Leftists are consummate linguistic hijackers. I've been making this point since the inception of this weblog back in aught-four. I won't repeat my examples. It just now occurred to me that a useful tactic in the culture war might be the reverse hijacking of liberal-leftist lingo.
I have done this three times in the last few days without conscious subsumption under the italicized rubric.
Thus 'Black Lives Matter' gets twisted into 'Black Lies Matter' to highlight the fact that the distortions, falsehoods, and outright lies of many blacks and their liberal-left enablers get people killed, mostly blacks, and undermine the rule of law.
'Safe space' and 'trigger warning' are easily mocked as I did a few hours ago.
All's fair in love and war, and this is a war, muchachos. Make no mistake about it. The behavior of leftists shows that they see it as a war, as witness their relentless smearing of Dr. Ben Carson. They practice without scruple the politics of personal destruction. They did it to Sarah Palin in an especially vile manner, and to Herman Cain. If they see politics as a war, we can't see it as a gentlemanly debate. Mockery and derision are potent weapons as Saul Alinsky recognized and they must be employed to attack the enemies of the republic and to energize those who, for whatever reason, are impermeable to calm and learned disquisitions.
But you must also have rigorous arguments and calm disquisitions at the ready for those who are capable of processing them.
Loaded with double-aught buckshot, the instrument of home defense depicted below has the power to separate the soul from the body in a manner most definitive. Just showing this bad boy to a would-be home invader is a most effective way to issue a 'trigger warning' in a reality-based sense of that phrase.
But let Uncle Bill give you a piece of friendly advice. You really don't want to have to shoot anyone. No matter how worthless the scumbag, he is some mother's son and a bearer, somewhere deep inside under a load of corruption, of the imago Dei. Taking a human life must always be the last resort, and this for moral, legal, prudential, and psychological reasons. You should aspire to die a virgin in this regard, assuming you are still 'intact.'
So here's my advice. Secure your home so that the miscreants cannot get in. That's Job One.
And of course never, ever, vote for criminal-coddling, criminal-releasing and gun-grabbing Democrats or liberals and always speak out loudly, proudly, and publicly for your Second Amendment rights. It is the Second that is the real-world back-up of the First and the others.
I'm sure you've heard a lot about the Mizzou [University of Missouri] protests so I'll spare you the details. But one particular debate caught my eye. Some of these student protesters claimed that the press has no right to photograph them because to do such is an intrusion on their privacy (obviously the press has a legal right to do such). Some people respond by saying that since Mizzou is a public space (it's a public university) you have no right to privacy in public spaces. But of course you still have some right to privacy in public areas (the right not to have your person searched without a warrant, the right to use a bathroom without people watching, etc.) So what are the moral grounds (as opposed to the legal grounds) for saying that the press should have unrestricted access to photograph things in plain view in public spaces?
Protests and demonstrations occur in public, and for good reason: the whole point is to make public one's concerns. So there is something deeply paradoxical about protesters who object to being photographed or televised. It is paradoxical to go public with one's protest and then object to reporters and other people who give you publicity. It is incoherent to suppose that a space in which one is noisily protesting and perhaps disrupting normal goings-on can be a 'safe space' into which the public at large cannot intrude, even at a distance, with cameras and such.
Paradox and incoherence aside, the protesters have no moral right not to be photographed given that they have occupied and disturbed the peace of public spaces. Does the press have the unrestricted moral right to photograph things in plain view in public spaces? No, not an unrestricted right. But surely they have the right to photograph what is in plain view in a public place if the ones photographed are protesting or demonstrating whether peacefully or violently.
Suppose a couple are enjoying a tête-à-tête under a tree in the quad. Does a roving photog have the moral right to snap a photo? I say No. He has a moral obligation not to do such a thing without permission. So I would say that is not just a question of good manners, but a question of morality.
This entry supplements the earlier entry on what Wittgenstein in the Tractatus calls the metaphysical subject. (5.633)
Wittgenstein
As I read him, Wittgenstein accepts Hume's famous rejection of the self as an object of experience or as a part of the world. "There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas." (5.631) The reason Wittgenstein gives is that, if he were to write a book called The World as I Found it in which he inventories the objects of experience, he would make mention of his body and its parts, but not of the subject of experience: "for it alone could not be mentioned in that book." The argument is similar to the one we find in Hume: the subject that thinks is not encountered as an object of experience.
