June 2019 – Maverick Philosopher

Why Did Communism Fail?

Richard Pipes, Communism: A History, Modern Library, 2001, p. 154:

In sum, Communism failed and is bound to fail for at least two reasons: one, that to enforce equality, its principal objective, it is necessary to create a coercive apparatus that demands privileges and thereby negates equality; and two, that ethnic and territorial loyalties, when in conflict with class allegiances, everywhere and at all times overwhelm them, dissolving Communism into nationalism, which is why socialism so easily combines with "Fascism."

The enforcing of equality requires an agency of enforcement, the revolutionary vanguard, that is vastly unequal in power to those who are being equalized. And this for the simple reason that people will resist expropriation: they will not willingly surrender what they consider to be the product of their labor. The deplorable masses will have to be forced, for their own good, to become good socialists. But once the vanguard gets a taste of power and its privileges and perquisites, it will not willingly surrender them and the wealth that comes in their train. Greed is ancient and endemic in the human condition. It antedates capitalism. It is therefore not a product of capitalism, and cannot be erased by erasing capitalism. The upshot is that the method by which Communists aim to enforce equality insures that equality will never be reached.

As for the second reason, there is an innate tendency in humans to revert to the tribal and the territorial. International communism is no match for the nationalism that comes naturally to people.

The underlying problem is that Communism is irremediably flawed in its philosophical anthropology: there is no understanding of human nature, and what is worse, no recognition that there even is such a thing as human nature. The utopian conceit of the Communists was and is that man is infinitely malleable: collectively, he can remake himself. Change the relations of production and you change man from the petty, greedy, individualistic bastard he hitherto has been into a transformed being willing to merge with his species-being (Gattungswesen) and work for the common good.

What is now called cultural Marxism retains this notion of the malleability of man in the form of social constructivism.

Now apply the above insights to the current political situation as the Democrat party moves in the Communist direction!

Bergoglio the Secularist on the Miracle of the Loaves and the Fishes

Dr. Vito Caiati reports:

Something that the Argentinian did this week really annoyed me.

Specifically, in his homily on the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, Bergoglio continued his devious discouragement of belief in miracles, flagitiously denying the great nature miracle by which Christ fed a multitude with just five loaves of bread and two fish.

As you know, the Gospel of Mathew describes the miracle as follows: “Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass; and taking the five loaves and the two fish he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and broke and gave the loaves to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And they all ate and were satisfied. And they took up twelve baskets full of the broken pieces left over. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children” (Mt 14:19-21; cf. Mk 6:40-44 and Lk 9:14-17, which have essentially the same wording, and Jn 6:10-14, which diverges only slightly).

Whatever happened here, it is quite clear that the very small quantity of matter contained in five loaves and two fish, was exponentially enlarged after Christ’s “blessing.” Thus, something miraculous occurred.

Now, here is Bergoglio’s exegesis of this event:

“Jesus.., .after having recited the blessing, gave the bread to be distributed, revealing in this the more beautiful significance: bread is not only a product of consumption: it is a means of sharing. In fact, surprisingly, in the telling of the multiplication of the loaves, multiplication is never mentioned. On the contrary, the verbs utilized are “break, give, distribute.” (cf. Lk 9:16) In short, the act of sharing rather than the multiplication is emphasized. This is important: Jesus does not perform an act of magic; he does not transform the five loaves into five thousand loaves and then day: “Now distribute them.” No, Jesus prays, blesses those five loaves and begins to distribute then, trusting in the Father. And those five loaves never finish. This is not magic; it is faith in God and in his providence” https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2019/documents/papa-francesco_20190623_omelia-corpusdomini.html).

Notice that the concept of miracle nowhere enters into this analysis; rather, Bergoglio engages in a sleight of hand, counterpoising the notion of “magic” with that of “faith in God.” His deprecation of multiple loaves, of which none of the Gospels in fact speak, insinuates that such a multiplication, certainly within the powers ascribed to Christ by the Evangelists, would have to be magical rather than miraculous. Now, magic is defined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church as “All practices . . . , by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one's service and have a supernatural power over others.” Jesus was, of course, accused of magic (as in Mt 12:24 or Lk 11:15), but the Gospels reject this falsity and instead proclaim that “Jesus accompanies his words with many “‘mighty works and wonders and signs’, which manifest that the kingdom is present in him and attest that he was the promised Messiah” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 547). In other words, when personally present here on Earth, Christ revealed His divine power through miracles. It is precisely this power that is denied in turning the feeding of the five thousand with five loaves and two fish into a simple “act of sharing.” Here, we have the Incarnation filtered through the decadent left-wing “humanist” ideology that is the hallmark of this pontificate.

