Author: Bill Vallicella

On the Many Nietzsches

Karl White writes,
I was wondering if I might share a philosophical irritant. I was recently in correspondence with a well-established Nietzsche scholar, a nice guy with a recent book out. Thing is, like all Nietzsche scholars, or so it seems to me, he confidently proclaimed that all other Nietzsche scholars had overlooked the ‘real Nietzsche’ and that his book would ‘surprise them’.
Now obviously the critical enterprise regarding all philosophers should be ongoing, but it strikes me that in regard to certain thinkers, and Nietzsche in particular, there is a never-ending production line of tomes declaring the ‘real thinker’. Now while Nietzsche fans might say this is a validation of Nietzsche’s own ‘perspectivism’ and so on, I am drifting closer to the possible view that on the contrary it may also signal a fundamental incoherence at the heart of Nietzsche’s ‘project’. If there are so many views and with no end in sight to their formulation, then it is not possible that the subject in question is a ‘Sphinx without a secret’?
Curious if you’ve any views.
Good to hear from you, Karl. 
In Beyond Good and Evil, Part One, Section 6, Nietzsche says that every great philosophy is  the personal confession of its author (Selbstbekenntnis ihres Urhebers).  I believe he is right about this, and that the observation applies also to us lesser lights who are unlikely to produce any great philosophy: an ineluctable subjectivity attaches to our quest to know the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. I would add that the observation also applies to the efforts of the commentators to penetrate the Nietzschean corpus. 
They see in Nietzsche what  interests them, and they find what they can exploit for their own projects.  Three Germans from same generation, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Alfred Baeumler read our man in very different ways. My post Nietzsche and National Socialism, which may add to your irritation, sports a link to an excerpt from Baeumler.  Heidegger has two fat volumes on Nietzsche. Have you read them? How about Jaspers’s book? And then there are the analytic Nietzsche enthusiasts. Have you read Laird Addis? He’s “Iowa School” (Gustav Bergmann and associates). I was impressed by the former’s Natural Signs, but I haven’t been able to acquire his Nietzsche book, a review of which is here. If you have a copy I will buy it from you should you want to sell it. Same goes for the book by Jaspers, whether in English or in German. I’m a big fan of Jaspers. In fact, my own philosophical position shares deep affinities with his.
You are right to be irritated by  those who claim to have laid bare the “real Nietzsche.”  A deep thinker, a tormented soul, whose deep entanglement in problems that are lived and felt and not merely thought about, is unlikely to arrive at a nice, neat, pat view with an easily discernible sense.  There is no “real Nietzsche,” or at least no such person accessible to the academics who live from philosophy rather than for it. 
Is the multiplicity of interpretations a validation of Nietzsche’s perspectivism? No. An incoherent doctrine cannot be validated.  I explore the problem in a number of posts, all of which  require re-thinking and revision.
“I am drifting closer to the possible view that on the contrary it may also signal a fundamental incoherence at the heart of Nietzsche’s ‘project’. If there are so many views and with no end in sight to their formulation, then it is not possible that the subject in question is a ‘Sphinx without a secret’?”
I sympathize with your drift, Karl, and thanks for writing.

Is Flag Burning Speech?

In the 1989 case “Texas v. Johnson,” SCOTUS handed down a 5-4 ruling according to which flag burning was a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.  Now if you read the amendment you will find no reference to flag burning.  The subsumption of flag burning under protected speech required interpretation and argument and a vote among the justices.  The 5-4 vote could easily have gone the other way, and arguably should have. 
President Trump’s recent Executive Order has set things right:
Notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s rulings on First Amendment protections, the Court has never held that American Flag desecration conducted in a manner that is likely to incite imminent lawless action or that is an action amounting to “fighting words” is constitutionally protected.  See Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397, 408-10 (1989).
The bit about ‘fighting words’ invites commentary.
Ought flag burning come under the rubric of protected speech?  Logically prior question: Is it speech at all?  What if I make some such rude gesture in your face as ‘giving you the finger.’  Is that speech?  It is a bit of behavior, no doubt, but there is nothing verbal about it. So consider ‘Fuck you!’ which is verbal. If it counts as speech, I would like to know what proposition it expresses. The content of an assertive utterance is a proposition. Propositions are either true or false.   ‘Fuck you!’ is neither true nor false; so it does not express a proposition.  It expresses an attitude of disdain, disgust, hatred, contempt, bellicosity. Likewise for the corresponding gesture with the middle finger.  The same goes for the burning of a flag. If someone burns a flag, I would like to know what proposition the person is expressing. There isn’t one, or at least there isn’t one that transcends the merely biographical.  “I hate the nation this symbol stands for!” Say that and you are merely emoting. 
The Founders were interested in protecting reasoned dissent about matters of common interest; the typical act of flag burning by the typical flag burner does not rise to that level.  To have reasoned dissent there has to be some proposition that one is dissenting from and some counter-proposition that one is advancing, and one’s performance has to make more or less clear what those propositions are.  I think one ought to be skeptical of arguments that try to subsume gestures and physical actions under speech. Actually, I am more than skeptical: I am strongly inclined to deny any such subsumption.  
My point, then, is that since flag burning is not speech, it is not protected speech. Of course, it does not follow that it is not in many cases an illegal act.
Am I suggesting that there should be a flag burning amendment to the U. S. constitution?  No.  Let the states and the localities decide what to do with those who desecrate the flag. Let’s consider some examples.
  • A man buys an American flag and burns it in his fireplace. Nothing illegal here.. He is simply disposing of a piece of private property in a safe manner. That is his right. The symbol is not the symbolized. Destruction of the former does not affect the latter. The spirit of the nation and its laws is not somehow incarnated in the piece of cloth, any more than the Word of God  is incarnated in a copy of the Bible.  (The final clause of the preceding sentence might ‘ignite’ some interesting discussions!)
  • Someone steals or desecrates the flag I am flying on my property. That illegal act comes under local laws.
  • Someone burns a flag in a tinder-dry wilderness area. That too comes under existing local and federal laws.
  • Someone steals or desecrates an American flag on display at a state or federal facility.  That also comes under existing laws.
  • Someone burns a flag in the presence of others in a public place in a manner that is likely to incite imminent violence. Here is where Trump’s EO applies. We must not tolerate the incitement of violence by speech — which I have argued flag burning is not — or by such nonverbal behavior as flag burning.