But why not? Because it doesn't exist, or because the subject of experience, by its very nature as subject, cannot be an actual or possible object of experience? It has to be the latter for Wittgenstein since he goes on to say at 5.632 that "The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world." So he is not denying that there is a subject; he is telling us what it is, namely, the limit of the world. His thesis is not eliminativist, but identitarian.
From the fact that the metaphysical subject is nowhere in the world, it does not follow that it does not exist. If, however, you think that this is a valid inference, then you would also have to think that from the non-appearance of one's eyes in one's visual field one could validly infer the nonexistence of one's eyes.
As 5.6331 asserts, one's eyes are not in one's visual field. If you say that they can be brought into one's visual field by the use of a mirror, I will point out that seen eyes are not the same as seeing eyes, a point on which I 'dilate' in detail in the earlier entry.
The analogy is clear to me. Just as one's eyes are not in one's visual field, visual consciousness of objects in the world is not itself in the world. Visual consciousness, and consciousness generally, is of the world, not in it, to reverse the New Testament verse in which we are enjoined to be in the world, but not of it. (Needless to say, I am reversing the words, not the sense of the NT saying. And note that the first 'of' is a genitivus objectivus while the second is a genitivus subjectivus.)
Of course, this is not to say that there is a substantial self, a Cartesian res cogitans outside the world. "The world is all that is the case." There is nothing outside it. And of course Wittgenstein is not saying that there are soul substances or substantial selves in the world. Nor is he saying that there is a substantial self at the limit of the world. He is saying that there is a metaphysical (better: transcendental) self and that it is the limit of world. He is stretching the notion of self about as far as it can be stretched, in the direction of a radically externalist, anti-substantialist notion of consciousness, which is later developed by Sartre and Butchvarov.
What we have here is the hyper-attenuation of the Kantian transcendental ego, which is itself an attenuation of substantialist notions of the ego. The Tractarian Wittgenstein is a transcendental philosopher. He may not have read much or any Kant, but he knew the works of the Kantian, Schopenhauer, and was much influenced by them. According to P. M. S. Hacker,
Of the five main philosophical influences on Wittgenstein, Hertz, Frege, Russell, Schopenhauer, and perhaps Brouwer, at least three were deeply indebted to Kant. It is therefore not surprising that Wittgenstein's philosophy bears deepest affinities to Kant's, despite the fact he never studied Kant . . . ." (Insight and Illusion, 139)
Spot on.
Butchvarov
Now to Butchvarov. He writes that his picture and Wittgenstein's share "the rejection of the metaphysical self and thus of subjectivism in all its forms." (Anthropocentrism in Philosophy, Walter de Gruyter, 2015, p. 235) A few pages earlier we read, "Hume in effect denied that there is what Wittgenstein was to call 'the philosophical self' or 'the metaphysical subject'." (226)
Here is where I disagree. While it is certainly true that both Hume and Wittgenstein reject the substantial self of Descartes and of the pre-Critical rational psychologists, Wittgenstein does not reject the metaphysical/transcendental subject. Nor should he, even if he accepts Hume's argument from the non-appearance of the self. For the metaphysical self, as the limit of the world, is not an object in the world and so cannot be expected to appear in the world. Its non-appearance is no argument against it.
That Wittgenstein does not reject the metaphysical/transcendental subject is also clear from Wittgenstein's claim at 5.641 that "there is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way" without, I may add, lapsing into a physiological or naturalistic way of talking about it. He goes on to reiterate that the "philosophical self" is not the human body or the human soul, and therefore no part of the world. It is the "metaphysical subject," the limit of the world.
What I am maintaining, then, in apparent contradiction to Butchvarov, is that, while Wittgenstein rejects the substantial ego of Descartes, he does not reject "the metaphysical subject" or "the philosophical self."
A Dilemma?
There is a serious substantive issue here, however, one that may tell against Butchvarov's solution to the Paradox of Antirealism. (See article referenced below.)
Why call this philosophical self or metaphysical subject a self if it only a limit? Can a limit be conscious of anything? Why should the self be a philosophical as opposed to a psychological or neurophysiological topic? How does the self get into philosophy? Must the self get into philosophy for antirealism to get off the ground? "What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that 'the world is my world'." (5.641) This harks back to the opening antirealist sentence of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation: "The world is my representation." Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung. The world is my world because, tautologically, the only world for me is my world. The only world for me as subject is the world as object. As Butchvarov puts it, though without reference to Schopenhauer, "The tautology is that the only world we perceive, understand, and describe is the world perceived, understood, and described by us." (231) This is the gist of what the great pessimist says on the first page of WWR. (Whether it is indeed a tautology needs to be carefully thought through. Or rather, whether it can be both a tautology and a statement of antirealism needs to be thought through. I don't think it can be both as I will argue in a moment.)
