Month: November 2009

Wonder at Existence

Existence elicited nausea from Sartre's Roquentin, but wonder from Bryan Magee:

. . . no matter what it was that existed, it seemed to me extraordinary beyond all wonderment that it should. It was astounding that anything existed at all. Why wasn't there nothing? By all the normal rules of expectation — the least unlikely state of affairs, the most economical solution to all possible problems, the simplest explanation — nothing is what you would have expected there to be. But such was not the case, self-evidently. (Confessions of a Philosopher, p. 13)

What elicited Magee's wonderment was the self-evident sheer existence of things in general: their being as opposed to their nonbeing. How strange that anything at all exists! Now what could a partisan of the thin conception of Being or existence make of Magee's intuition of existence?

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Nausea at Existence

Nausea Existence is often 'invisible' to  analytic types well-versed in logic, for existence is "odious to the logician" as George Santayana sagely remarked in Scepticism and Animal Faith  (Dover, 1955, p. 48) It is so odious, in fact, that they need to mask it under the misnamed 'existential' quantifier. So I need to resort to extreme methods to bring it into view I will quote from Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea. 

Now it goes without saying that I don't agree with Sartre that existence is an unintelligible surd. For me it is the opposite of unintelligible. But what I will borrow from Sartre is the insight that existence is extralogical: it is precisely not what Quine said it was whn he said that "Existence is what existential quantification expresses."  So let's consider the famous 'chestnut tree' passage.

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The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook

Recently discovered.  Warning: it may induce nausea.

Excerpt:

Today I made a Black Forest cake out of five pounds of cherries and a live beaver, challenging the very definition of the word "cake." I was very pleased. Malraux said he admired it greatly, but could not stay for dessert. Still, I feel that this may be my most profound achievement yet, and have resolved to enter it in the Betty Crocker Bake-Off.

Liberal Dreckmeisters and Their Decadent Drivel

How is that for a polemical title?

The first decades of televison were comparatively wholesome compared to what came later. An example of outstanding TV was Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, which ran from 1959-1964.  Comparing a series like TZ with trash like The Sopranos, one sees the extent of the decline.

Serling knew how to entertain while also stimulating thought and teaching moral lessons. Our contemporary dreckmeisters apparently think that the purpose of art is to degrade sensibility, impede critical thinking, glorify scumbags, and rub our noses ever deeper into sex and violence. It seems obvious that the liberal fetishization of freedom of expression without constraint or sense of responsibility is part of the problem. But I can't let a certain sort of libertarian or economic conservative off the hook. Their lust for profit is also involved.

What is is that characterizes contemporary media dreck? Among other things, the incessant presentation of defective human beings as if there are more of them than there are, and as if there is nothing at all wrong with their way of life. Deviant behavior is presented as if it is mainstream and acceptable, if not desirable. And then lame justifications are provided for the presentation: 'this is what life is like now; we are simply telling it like it is.' It doesn't occur to the dreckmeisters that art might have an ennobling function.

The tendency of liberals and leftists is to think that any presentation of choice-worthy goals or admirable styles of life could only be hypocritical preaching.  And to libs and lefties, nothing is worse than hypocrisy.  Indeed, a good indicator of whether someone belongs to this class of the terminally benighted is whether the person obsesses over hypocrisy and thinks it the very worst thing in the world.  See my category Hypocrisy for elaboration of this theme.

Sartre’s Existentialism and the Meaning of Life, Part Two

Sartre Near the end of  Part One of this two-part series, I wrote,

. . . Sartre, denying God, puts man in God's place: he ascribes to man a type of freedom and a type of responsibility that he cannot possibly possess, that only God can possess. He fails to see that human freedom is in no way diminished by an individual's free acceptance of an objective constraint on his behavior. This is because human freedom is finite freedom; only an infinite freedom, a divine freedom, would be diminished by objective constraints.

This may well be the crux of the matter. But we need to explore it in greater depth. For a theist, God is the absolute. But Sartre famously denies God on the ground that a for-itself-in-itself is impossible: see Being and Nothingness. For Sartre the God-denier, man is the absolute. But there is no Man, only men. Man is an abstraction. So the absolute fractures into finite individual subjectivities, each of which exists contingently. Here is a crucial passage:

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Sartre’s Existentialism and the Meaning of Life, Part One

Sartre_j Suppose we divide theories of the meaning of human life into the exogenous and the endogenous. According to the exogenous theories, existential meaning derives from a source external to the agent, whereas on endogenous theories, meaning and purpose are posited or projected by the agent. Classical theism provides an example of an exogenous theory of meaning: because man was created by God for a purpose, namely, to serve and glorify him in this world and commune with him in the next, the purpose of human life is to live in accordance with the divine will so as to achieve one's higher destiny of unending bliss. Jean-Paul Sartre's theory as presented in the manifesto "Existentialism is a Humanism" is an example of an endogenous theory. Indeed, it is the polar opposite of a theistic theory of existential meaning: "Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position." (369, Kaufmann anthology) Herewith, some critical commentary on Sartre's theory as we find it in the essay mentioned.

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Is Smoking a Moral Obligation?

Readers of this weblog know that I am no friend of those benighted purveyors of misplaced moral enthusiasm, the 'tobacco wackos.' But the best way to oppose fanaticism is not by an equal and opposite fanaticism, but by moderation and good sense, qualities usually absent in cults. In The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult, a very good essay, Murray Rothbard relates the Randian party line on smoking:

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Deriving Gun Rights From the Right to Life

I take the view that some rights are logically antecedent to anything of a conventional nature such as a group decision or a constitution. Thus the right to life is not conferred by any constitution, but recognized and protected by well-crafted ones. In simple terms, you don't have the right to life because some people say you do; they correctly say you do because you have this right quite apart from anything they say. The right to life is a natural right. It is logically antecedent to anything of a conventional nature such as the positive law.

