the tribe of Plato conceive of the divine life as the eternal life, not as the omnitemporal or everlasting life. Our spokesman is Boethius, inspired by Philosophia herself:

     Eternity is the simultaneous and complete possession of infinite
     life. This will appear more clearly if we compare it with temporal
     things. All that lives under the conditions of time moves through
     the present from the past to the future; there is nothing set in
     time which can at one moment grasp the whole space of its lifetime.
     It cannot yet comprehend tomorrow; yesterday it has already lost.
     And in this life of today your life is no more than a changing,
     passing moment. And as Aristotle said of the universe, so it is of
     all that is subject to time; though it never began to be, nor will
     ever cease, and its life is coextensive with the infinity of time,
     yet it is not such as can be held to be eternal. For though it
     apprehends and grasps a space of infinite lifetime, it does not
     embrace the whole simultaneously; it has not yet experienced the
     future. What we should rightly call eternal is that which grasps
     and possesses wholly and simultaneously the fullness of unending
     life, which lacks naught of the future, and has lost naught of the
     fleeting past; and such an existence must be ever present in itself
     to control and aid itself, and also must keep present with itself
     the infinity of changing time. (The Consolation of Philosophy, Book
     V; the Latin below the fold)

Silenian and Epicurean Sources of "Death is Not an Evil"

Clarity will be served if we distinguish the specifically Epicurean reason for thinking death not an evil from another reason which is actually anti-Epicurean. I'll start with the second reason.

A. Death is not an evil because it removes us from a condition which on balance is not good, a condition which on balance is worse than nonexistence.  This is the wisdom of Silenus, reported by Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 1244 ff.) and quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth ofTragedy, section 3:

There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him.  When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man.  Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words:  "O wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing.  But the second best for you is -- to die soon."

B.  Death is not an evil for the one who dies because when death is, one is not, and when one is, death is not.  My being dead is not an evil state of affairs because there is no such state of affairs (STOA) as my being dead.  Since there is no such STOA, there is no bearer of the property of being evil.  If this property has a bearer it cannot be an individual or a property but must be a STOA.

And so the Epicurean line is consistent with life affirmation. The Epicurean is not saying that being dead is good and being alive evil; he is saying that being dead is not evil because axiologically neutral.  The Epicurean is therefore also committed to saying that being dead is not a good.

The first reason is axiological, the second ontological.  The Silenian pessimist  renders a negative value verdict on life as a whole:  it's no good, better never to have been born, with  second best being to die young.  By contrast, the Epicurean's point is that the ontology of the situation makes it impossible for death to be an evil for the one who has died. 

This reinforces my earlier conclusion that there is nothing nihilistic about the Epicurean position. 

Nietzsche's Definition of 'Nihilist'

Der Wille zur Macht #585 (Kroener Ausgabe): 

Ein Nihilist ist der Mensch, welcher von der Welt, wie sie ist, urteilt, sie sollte nicht sein, und von der Welt, wie sie sein sollte, urteilt, sie existiert nicht.

A nihilist is one who judges of the world as it is, that it ought not be, and of the world as it ought to be, that it does not exist.

My translation is as beautiful as the German original.  Don't you agree?

Best Evidence of the Greatness of This Country

Keith Burgess-Jackson writes:

The best evidence of the greatness of this country is that people are clamoring to get into it. Almost nobody—including self-loathing progressives—wants to leave it.

It is also the best evidence of the failure of Communism and those socio-political schemes that are ever on the slouch toward Communism.   They needed walls to keep people in, we need walls to keep them out.  Hence the rank absurdity of the comparsion of a wall on our southern border to the Berlin Wall.  Now the leftists who make this comparison cannot be so obtuse as not to see its rank absurdity.  But they make it anyway because they will say or do anything to win.  They are out for power any way they can get it.

