Month: November 2009

Charles Hartshorne on Abortion

The eminent philosopher Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) in Concerning Abortion: Attempt at a Rational View writes:

What is the moral question regarding abortion? We are told that the fetus is alive and that therefore killing it is wrong. Since mosquitoes, bacteria, apes and whales are also alive, the argument is less than clear. Even plants are alive. I am not impressed by the rebuttal “But plants, mosquitoes, bacteria and whales are not human, and the fetus is.” For the issue now becomes, in what sense is the fetus human? No one denies that its origin is human, as is its possible destiny. But the same is true of every unfertilized egg in the body of a nun. Is it wrong that some such eggs are not made or allowed to become human individuals?

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Conservatism, Religion, and Money-Grubbing

This from a reader in Scotland: 

I'm a first year undergraduate philosophy student with some very muddled political views. My father has always been a staunch supporter of the Left to the point of being prejudiced against all things on the conservative or Right side as 'religious' and 'money grubbing' . I never questioned any of his beliefs until perhaps a year or two ago. Now that I have began studying philosophy I cannot ignore this lazy neglect and the time has come to develop my own political views.

The next time you talk to your father point out to him that there is nothing in the nature of conservatism to require that a conservative be religious.  There are conservative theists, but also plenty of conservative atheists.  (I am blurring the distinction between religion and theism, but for present purposes this is not a problem.) Below you mention David Horowitz.  The Left hates him for being an apostate, but his conversion to conservatism did not make a theist of him.  He is an agnostic.  Conservatism at one end shades off into libertarianism, one of the main influences on which is Ayn Rand.  She was a strident atheist. 

Opposition to conservatism is often fueled by opposition to religion.  But surely one can be conservative without being religious just as one can be religious without being conservative.  There is a religious Right, but there is also a religious Left, despite the fact that 'religious Left'  is a phrase rarely heard.  Here in the States a lot of liberal/left mischief originates from the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  (One may well doubt whether these gentlemen are worthy of the 'R' honorific.)

As for 'money-grubbing,' you might point out to your father that there are money-grubbers on both the Right and the Left, and that there is nothing in the nature of conservatism to require that a conservative be a money-grubber.  In fact, studies have shown that conservatives are much more charitable and generous than liberals/leftists.  See Conservatives are More Liberal Givers.  It is sometimes said that capitalism has its origin in greed.  But this is no more true than that socialism has its origin in envy. 

To feel envy is to feel diminished by the success or well-being of others.  Now suppose someone were to claim that socialism is nothing be a reflection of envy: a socialist is one who cannot stand that others have things that he lacks.  Driven by envy alone, he advocates a socio-political arrangment in which the government controls everything from the top, levelling all differences of money and status, so that all are equal.  Surely it would be unfair to make such a claim.  Socialism does not have its origin in envy, but in a particular understanding of justice and what justice demands.  Roughly, the idea is that justice demands an equal distribution of money, status and other social goods.  Conservatives of course disagree with this understanding of justice. What we have are competing theories of justice.   Just as it is a cheap shot to reduce socialism to envy, it is a cheap shot to reduce a free market approach to greed.

It was namely for the philosophical content that I started reading your blog but I gradually became enthralled with your conservative views . They have uprooted many of my fickle Left-leaning political ideas . Now I am left increasingly uncertain about many political questions that I commonly held as beautifully obvious. I have began noticing the phenomenon of 'political correctness ' at University and am not entirely sure what to think of it.

Are there specific books you recommend for anyone who wants to find some sense in this Liberal climate ? I have been considering picking up some of Horowitz' writings.

I am glad that my writing has had the effect of opening new perspectives for you.  Unfortunately, universities have become hotbeds of political correctness and indoctrination when they should be places where ideas of all sorts are critically and openly examined.  I would recommend Horowitz to you, in particular, Destructive Generation, Left Illusions, Radical Son, and Unholy Alliance.  He has also written a couple of books on the politicization of the universities.  Among academic philosophers, I recommend the works of John Kekes.

Obamacare: Lawyers Win, Doctors Lose

Today's column by Dennis Prager is a must-read.  Excerpt (emphasis added):

If the 1,990-page House Health Care Bill becomes law, the average American will receive worse health care, American physicians will decline in status and income, American medical innovation will dramatically slow down and pharmaceutical discoveries will decline in number and quality. And, of course, the economy of the United States will deteriorate, perhaps permanently.

However, we are also certain that there is one American group that will thrive — trial lawyers. The very existence of a 1,990-page law guarantees years of, if not more or less permanent, lawsuits. And the law actually specifies that states that do not limit attorneys' fees in cases of medical malpractice shall be financially rewarded.

Philosophy is Dialectical and Aporetic

Gustav Bergmann, Meaning and Existence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959, p. vii):

Philosophy is dialectical. This means, among other things, that critical examination of the positions he rejects is an important part of a philosopher's argument for the position he adopts.

I would add that philosophy is also aporetic. The positions a philosopher affirms are responses to problems and cannot be understood otherwise. The problems are logically primary; solutions in the form of theories and theses are logically secondary. As Plato puts it at Theaetetus 155, "wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder."   This passage is expressive of the aporetic sense.