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Joe Pyne Remembered

Pyne The other day I happened to think of the confrontational talk show host from the 1960's, Joe Pyne. He was perhaps the original angry white guy. A little search revealed that chainsmoker Pyne died in 1970, at age 44, of lung cancer.

He once said to Frank Zappa, "I see you have long hair. You must be a girl." Zappa: "I see you have a wooden leg. You must be a table."

Addendum:  David Gordon e-mails:  " I used to enjoy Joe Pyne too. Two favorite phrases of his that come to mind are 'Go shinny up a tree' and 'Go gargle with razor blades.' "

And now I recall a segment he did on marijuana.  He insisted that one drank alcohol to relax, but smoked weed to get stoned.  My 16 year-old self thought that a bogus distinction:  you can relax with either and get stoned with either. 

Malcolm Pollack at the Gates of Vienna

Or rather, at the gates of Gotham.  Malcolm writes,

Upon reading your post The Left's Death Wish, I thought you might find this interesting: A Genealogy of Radical Islam.

I've been contending with the liberal mindset regarding Islam over at my own place, where, for suggesting that the massacre at Ft. Hood was most likely an example of jihad, and of why an increasing Muslim presence in the West might not be such a good idea, I was tarred, as usual, as a vile Islamophobe.

It's often tempting, as my own shadow lengthens to the East, to withdraw to a quiet life of reading and contemplation. But scribble I must, it seems.

1. Well, Malcolm, I hope you don't succumb to the temptation to withdraw from the fray.  To paraphrase Plato, the price the good pay for their indifference to politics is to be ruled by the evil.  Not that I don't understand the temptation to withdraw.  To quote from an earlier post: 

Why not stick to one's stoa and cultivate one's specialist garden in peace and quiet, neither involving oneself in, nor forming opinions about, the wider world of politics and strife? Why risk one's ataraxia in the noxious arena of contention? Why not remain within the serene precincts of theoria? For those of us of a certain age the chances are good that death will arrive before the barbarians do.

[. . .]

 The answer is that the gardens of tranquillity and the spaces of reason are worth defending, with blood and iron if need be, against the barbarians and their leftist enablers. Others have fought and bled so that we can live this life of solitude and beatitude. And so though we are not warriors of the body, we can and should do our tiny bit as warriors of the mind to preserve for future generations this culture which allows us to pursue otium liberale in peace, quiet, and safety.

2.  I don't know whether to commend you or criticize you for the restraint and tolerance you have shown in the comment thread to your 11/5 post.  One of the cyberpunks  calls you a "xenophobe" while the other removes the 'crypto' from your ironic self-characterization as a "crypto-Nazi."  Me, I DELETE and BLOCK the minute that sort of behavior is manifested.  Why waste your time with abusive cyberpunks who hide anonymously behind their 'handles' while spewing their PeeCee nonsense? 

The answer, I suppose, is that by responding you demonstrate to others, if not to the punks, how to rebut the charges.  So perhaps I should commend you for your toleration.  I suspect you will agree with me, however, that toleration has its limits.

3.  We agree on the substantive point that, as you put it " the massacre at Ft. Hood was most likely an example of jihad. . . ."  There is plenty of evidence for this, and it is most disconcerting that so many, blinded by their political correctness and moral cowardice cannot see it.

Blog on!

Is Meinong’s Theory of Objects “Obviously Self-Contradictory?” Van Inwagen Says ‘Yes’

Uarc1www_meinong-tafel Relevant to my interest in the philosophy of existence is Peter van Inwagen's "McGinn on Existence" which is online here, and published in Andrea Bottani and Richard Davies (eds.), Modes of Existence: Papers in Ontology and Philosophical Logic, Ontos Verlag, 2006, pp. 105-129. On p. 108 we read:

. . . Meinong's theory has a rather more important defect than its incorporation of the idea of modes of being, and that is that it's self-contradictory — obviously self-contradictory. Here is one way of bringing out the contradiction in the theory: Meinongianism entails that there are things that participate in neither mode of being, things that have no being of any sort; but if there are such things, they obviously have being. For a thing to have being is for there to be a such a thing as it is; what else could being be? Now this defect in Meinong's theory — its being obviously self-contradictory — is avoided by certain recent theories whose proponents describe themselves as Meinongians, philosophers such as Terence Parsons and Richard Routley, among others. I call these people neo-Meinongian, since, although their theories incorporate many Meinongian elements, they reject a component of Meinong's theory of objects that I consider essential to it, the doctrine of Aussersein, a doctrine an immediate consequence of which is the self-contradiction that I just called your attention to: that there are things of which it is true that there are no such things. (Emphasis in original.)

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Simone Weil in the Light of Plato, Phaedo 83

To understand Simone Weil, you must understand her beloved master, Plato. So let's interpret a passage from the Phaedo, and then compare it to some statements of Weil.

At St. 83 we read, "…the perceptions of the eye, and the ear, and the the senses are full of deceit." The point is presumably not that the senses are sometimes nonveridical, but that they tie us to a world that is not ultimately real, and that distracts us from the one that is. The point is not epistemological but axiological and ontological. It is not that the senses are unreliable, whether episodically or globally, in respect of the information they provide us about an external world of spatiotemporal particulars. They are reliable enough in providing us such information. The point is rather that the senses deceive us into conferring high value on what is of low value, and into taking as ultimately real what is derivatively real.

It would be a mistake, therefore, to read the passage as an anticipation of the modern problematic of the external world.  The point is much deeper.  The Platonic inquiry call into question, not human knowledge of a physical world taken to be ultimately real, but the reality and importance of the physical world itself.

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