Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
With a little help from Carl Schmitt. Top o' the Stack.
Ben wants to talk about Schmitt. This article will serve as an introduction. You say Schmitt was a Nazi? So was Heidegger. Frege, according to Michael Dummett, was an anti-Semite. And Sartre was a Stalinist. You won't read these thinkers because of their distasteful political alignments?
Are you stupid?
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George Orwell posed the following thought experiment. If it came to light that Shakespeare had a fondness for abusing very young girls, would that colour our view of his work?
Bill,
Thanks. I agree, even to the point of going a littler farther. Ed Feser calls liberalism a Christian heresy. I tend to agree. It not only secularizes the equality inherent in Matthew 22:39, but it chooses to do so at the expense of important distinctions, for example the “neighbor” mentioned in the verse. Neighbors are familiar, local. This is in direct contrast to the sort of pablum about being a “citizen of the world” and preferring the plight of the universal faceless stranger over what you owe to your own countrymen, but it makes sense in light of the secularization of the “Judeo-Christian Equality Axiom.”
More importantly, what is never seemingly mentioned when Jesus is appropriated by as a hippie social worker by the left is that there’s also a hierarchy of duties established by Jesus here in the whole passage (vv. 37-40). To “love God with all you heart, all your soul, and all your mind” is the “first and greatest commandment” over the second that the left likes to read its secularized ethics into. I don’t think it’s underselling it to insist what they’re doing is deeply impious.
Ben writes, >>Neighbors are familiar, local. This is in direct contrast to the sort of pablum about being a “citizen of the world” and preferring the plight of the universal faceless stranger over what you owe to your own countrymen . . .<< That's right. I'll add that while we are enjoined to love our neighbors, we are also commanded to love our enemies (MT 5:44 and Luke 6:27). Are these enemies familiar and local too and not, say, Iranian Islamists? Do the verses mentioned rule out hating foreigners who pose an existential threat to us? Or do they permit it? You have given me an idea for a post. I'll get right on it. And I hope to come back to your earlier question about the Schmittian exception (Ausnahme) and the state of emergency. This all has considerable present relevance to the question of whether and to what extent Trump is a dictator.
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