By the way, this lust for power by any means explains the fascination of leftists with Nietzsche, a fascination which would otherwise be difficult to explain given the German's social and political views.  Nietzsche's fundamental ontological thesis is that the world is the will to power.  Die Welt is der Wille zur Macht und nichts anders!  And because reality at its base and core is blind will to power without rhyme or reason, whose only goal is its own expansion, there is no place for truth.  Truth gets reduced, and in consequence of the reduction eliminated, in favor of ever-shifting perspectives of ever-changing power centers.  Perspectivism, accordingly, is Nietzsche's central epistemological doctrine.  It is of course incoherent and easily refuted.  But why should that matter to someone who does not care about truth in the first place?  Truth is a conservative notion since it points us to the way things ARE.  But progressives take their marching orders from Karl Marx: "The philosophers have variously interpreted the wotrld; but the point is to change it." (11th Thesis on Feuerbach.)  Die Philosophen haben die Welt verschieden  interpretiert; aber es kommt darauf an, sie zu veraendern.

What in these two central Nietzschean doctrines is there for a leftist not to love?  He finds sanction in them  both for his pursuit of power unchecked by any moral standard ("The end justifies the means") and for his propaganda and deceitfulness.   If there is no truth there is no limit to what he can say and do in pursuit of his ends.

This also explains the leftist's  belief in the indefinite malleability of man and society. If there is no way things are, no rerum natura, then there is no limit on what is possible.  And if there is no moral world order, then there is no check on what it is morally permissible to do. And so the leftist, foolish idealist that he is, embarks upon schemes the upshot of which  are of the sort documented in the Black Book of Communism.  But if you break 100 million eggs and still have no omelet, then you need to go back and check your premises.  Or, to paraphrase Aristotle, a little error in the beginning leads to a big bloody one in the end.

 

The Eternal Return of the Same Old Same Old

A redemption from transitoriness that consists of an endless repetition is no redemption at all.  An eternity of the same old crap is still crap.  It is actually worse than transient crap.  It is Crap Eternalized, nihilism on stilts.

Pious Nietzscheans will be shocked at my irreverence.  But wasn't it his irreverence that attracted their adolescent selves to him in the first place?

Nietzsche would restore the 'weight' to the world that the now absent God had supplied.  But his Eternal Recurrence is a makeshift not up to the task. 

Fulminate as he does against old Plato, he himself is a Platonist: he takes the world's impermanence to argue its unreality and unimportance. Which is why he posits Eternal Recurrence.  From within Becoming he would redeem Becoming.  But he should have seen that among the consequences of the death of God is not only the death of truth, but also the death of redemption.

On Writing for Money

From an NYT interview with Christopher Hitchens on the occasion of the publication of his memoir Hitch-22:

Did you write the book for money?
Of course, I do everything for money. Dr. Johnson is correct when he says that only a fool writes for anything but money. It would be useful to keep a diary, but I don’t like writing unpaid. I don’t like writing checks without getting paid.

The fool in excelsis, I suppose, would be he who not only writes what cannot sell, but uses his own blood for ink.  I am thinking of Nietzsche whose posthumous birth was due in no small measure to the  auto-vivisection which supplied the fluid which powered his pen.

Nietzsche

His was the throbbing heart of the homo religiosus wedded to be bladed intellect of the skeptic.

Soteriology in Nietzsche and the Question of the Value of Life

Giles Fraser in his provocative Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief (Routledge 2002) maintains that "Nietzsche is obsessed with the question of human salvation" and that his work is "primarily soteriology." (p. 2)  I don't disagree with this assessment, but there is a tension in Nietzsche that ought to be pointed out, one that Fraser, from what I have read of his book, does not address.

1. Talk of salvation presupposes, first,  that there is some general state or condition, one in which we all find ourselves, from which we need salvation, and second, that this general condition is profoundly unsatisfactory.  In The Birth of Tragedy, section 3, Nietzsche invokes "the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus" who, when asked by King Midas about that which is most desirable for man, replied that the best of all is utterly beyond human reach: not to be born.  The second best, if one has had the misfortune of being born, is to die soon.  Now it is clear that some such negative assessment of life, or of human life, is a precondition of any quest for salvation, no matter what form it might take, whether Buddhist, Stoic, Christian, whatever.  The negative judgment on life as a whole need not be as harsh as the Silenian one, but without some negative judgment or other as to the value of life the question of salvation  makes no sense.  To take the question seriously one need not believe that salvation to some positive state is possible; but one has to believe that the general state of humanity (or of all sentient beings) is deeply unsatisfactory, to use a somewhat mild term. 