John Searle: Two Anecdotes

I wouldn't be mentioning the following two unflattering anecdotes had it not been for the recent revelations with regard to Searle's having been been stripped of his emeritus status at the University of California, Berkeley. He was found to have violated sexual harrassment policies. See The Fall of John Searle.

In 1983 during my tenure at the University of Dayton, John Searle was invited to be a keynote speaker at a conference organized by the philosophy department. Searle opened the proceedings by telling a joke and insulting his hosts. He recounted how his travel agent, upon hearing Searle's request for a ticket to Dayton, Ohio, exclaimed, "What are you, a ticket fetishist?" A coastal elitist, Searle apparently considered Ohio to be 'flyover country' and Dayton Hicksville.

In one of the sessions, while a young academic was reading his paper, Searle ostentatiously ignored him by reading from The New York Times. He sat in the front of the room, with the paper held high, blocking his view of the speaker.

That says something about the man, and its says something about contemporary analytic philosophy.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Sweet and Wholesome

I once asked a guy what he wanted in a woman. He replied, "A whore in bed, Simone de Beauvoir in the parlor, and the Virgin Mary on a pedestal." An impossible combo. Some just want the girl next door.

Bobby Darin, Dream Lover. With pix of Sandra Dee.

Audrey Hepburn, Moon River

Gogi Grant, The Wayward Wind, 1956. I'll take Lady Gogi over Lady Gaga any day.

Doris Day, Que Sera, Sera, 1956. What did she mean? The tautological, Necessarily, what will be, will be? Or the non-tautologically fatalistic, What will be, necessarily will be? Either way, she died in May.

William James on Self-Denial

Few preach self-denial anymore. We have become a nation of moral wimps. We need a taste of the strenuosity of yesteryear, and who better to serve it up than our very own William James, he of the Golden Age of American philosophy:

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But, if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes. (Principles of Psychology, vol. 1)

The Ascesis of the Lower

It is useful to suppose oneself composed of a lower and a higher self. Much good comes from denying the former, good that accrues to the latter.

The Christian View of Death and Immortality

Thanatology presupposes philosophical anthropology: what death is taken to be depends on what the human being is taken to be. Although Christianity certainly has affinities with Platonism, so much so that Nietzsche could with some justice speak of Christianity as Platonism for the people, the Christian view of man is in an important respect un-Platonic. In terms of Aquinas' Latin, Platonism holds that homo est anima utens corpore, man is a soul using a body. On this view the person is essentially the soul, and the body is a temporary and accidental housing or vehicle. There are Platonic passages in which the soul is described as "imprisoned" in the body. The body is the prison house of the soul. The soul is in the body like an oyster in its shell. These and other metaphors can be found in the Platonic dialogues. If one thinks in this way, then death is not a calamity but something good. Death is liberation, release, the separation of one thing, the soul, from another, the body, to which it should not have been attached in the first place. The fall into time is a fall into the flesh. For Platonism, death undoes the fall into time. Death is to that extent good, and the philosopher welcomes it. Indeed, the philosophical life is a preparation for death. (Plato, Phaedo, 67e)

Christianity, however, in terms of Aquinas' Latin, maintains that (a) homo non est anima tantum, man is not the soul alone, and (b) anima forma corporis, the soul is the form of the body. The human person, then is essentially a form-matter composite, and not essentially a soul. On the Platonic view soul can exist without body, though not conversely, while on the Christian view as understood by Aquinas, neither soul nor body can exist without the other.* The two need each other: the body needs the soul to animate it and 'personalize' it, to make it a person's body as opposed to a corpse. And the soul needs the body to achieve its proper unfolding. Despite the difference between soul and body, man is a unitary being in a way in which he is not unitary on the Platonic conception.

There is another important difference. For Platonism, the fall into time — see Phaedrus — is a fall into an evil condition. But for Christianity, everything is and is good because it comes from God who is all-good. So our embodiment cannot be evil. For Christianity there is of course a Fall, but it is not a Fall into embodiment. It is a fall from a perfect form of embodiment to an imperfect form.