Now the possessive pronoun 'my' is parasitic upon the the first-person pronoun 'I' which refers to the self. So my world is the the world thinkable and cognizable by me, by the I which is no more in the 'consciousness field,' the world of objects, than the seeing eye is in the visual field. How can my world be mine without this transcendental I? And if you send the transcendental I packing, what is left of antirealism?
Are we headed for a dilemma? It seems we are.
1. Either (a) antirealism boils down to the tautological thesis that "the only world we perceive, understand, and describe is the world perceived, understood, and described by us" (231) or (b) it does not. Please note that the quoted thesis is indeed a tautology. But it is a further question whether it can be identified with a nonvacuous thesis of antirealism. (And surely antirealism must be nonvacuous to be worthy of discussion.) While it is a tautology that the only cats I see are the cats I see, this is consistent with both the realist thesis that cats exist independently of anyone's seeing and the antirealist thesis that their existence is just the indefinite identifiability of cat-noemata by a perceiver.
2. If (a), then antirealism 'says nothing' and does not exclude realism. It is a vacuous thesis. For example, it does not exclude a representational realism according to which there is a world that exists in itself, a world that includes beings like us who represent the world in various ways more or less adequately and whose representations are representations of what, in itself, is not a representation.
3. If (b), and antirealism is to have any non-tautological 'bite,' it must imply that the world is in some respect dependent on a self or selves other than it. But then the "philosophical self" or "metaphysical subject" cannot be either a mere limit of the world as Wittgenstein says or nonexistent as Butchvarov implies. It must be a part of the world. But this leaves us with the Paradox of Antirealism. For it conflicts with what Butchvarov considers "self-evident," namely, that in the context of the realism-antirealism debate, "we cannot coherently regard ourselves as a part, mental (an ego, a colony of egos) or material (a brain, a collection of brains), of that world." (231)
Therefore
4. Antirealism is either vacuous or incoherent. It is vacuous if a tautology. For then it cannot exclude realism. It is incoherent if not a tautology. For then it succumbs to the Paradox of Antirealism.
What Butchvarov wants is a "metaphysics that is antirealist but not anthropocentric." (231) It is not clear to me that he can have both antirealism and non-anthropocentrism. Antirealism cannot get off the ground as a substantive, non-tautological thesis in metaphysics without a self or selves on which the world depends (in some respects, not necessarily all). But the price for that is anthropocentrism in Butchvarov's broad use of that term. He opposes (rightly!) making the world dependent on physical proper parts thereof, but also making it dependent on purely mental/spiritual proper parts and presumably also a divine proper part
One can of course attenuate the subject, retreating from brain to psyche, to transcendental ego, to limit of the world, to a self that shrinks to a point without extension (5.64), to a Sartrean wind blowing towards objects which is, as Sartre says, nothing — but at the limit of this attenuation one arrives at something so thin and next-to-nothing as to be incapable of supporting a robust antirealism.
Questions for Professor Butchvarov
1. Do you agree with me that, while Wittgenstein rejects the Cartesian-type ego that Hume rejects, he does not reject what he calls "the metaphysical subject" and "the philosophical self"?
2. Do you agree with me that, for Wittgenstein, the metaphysical subject construed as limit of the world, exists, is not nothing?
3. Do you agree with me that, while "the only world we perceive, understand, and describe is the world perceived, understood, and described by us" (231) is plainly a tautology, it is a further question whether this tautology is the thesis of antirealism that is debated by philosophers? (As opposed to a thesis of antirealism that you have arbitrarily stipulated.)
4. Do you agree with me that the above quoted tautology is logically consistent with both realism and antirealism?
5. Do you agree that rather than solving the Paradox of Antirealism, you dissolve it by eliminating the subject of consciousness entirely?
6. Suppose I grant you that there are no egos, no acts, and that consciousness-of is non-relational along the lines of Sartre's radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness. Will you grant me that the distinction — the 'Transcendental Difference' if you will — between subjectless consciousness-of and objects is ineliminable and undeniable?