2. But here's the rub.  It is well known  that Nietzsche maintains that the value of life is inestimable.  As he puts it in Twilight of the Idols ("The Problem of Socrates," sec. 2) : der Wert des Lebens nicht abgeschaetzt werden kann.  His point is that objective judgments about the value of life are impossible.  Such judgments can never be true; they count only as symptoms.  Saying nothing about life itself, they merely betray the health or decadence of those who make the judgments.  Buddha, Socrates, and all those belonging to the consensus sapientium who purport to say something objective about this life when they pronounce a negative judgment upon it, as Buddha does in the First Noble Truth (sarvam dukkham: all is suffering) merely betray their own physiological decline.  There is no fact of the matter as to the value or disvalue of life.  There is only ascending and descending life with the value judgments being no more than symptoms either of life ascending or life descending.  Thus spoke Nietzsche.

3. The tension, then, is between the following two Nietzschean commitments: (1) Man needs salvation from his present predicament in this life; (2) The value of life cannot be objectively assessed or evaluated.  The claims cannot both be true.  The need for salvation implies that our predicament in this life is of negative value, when this cannot be the case if there is no fact of the matter concerning the value of life. 

4.  Finding contradictions in Nietzsche is not very difficult, and one could even argue that the conflicting trends of his thought show its richness and its nearness to the bloody bone of the predicament in which we find ourselves; my present point, however,  is that Fraser's essentially correct claim that Nietzsche's work is "primarily soteriology" needs to be qualified by his fundamental thesis  about the inestimability of life's value, which thesis  renders soteriology impossible.

5. Well, is the value of life objectively inestimable?  A most vexing question.  Life is always an individual life, mine for example.  Heidegger spoke of the Jemeinigkeit des Daseins; I will speak of the Jemeinigkeit des Lebens.  There is no living in general; it is always a particular affair.  What's more, every individual life is stretched on the rack of time:  one does not live one's individual life all at once but bit by bit.  If there is a problem about how any given individual life can judge the value of life in general, then there will also be a problem about how any phase of an individual's life can judge the value of that individual's life as a whole.

I am tempted to give the gastroenterologist's answer to the question whether life is worth living.  It depends on the liver.  Joking aside, the point would be that there is just no objective fact of the matter  as to whether or not life in general is worth living.  You either experience your particular life as worth living or you don't.  If you do then your particular life has value, at least for the moment.  There is no  standard apart from life, and indeed apart from the life of the individual, by which the value of life could be measured.  No standard apart from life does not imply no standard: individual life is the standard.  The value of life's being objectively inestimable therefore does not imply that its value is merely subjective.  The implication seems to be that the individual life is an absolute standard of value in which subjective and objective coalesce.

6. "But aren't there certain general considerations that show that no life is worth living or that no life is worth very much?"  And what would those be? 

a) Well, there is the fact of impermanence or transience.  In a letter to Franz Overbeck, Nietzsche himself complains, "I am grieved by the transitoriness of things."  I feel your pain, Fritz.  Doesn't universal impermanence show that nothing in this life is worth much?  How important can anything be if it is here today and gone tomorrow?  How can anyone find value in his doings and strivings if he faces up to the universality of impermanence?  Does not the certainty of death mock the seriousness of our passions and plans?  (Arguably, most do not honestly confront impermanence but vainly imagine that everything will remain hunky-dory indefinitely.  They live in illusion until driven out of it by some such calamity as the sudden death of a loved one.)  But on the other hand, how can impermanence be taken to be an argument against worth and importance if there is no possibility of permanence?  As Nietzsche says in Twilight, if there is no real world, if there is no world of Platonic stasis, then there is no merely apparent world either.  Is it an argument against this life that it fails to meet an impossible standard?  And is not the postulation of such a world a mere reflex of weakness and world-weariness?  Weltschmerz become creative conjures up spooks who preside over the denigration of the only world there is. 

b) And then there is the fact of misery and affliction.  (Simone Weil is one of the best writers on affliction, malheur.)  Don't we all suffer, and doesn't this universal fact show that Silenus was right after all:  better never to have been born, with second best being an early death?  But again, and taking the side of Nietzsche, is it not the miserable who find life miserable, the afflicted who find it afflicting?  The strong do not whine about pain and suffering; they take them as goads to richer and fuller living.  Or is this just Nietzschean romanticism, a failure to fully face the true horror of life?

These questions are not easy to answer!  Indeed, the very posing of them is a difficult and ticklish matter.