For Christianity, then, we are not immortal souls accidentally housed in mortal bodies, and death cannot be understood as affecting only our bodies. Death is not release of one part of the self from another, but the destruction of the entire unitary self. Being, bestowed as it is by God, is good, and so, if we are essentially embodied, death is a total calamity.

On the Christian view, then, we are not naturally immortal: we are mortal body and soul. Any immortality that we come to acquire requires a supernatural agent operating in a supernatural way. But weren't humans naturally immortal before the Fall? Didn't death enter the picture only when sin did?

It is true that on the Christian scheme death first enters the picture as punishment for sin. But it does not follow that we are naturally immortal in our prelapsarian state. The doctor angelicus discusses this question in the Summa Theologica, Q 97, art. 1. If prelapsarian, paradisiacal man were immortal by nature, then he could not have lost his immortality, which is precisely what happened when he sinned. Some of the angels sinned but did not lose their immortality because they are naturally immortal. But man is not: his prelapsarian immortality was a divine gift. By nature he is mortal, i.e., subject to death, able to die. Aquinas speaks of a "supernatural force given by God to the soul, whereby it was enabled to preserve the body from all corruption so long as it itself remained subject to God."

In sum, man in his own nature is mortal, body and soul, in both his prelapsarian and postlapsarian states. But owing to a supernatural gift, man in his prelapsarian state was given the power to preserve himself as long as he willed to so so. Prelapsarian man could die, but not against his will. We, however, are condemned to death nolens volens by Adam's sin.

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*On Aristotelian hylomorphic metaphysics, the form and the matter of a primary sublunary substance are not themselves substances: they cannot exist on their own apart from the substance of which they are 'principles' or ontological factors. In particular, the soul, as form of an animal body, cannot exist disembodied. But then what accounts for the continuity of the human person from the time of death to the resurrection of the body? As I understand Aquinas, he simply makes an exception in the case of the deceased human animal: in this case the soul as form can exist apart from a material substratum. This exception goes along with the exception in the case of God himself, the forma formarum, form of all forms. God is self-subsistent pure form, form without matter and the human soul between death and resurrection is pure form as well, although not self-subsistent pure form.

The first exception strikes this philosopher as and ad hoc move that does not fit within Aristotelian hylomorphism. If the forms of sublunary substances are not themselves substances, then this should hold across the board and allow of no exceptions. It has been said that Aquinas is a Aristotelian on earth, but a Platonist in heaven. Is this a problem? I should think it is, but others will disagree.

The Political Burden of Proof: Polite Version

As contemporary 'liberals' become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I will call the political burden of proof. The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.

Time Apportionment as between Athens and Benares

If a philosopher who meditates spends five hours per day on philosophy, how many hours should he spend on meditation? One correspondent of mine, a retired philosophy professor and Buddhist, told me that if x hours are spent on philosophy, then x hours should be spent on meditation. So five hours of philosophy ought to be balanced by five hours of meditation. A hard saying! I find it very easy to spend five to eight hours per day reading and writing philosophy. But my daily formal meditation sessions are almost never more than two hours in duration. There is also mindfulness while hiking or doing other things such as clearing brush or washing dishes, but I don't count that as formal meditation.

What are the possible views on this topic of time apportionment?

1. No time should be wasted on philosophy. Pascal famously remarked that philosophy is not worth an hour's trouble. (I am pretty sure he had his countryman Renatus Cartesius in mind.) But he didn't proffer his remark in defense of Benares, but of Jerusalem. Time apportionment as between Athens and Jerusalem is a separate topic. Note that Pascal made an exception in his own case. He left behind a magnificent collection that comes down to us as Pensées. So no philosophy is worth an hour's trouble except Pascal's own. It would have shown greater existential consistency had the great thinker devoted himself after his conversion to prayer, meditation, and charitable works. But then we would have been the poorer for it.

2. No time should be wasted on meditation. Judging by their behavior, the vast majority of academic philosophers seem committed to some such proposition.

3. Time spent on either is wasted. The view of the ordinary cave-dweller or worldling.

4. More time ought to be devoted to philosophy. But why?

5. The two 'cities' deserve equal time. The view of my Buddhist correspondent.

6. More time ought to be devoted to meditation than to philosophy.

What could be said in defense of (6)? Three quotations from Paul Brunton (Notebooks, vol. II, The Quest, Larson, 1986, p. 13):

The intuitive element is tremendously more important than the intellectual . . . .
The mystical experience is the most valuable of all experiences . . . .
. . . the quest of the Overself is the most worthwhile endeavour open to human exertions.

