“When you buy gold you’re saying nothing is going to work and everything is going to stay ridiculous,” said Mackin Pulsifer, vice chairman and chief investment officer of Fiduciary Trust International in New York. “There is a fair cohort who believes this in a theological sense, but I believe it’s unreasonable given the history of the United States.”
So to believe something 'in a theological sense' is to believe it unreasonably. It follows that liberals have plenty of 'theological' beliefs. In the 'theology' of a liberal, theology can be dismissed unread as irrational.
And then there is the misuse of 'metaphysics.' I'll save that rant for later.
A massage parlor is given the name Nirvana, the implication being that after a well-executed massage one will be in the eponymous state. This betrays a misunderstanding of Nirvana, no doubt, but that is not the main thing, which is the perverse tendency to attach a religious or spiritual significance to a merely sensuous state of relaxation.
Why can’t the hedonist just enjoy his sensory states without glorifying them? Equivalently, why can’t he admit that there is something beyond him without attempting to drag it down to his level? But no! He wants to have it both ways: he wants both sensuous indulgence and spirituality. He wants sensuality to be a spiritual experience and spirituality to be as easy of access as sensuous enjoyment.
A catalog of currently misused religious terms would have to include ‘heaven,’ ‘seventh heaven,’ ‘hell,’ 'dark night of the soul,' and many others besides.
Take ‘retreat.’ Time was, when one went on a retreat to get away from the world to re-collect oneself, meditating on the state of one's soul and on first and last things. But now one retreats from the world to become even more worldly, to gear up for greater exertions in the realms of business or academe. One retreats from ordinary busy-ness to prepare for even greater busy- ness.
And then there is ‘spirituality.’ The trendy embrace the term but shun its close cousin, ‘religion.’ I had a politically correct Jewish professor in my kitchen a while back whose husband had converted from Roman Catholicism to Judaism. I asked her why he had changed his religion. She objected to the term ‘religion,’ explaining that his change was a ‘spiritual’ one.
Etymologically, ‘religion’ suggests a binding, a God-man ligature, so to speak. But trendy New Age types don’t want to be bound by anything, or submit to anything. I suggest that this is part of the explanation of the favoring of the S word over the R word. Another part of the explanation is political. To those with a Leftward tilt, ‘religion’ reminds them of the Religious Right whose power strikes them as ominous while that of the Religious Left is no cause for concern. Not to mention the irreligious and anti-religious Left for whom leftism is their 'religion.'
A third part of the explanation may be that religion is closely allied with morality, while spirituality is often portrayed as beyond morality with its dualism of good and evil. One of the worst features of New Age types is their conceit that they are beyond duality when they are firmly enmired in it. Perhaps the truly enlightened are beyond moral dualism and can live free of moral injunctions. But what often happens in practice in that spiritual aspirants and gurus fall into ordinary immorality while pretending to have transcended it. One may recall the famous cases of Rajneesh and Chogyam Trungpa. According to one report, ". . . Trungpa slept with a different woman every night in order to transmit the teaching to them. L. intimated that it was really a hardship for Trungpa to do this, but it was his duty in order to spread the dharma."
Attributed to Voltaire. "The better is the enemy of the good." Supposedly from the earlier Italian Il meglio è nemico del bene, attested since 1603. (Wikipedia) The thought is perhaps better captured by "The best is the enemy of the good."
In an imperfect world it is folly to predicate action upon perfection. Will you hold out for the perfect spouse? Then you will remain alone. And if you yourself are less than perfect, how can you demand perfection in others?
Politics is a practical business: it is about the gaining and maintaining of power for the purpose of implementing programs and policies that one believes to be beneficial, and for opposing those whose policies one believes to be deleterious. It's about winning, not talking. It's not about ideological purity or having the supposedly best ideas; it's about gaining the power to implement good ideas, ideas that are implementable in the current configuration of suboptimal circumstances. The practical politician understands that quite often Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien, the better/best is the enemy of the good.
The Never Trumpers and the conservative opponents of the American Health Care Act displayed a failure to understand this important principle of practical politics.
Practical politics as opposed to what? As opposed to the effete and epicene political salon talk of Bill Kristol and George Will. Erudite and entertaining but useless in stopping the leftist-Islamist juggernaut.
The main external threat to civilization? Radical Islam. The main internal threat? Leftism. That the latter is in cahoots with the former makes for a nasty synergy. Prager:
Conservatives who voted for Trump believed that defeating the Left is the overriding moral good of our time. We are certain that the Left (not the traditional liberal) is destroying Western Civilization, including, obviously, the United States. The external enemy of Western Civilization are the Islamists (the tens or perhaps hundreds of million of Muslims who wish to see the world governed by Sharia), and the internal enemy of the West is the left. What the left has done to the universities and to Western culture at the universities is a perfect example.
From Russia’s point of view, considering their strategic and economic interests, a pliable Obama 2.0 would have been far better than Trump, with his pro-oil-and-gas domestic agenda, his promised defense buildup, and his unpredictable Jacksonian promises to help friends and hurt enemies.
Well, duh. The sheer stupidity of the Dem line on all of this should inspire the right-thinking to have contempt for the jackass party forever more. Be grateful that the jackasses are out and the Jacksonian is in.
What is so bad about the strife of systems, controversy, conflict of beliefs? Are they always bad, never productive? Is it not by abrasion (of beliefs) that the pearl (of wisdom) is formed? At least sometimes?
Doxastic conflict can be mentally stimulating, a goad to intellectual activity. We like being active. It makes us happy. Happiness itself is an activity, a work, an ergon, taught Aristotle. It is not a passive state. There is the joy of movement: running, hiking, climbing, dancing. The joy extends to mental movement. We like problem-solving in our homes, in our jobs, in the aethereal precincts of mathematics and philosophy and science. We like puzzles of all sorts. We like to test our wits as much as we like to test our muscles. The rest after the test is the keener, the keener the test. Mental disturbance, the aporetic predicament, can be enlivening and exhilirating. Damn me, but there must be a way out, a way forward, a work around, a solution! Engineers and chess players and route finders know what I am talking about.