7. If you grant me that, will you grant me that the non-relational appearing of objects does not itself appear?
8. If you grant what I want you to grant in (7) will you grant that something can be real without appearing, without 'showing up' phenomenologically?
9. If you grant me what I want you to grant in (8) will you grant that, if something can be real without appearing, that the transcendental ego and acts can also be real without appearing?
To put it another way, if you hold that there are no egos and acts on the ground that they do not appear, must you not also maintain that there is no nonrelational consciousness-of on the ground that it does not appear?
It began in the universities in the '60s. And now it is in full 'flower.' I recall Dennis Prager putting it this way: "There is no coward like a university administrator." Now hear David French:
Fortunately for the radicals, our universities are populated by the craven and the cowardly. Push a professor, even slightly, and it’s likely he’ll fold. Demand faculty support for your protest, and dozens will rush to join, self-righteously advancing their own false oppression narratives even as they enjoy lives billions of others would covet. There is nothing brave about these people. They are not “elite.” They don’t deserve a single dime of taxpayer money or one cent of student tuition. They dishonor their schools and their country.
Closeted campus conservatives are worse than useless. Indeed, their very timidity contributes to the narrative that there is something shameful about their beliefs. To read anonymous letters from professors who are afraid to “out” themselves in a hostile campus culture is to read the sad dispatches of people too pitiful for their profession. Do something else, anything else, than merely sit and watch while the revolutionaries shred the Constitution, reject our culture, and assert their own will to power.
The true shame is that it doesn’t even require actual courage to defeat the university Left, just a tiny bit of will — a small measure of staying power. No one is shooting at trustees. No one is beheading professors. There’s no guillotine in the quad. Instead, campus “leaders” tremble before hashtags and weep at the notion of losing a football team so inept that it couldn’t score a touchdown through most of the month of October. Let them strike. With an offense that inept, the SEC won’t even notice.
These are the times that try men’s souls? No. These are the times of men without chests. The Left has the will to power. University leaders have no will at all. They have earned nothing but contempt.
It's not easy avoiding the sentimental. But what, exactly, is wrong with sentiment? Let's not pursue it. To hell with Adorno. It's Saturday night. Time to feel, not think.
An abstract with the above title has been making the rounds. No doubt you have seen it, so there is no need to link to it, nor does it deserve a link. It is almost certainly a joke, and if not, then the author is a fool. But since I have just made a harsh allegation, perhaps you should see for yourself.
There have always been crises. Human history is just one crisis after another. The 20th Century was a doosy: two world wars, economic depression, the rise of unspeakably evil totalitarian states, genocide, the nuclear annihilation of whole cities, the Cold War that nearly led to WWIII (remember the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962?), and then after the Evil Empire was quashed, the resurrection of radical Islam. Should we conclude that philosophy has never been justified? But then science has never been justified and much of the rest of what we consider high culture. For they have their origin in philosophy.
Perhaps you don't agree with my 'origins' claim. Still, plenty in life is of value regardless of its utility in mitigating whatever crisis happens to be in progress. Or do you think Beethoven should have been a social worker?
But the really fundamental error is to think that philosophy needs justification in terms of something external to it. I demolish this notion with the precision and trenchancy you have come to expect in Should One Stoop to a Defense of Philosophy or the Humanities?
A Pew survey last year found that 75 percent of Republicans believed it is more important to "protect the right of Americans to own guns" than to "control gun ownership."
This way of framing the issue shows left-wing bias. For it implies that Republicans are opposed to controlling gun ownership. But that is not the case. Almost everyone wants gun control laws some of which will regulate the acquisition and ownership of firearms. Name me a Republican who thinks that felons should be allowed to purchase firearms.
Either gun rights or gun control is a false alternative.
The point, once again, is that language matters. He who controls the terms of the debate controls the debate. You should always be on the lookout for linguistic mischief. Liberals excel at it, but there are examples across the political spectrum.
Part of my self-imposed task in these pages is to teach critical thinking.
Much as I disagree with Daniel Dennett on most matters, I agree entirely with what he says in the following passage:
I deplore the narrow pragmatism that demands immediate social utility for any intellectual exercise. Theoretical physicists and cosmologists, for instance, may have more prestige than ontologists, but not because there is any more social utility in the satisfaction of their pure curiosity. Anyone who thinks it is ludicrous to pay someone good money to work out the ontology of dances (or numbers or opportunities) probably thinks the same thing about working out the identity of Homer or what happened in the first millionth of a second after the Big Bang. (Dennett and His Critics, ed. Dahlbom, Basil Blackwell 1993, p. 213. Emphasis in original.)