Philosophical Vulgarity

Is it not vulgarity in a philosopher to think that he will settle the ultimate questions in short order? One thinks of the Tractarian Wittgenstein and of Ayn Rand. Connected with this is the philistinism of certain forms of clarity such as that of the logical positivist. One recalls Rudolf Carnap's pathetic refutation of Heidegger. And then there is the vulgarity of the later Wittgenstein's speleo-conservatism which, leaving everything in the Cave just as it was, takes the form, not of facile solutions to problems, but of their very denial.

Kolakowski: No God, No Meaning

Leszek Kolakowski, Freedom, Fame, Lying, and Betrayal: Essays on Everyday Life (Westview 1999), pp. 116-117:

. . . our reason naturally aspires to encompass the totality of being; and our will for order and our need to make sense of existence lead us instinctively to seek that which is both the root and the keystone of existence, and gives it its meaning. Even atheists, Nietzsche among them, knew this: order and meaning come from God, and if God really is dead, then we delude ourselves in thinking that meaning can be saved. If God is dead, nothing remains but an indifferent void which engulfs and annihilates us. No trace remains of our lives and our labours, there is only the meaningless dance of protons and electrons. The universe wants nothing and cares for nothing; it strives toward no goal; it neither rewards nor punishes. Whoever says that there is no God and all is well deceives himself.

Stalin on Philology

For insight into the depredations suffered by science and scholarship in Stalin's USSR, I recommend Chapter 4 of Volume III of Leszek Kolakowski's magisterial Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford, 1978). It is astonishing what happened to literature, philosophy, economics, physics, cosmology, and genetics in the Workers' Paradise. Not even philology was spared. Kolakowski, pp. 141-142:

In the first few days of the Korean War, when international tension was at its height, Stalin added to his existing titles as the leader of progressive humanity, the supreme philosopher, scientist, strategist, etc., the further distinction of being the world's greatest philologist. (As far as is known, his linguistic attainments were confined to Russian and his native Georgian.) In May 1950 Pravda had published a symposium on the theoretical problems of linguistics and especially the theories of Nikolay Y. Marr (1864-1934). Marr, a specialist in the Caucasian languages, had endeavoured towards the end of his life to construct a system of Marxist linguistics and was regarded in the Soviet Union as the supreme authority in this field: linguists who rejected his fantasies were harassed and persecuted. His theory was that language was a form of 'ideology' and, as such, belonged to the superstructure and was part of the class system. . . .

Stalin intervened in the debate with an article published in Pravda on 29 June, followed by four explanatory answers to readers' letters. He roundly condemned Marr's theory, declaring that language was not part of the superstructure and was not ideological in character. . . .

The Marrists were ousted from the domain of linguistics. . . .

Don't say it can't happen here.  It is happening here as witness the ideological tainting of climatology by the gasbags of global warming.

Political Discourse as Unavoidably Polemical: the Converse Clausewitz Principle

A regular reader writes:

I would urge some caution withyour recent political cartoon.  This is only because you may unjustly be treated with less seriousness than your blog deserves if someone wants to peg you in a certain way.  I'm certainly not being PC or suggesting that political satire is problematic — it's primarily a tactical point.

I couldn't agree more, of course, that liberalism (and, in particular, it's diseased and mutated zombie baby of multiculturalism) is attempting, even if unwittingly, to destroy its host body.  The cartoon is a very powerful one, indeed!

Point taken.  It's a tricky issue.  But I think it is important to let our opponents know that we will oppose them.  There is no way not to be unfairly pegged by the nimrods and numbskulls of the Left.  So conservatives shouldn't worry about it.  Janeane Garofalo's comment that the 'tea-baggers' as she derisively refers to them are racists and rednecks is, I am afraid, representative of the scum-baggery widespread on the Left.  We should stand up to them and speak the truth with courage.

Would that I could avoid this stuff.  But I cannot in good conscience retreat into my inner citadel and let my country be destroyed — the country that makes it possible for me to cultivate the garden of solitude, retreat into my inner citadel, and pursue pure theory for its own sake.

Political discourse is unavoidably polemical. The zoon politikon must needs be a zoon polemikon. ‘Polemical’ is from the Greek polemos, war, strife. According to Heraclitus of Ephesus, strife is the father of all: polemos panton men pater esti . . . (Fr. 53) I don't know about the 'all,' but strife  is certainly at the root of politics.  Politics is polemical because it is a form of warfare: the point is to defeat the opponent and remove him from power, whether or not one can rationally persuade him of what one takes to be the truth. It is practical rather than theoretical in that the aim is to implement what one takes to be the truth rather than contemplate it.  'What one takes to be the truth': that is the problem in a nutshell.  Conservatives and leftists disagree fundamentally and nonnegotiably.

Implementation of what one takes to be the truth, however, requires that one get one’s hands on the levers of power. Von Clausewitz  held that war is politics pursued by other means. But what could be called the converse-Clausewitz principle holds equally: politics is war pursued by other means.

A political cartoon like the one I posted surely won't convert any leftists.  How could it, when the 281 patiently argued pages of David Horowitz's Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Regnery 2004) made no impression on them?  The Left cannot be persuaded; they must be opposed.