Merton on the Monastic Journey

Thomas Merton, The Monastic Journey, p. 155:

If a solitary should one day find his way, by the grace and mercy of God, into a desert place in which he is not known, and if it is permitted to him by the divine pity to live there, and to remain unknown, he may perhaps do more good to the human race by being a solitary than he ever could have done by remaining the prisoner of the society where he was living.

Merton's life suggested that he wasn't really sold on the above idea. Merton the restless, Merton the conflicted. Human, all-too-human. See my Merton category for rich substantiation.

The Orwellian Left and Abortion

For leftists, words are weapons. Nothing new here. If you have been paying attention, however, you will have noticed that their weaponization of language is becoming increasingly Orwellian.

Case in point: OPPOSITION to abortion is now 'racist.' 'Racist' has long been a verbal cudgel in the hands (mouths?) of leftists, elastic in its meaning, but now an Orwellian twist is added. It makes some sense to say that abortion is 'racist' because it disproportionately affects pre-natal blacks. But to say that OPPOSITION to abortion is racist is just insane.

Not only is truth not a leftist value, sense isn't either. Being a lefty means not having to make sense.

The Democrats are now a hard-left party. So I ask one more time: Why are you still a Dem?

Of ‘Pussy’ and ‘Pusillanimous’ and Politics

A friend of mine recently maintained with a straight face that 'pusillanimous' derives from 'pussy.' As an etymological claim that is of course preposterous. But there are two questions here that we ought to distinguish.

The first is whether 'pusillanimous' has roughly the same meaning as 'pussy' when the latter is used as it is used in American slang. I'd say it does.

The second question is whether 'pusillanimous' is etymologically derivable from 'pussy.' No. It comes from the Latin pusillus (very small) + animus (mind, soul) –> L. pusillanimis –> late Middle English pusillanimous. And that reminds me of a certain pusillanimous former president.

I asked a reader about a month before the 2016 election whether the graphic above was too tasteless to post to my high-toned blog, adding, "But then these are times in which considerations of good taste and civility are easily 'trumped.'" My reader responded with a fine statement (emphasis added):

Of course it’s tasteless, but it’s funny. We should go to battle with a song in our hearts. Never had patience for the hand-wringing by the beskirted Republicans and professional “conservatives”. How could anyone be surprised by the locker room braggadocio of a man who appeared on the Howard Stern show 600 times? Trump is a deeply flawed messenger of the right message, but politics is a practical affair. He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard in this go-around. After all it’s only the very foundation of the republic at stake. So let’s have some fun while beating the drum for him.

My reader is right. Trump is all we've got. And the very foundation of the Republic is at stake. He has a dubious character, but then so does Hillary. This may not be obvious because, while Trump broadcasts his faults, she hides hers. This is part of her being a slimy, mendacious, stealth ideologue. That is part of what led to her defeat. People saw through her flip-flopping opportunism and refusal to come clean.

Given that both are sorry specimens on the character front, it comes down to principles, policies, and programs. And now, well into President Trump's first term, it is obvious that we who rolled the dice for Trump have been vindicated in spades.

Liberals and Segregation

When a liberal hears 'segregation,' he thinks of racial segregation, thereby confusing the genus with one of its species, and of course, being the bien-pensant fellow he is, he reflexively comes out against it in words for public consumption. But in his private life he practices segregation, racial and otherwise: he lives in a lily-white, non-deplorable, gated and guarded enclave with his own ilk and would not think of sending his children to public schools, there to enjoy a truly 'diverse' educational 'experience.'

Surely it is racist to want to deprive your children of close contact with 'people of color.' No?

Two Marks of Maturity

One is the ability to take a joke and the other is the ability to live without dogmatic pseudo-certainty while striving for genuine certainty.

The Optimist and the Art of Life

The optimist is no cosmologist seeking the final truth about the world but a cosmetologist who puts a pretty face on it. He applies cosmetics to the cosmos. He knows the art of life and how to make the most of life, and does not shy away from such life-enhancing illusions as are conducive to his making the most of it. The philosopher, however, seeks the truth of life. Come hell or high water, or both, or neither.

There is the art of life and the truth of life, and there is a tension between them, a tension to be investigated by those of us who seek the truth of life. The investigation of this tension cannot be recommended to the artful livers. They would do well to ignore, and leave unexamined, the Socratic "The unexamined life is not worth living."