I would put the point in stronger terms and go Dennett one better. Anyone who thinks that intellectual inquiry has value only if it has immediate or even long-term social utility is not only benighted, but is also a potential danger to free inquiry.
One of my favorite examples is complex numbers. A complex number involves a real factor and an imaginary factor i, where i= the square root of -1. Thus a complex number has the form, a + bi where a is the real part and bi is the imaginary part.
One can see why the term 'imaginary' is used. The number 1 has two square roots, 1 and -1 since if you square either you get 1. But what is the square root of -1? It can't be 1 and it can't be -1, since either squared gives a positive number. So the imaginary i is introduced as the square root of -1. Rather than say that negative numbers do not have square roots, mathematicians say that they have complex roots. Thus the square root of -9 = 3i.
Now to the practical sort of fellow who won't believe in anything that he can't hold in his hands and stick in his mouth, this all seems like idle speculation. He demands to know what good it is, what it can used for. Well, the surprising thing is is that the theory of complex numbers which originated in the work of such 16th century Italian mathematicians as Cardano(1501 – 1576) and Bombelli (1526-1572) turned out to find application to the physical world in electrical engineering. The electrical engineers use j instead of i because i is already in use for current.
Just one example of the application of complex numbers is in the concept of impedance. Impedance is a measure of opposition to a sinusoidal electric current. Impedance is a generalization of the concept of resistance which applies to direct current circuits. Consider a simple direct current circuit consisting of a battery, a light bulb, and a rheostat (variable resistor). Ohm's Law governs such circuits: I = E/R. If the voltage E ('E' for electromotive force) is constant, and the resistance R is increased, then the current I decreases causing the light to become dimmer. The resistance R is given as a real number. But the impedance of an alternating current circuit is given as a complex number.
Now what I find fascinating here is that the theory of complex numbers, which began life as something merely theoretical, turned out to have application to the physical world. One question in the philosophy of mathematics is: How is this possible? How is it possible that a discipline developed purely a priori can turn out to 'govern' nature? It is a classical Kantian question, but let's not pursue it.
My point is that the theory of complex numbers, which for a long time had no practical (e.g., engineering) use whatsoever, and was something of a mere mathematical curiosity, turned out to have such a use. Therefore, to demand that theoretical inquiry have immediate social utility is shortsighted and quite stupid. For such inquiry might turn how to be useful in the future.
But even if a branch of inquiry could not possibly have any application to the prediction and control of nature for human purposes, it would still have value as a form of the pursuit of truth. Truth is a value regardless of any use it may or may not have.
Social utility is a value. But truth is a value that trumps it. The pursuit of truth is an end in itself. Paradoxically, the pursuit of truth as an end in itself may be the best way to attain truth that is useful to us.
Voter ID laws have been challenged because liberal Democrats deem them racist. I guess that’s because they see blacks as being incapable of acquiring some kind of government-issued identification. Interesting enough is the fact that I’ve never heard of a challenge to other ID requirements as racist, such as those: to board a plane, open a charge account, have lab work done or cash a welfare check. Since liberal Democrats only challenge legal procedures to promote ballot-box integrity, the conclusion one reaches is that they are for vote fraud prevalent in many Democrat-controlled cities.
I have been saying the above for years. But what I hadn't noticed was the following:
There is another area where the attack on ballot-box integrity goes completely unappreciated. We can examine this attack by looking at the laws governing census taking. As required by law, the U.S. Census Bureau is supposed to count all persons in the U.S. Those to be counted include citizens, legal immigrants and non-citizen long-term visitors. The law also requires that illegal immigrants be a part of the decennial census. The estimated number of illegal immigrants ranges widely from 12 million to 30 million. Official estimates put the actual number closer to 12 million.
Both citizens and non-citizens are included in the census and thus affect apportionment counts. Counting illegals in the census undermines one of the fundamental principles of representative democracy — namely, that every citizen-voter has an equal voice. Through the decennial census-based process of apportionment, states with large numbers of illegal immigrants, such as California and Texas, unconstitutionally gain additional members in the U.S. House of Representatives thereby robbing the citizen-voters in other states of their rightful representation.