It is equally true that conflicts of belief can be troubling, painful, depressing, unmooring. Cognitive dissonance can induce extreme mental suffering. ('Doxastic dissonance' is a better name for it.) We want certain knowledge, but the indications are many that it is out of reach in this life. We are thrown back on that miserable substitute, belief. Belief butts up against counter-belief. The joys of dialectic transmogrify into acrimonious division.
So Sextus and the boys are on to something. They see the problem, not that their their diagnosis, let alone their cure, can be reasonably endorsed. Unfortunately, they see the problem onesidedly. They see what is bad about belief and the conflicts of belief. But they ignore the good. Insofar forth they could be called epistemic wimps.
This fits well with the decadence of the late Hellenic schools of Greek philosophy. Things went south after the passing of the titans, Plato and Aristotle. Social and cultural decline brought with it a turn away from pure theory and a concern with the practical and therapeutic. The desire for knowledge gave way to a desire for freedom from disturbance.
That is a peace not worth wanting as I argued the other day.
I now hand off to the Franz Brentano, Vier Phasen der Philosophie.
It takes intellect to discern that people are dominated by their emotions, but the intellectual who is capable of understanding this is often prevented from understanding it by his tendency to project his intellectuality into others. We often have a hard time appreciating that others are not like us and do not value what we value, or if they do, not to the same extent. My younger self used to make this mistake.
Our beliefs, political and religious beliefs in particular, divide us and ignite sometimes murderous passions. A radical cure would be to find a way to abstain from belief, to live without beliefs, adoxastōs. Is this possible, and if possible, desirable?
No on both counts. Such is the interim conclusion of my ongoing series on Pyrrhonian skepticism, the infirmity of reason, and cognate topics. But I continue to inquire . . . . That's what a philosopher does. That's how he lives.
I brought Cioran into my latest Pyrrhonian post to lay bare the contrast between the Christian's pursuit of a "peace that surpasses all understanding" (Philippians 4:7) and the Pyrrhonian's peace which is beneath understanding inasmuch as it is predicated upon not understanding — and not caring any more about understanding. I then asked whether this could be a peace worth wanting.
I ended my Pyrrhonian post with the quip: "To Emil Cioran I would say: safety is overrated." My point, in contemporary jargon, is that really fruitful living requires frequent and extended forays from one's 'comfort zone' into regions of stress and challenge and doxastic risk.
Kai Frederik Lorentzen comments:
I think you do Cioran wrong insofar as he seems to be ambivalent about Skepticism. In Histoire et Utopie (1960), he writes: "Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls."
Cioran's spiritual yearning appears real to me.
I have read quite a bit of Cioran but not enough to venture a definitive judgment. So I don't know whether his spiritual yearning is genuine or just a literary posture. My impression is that he is a mere litterateur. But even if he is sincere, his scepticism seems distinct from Pyrrhonian Skepticism. Acolytes of the latter try not to dogmatize whereas it is not clear to me that Cioran avoids or tries to avoid a dogmatic scepticism/nihilism. A bit of (inconclusive) evidence:
X, who instead of looking at things directly has spent his life juggling with concepts and abusing abstract terms, now that he must envisage his own death, is in desperate straits. Fortunately for him, he flings himself, as is his custom, into abstractions, into commonplaces illustrated by jargon. A glamorous hocus-pocus, such is philosophy. But ultimately, everything is hocus-pocus, except for this very assertion that participates in an order of propositions one dares not question because they emanate from an unverifiable certitude, one somehow anterior to the brain’s career. (E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered (New York: Seaver Books, 1983), translated from the French by Richard Howard, p.153)
A statement of Cioran’s scepticism. But his scepticism is half-hearted and dognatic since he insulates his central claim from sceptical corrosion. To asseverate that his central claim issues from “an unverifiable certitude” is sheer dogmatism since there is no way that this certitude can become a self-certitude luminous to itself. Compare the Cartesian cogito. In the cogito situation, a self’s indubitability is revealed to itself, and thus grounds itself. But Cioran invokes something anterior to the mind, something which, precisely because of it anteriority, cannot be known by any mind. Why then should we not consider his central claim – according to which everything is a vain and empty posturing – to be itself a vain and empty posturing?
Indeed, is this not the way we must interpret it given Cioran’s two statements of nihilism cited above? If everything is nothing, then surely there cannot be “an unverifiable certitude” anterior to the mind that is impervious to sceptical assault.
Again, one may protest that I am applying logic in that I am comparing different aphorisms with an eye towards evaluating their mutual consistency. It might be suggested that our man is simply not trying to be consistent. But then I say that he is an unserious literary scribbler with no claim on our attention. But the truth of the matter lies a bit deeper: he is trying have it both ways at once. He is trying to say something true but without satisfying the canons satisfaction of which is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of anything’s being true.
My interim judgment, then, is this. What we have before us is a form of cognitive malfunction brought about by hypertrophy of the sceptical faculty. Doubt is the engine of inquiry. Thus there is a healthy form of scepticism. But Cioran’s extreme scepticism is a disease of cognition rather than a means to it. The writing, though, is brilliant.
A salutary saltus. Good for the country. The muse is with me this morning. 'Salutary' fits nicely with the downing of the deeply-flawed health care bill.
But my purpose is not to preen and plume but to self-effacingly send you over to Scott Adams' place where you will find yet another installment of highly original analysis of the events of the day.
(Yes, I split the infinitive, deliberately, for stylistic purposes.)