Political Violence: Issues and Questions, Part II

In Part I, I argued that in the current state of affairs in the USA, our  political opponents are not mere opponents, but enemies. Given that this enmity is a contingent state of affairs, one that could have been otherwise, I am not defining political opposition or the political in terms of enmity.  This distinguishes my position (in progress, and thus tentatively held) from that of Carl Schmitt’s. For Schmitt, the essence of the political (das Politische) consists in the Freund-Feind (friend-enemy) distinction. (See his The Concept of the Political.) By contrast with Schmitt, I am not trying to isolate the essence or nature of the political; I am merely saying that at the moment, as a matter of contingent fact, our opponents, the Democrats, are our enemies. They are our enemies in that they pose a clear and present threat to us and our way of life. And increasingly this threat is being executed, and in the worst way, by assassination, attempted assassination, calls for assassination, celebrations of assassination, and refusals to condemn assassination.  What is the source of this enmity? In Part I a case was made that our political opponents are enemies. In this Part II, I will proffer an explanation of why we are enemies. In a future Part III, I will consider what we can do to ameliorate our nasty and highly dangerous predicament. 

With our (mere) opponents we share common ground; with our enemies we do not. The source, then, is the lack of common ground. We do not share ground sufficient to keep enmity at bay if we don’t agree on many things. For now, I will mention just  three things we need to agree on, but on which we no longer agree, borders, reality, equality.

BORDERS.  Nations need enforceable, and enforced, borders to maintain their cultural identity and their security as sovereign states. There is no right to immigrate. Correlatively, there is no obligation on the part of any state to allow immigration.  The granting of asylum is not obligatory but supererogatory. Illegal immigration cannot be tolerated. What’s more, legal immigration must be to the benefit of the host country. For each nation has the right to look to its own interests first. More that that, a properly functioning government has the duty to look first to the interests of the nation of which it is the government. 

America first is merely a special case of nation first; it does not imply that America ought to dominate other nations. So only those persons can be allowed into the USA  who are likely to assimilate and accept our republican system of government and our culture. This implies that certain groups  ought to  be favored over others, English speakers, for example, over those who do not know our language, other things being equal.  Ought we “welcome the stranger?”  Yes, but not unconditionally: only if they satisfy the conditions I have specified and some others I do not have the time to specify.  There must not be any blanket “Welcome  the stranger.” Squishy Catholic bishops take note.

Immigration without assimilation is a recipe for disaster, leading as it does to Balkanization, ‘no go’ zones, and endless civil contention. Europe and the U. K. are committing cultural suicide by failure to grasp the importance of this principle. Sharia-supporting Muslims must not be allowed to immigrate into the West, and in particular into America, the last hope of the West. If we fall, the West falls. The rest of the Anglosphere has pretty much abdicated. Sharia law is antithetical to our founding values and principles. Only those people from Muslim lands who renounce Sharia are admissible. The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

But isn’t diversity good? Diversity of various types is of course good, but diversity as such  is precisely not our strength, as foolish and/or deliberately destructive leftists mindlessly repeat. Full-spectrum diversity would be our undoing, and was in process of undoing us until Donald Trump came along.  If any one thing is ‘our strength,’ it is unity, not diversity. “One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.”  To call a sane immigration policy that benefits the host country ‘xenophobic’ is a  typically vicious and typically mendacious leftist smear. And the same goes for ‘Islamophobic’ used to dismiss what I wrote one paragraph up. A phobia is an irrational fear, by definition, but there is nothing irrational about fear of full-strength, Sharia-based Islam, which is not merely a religion, but is also an expansionist political ideology, one that poses an existential threat to us.

REALITY. A second thing we need to agree on, but no longer agree on, is that there is a real world out there independent of our thoughts and dreams, wishes and desires. No doubt there are social constructs, but nature herself in her abiotic and biotic strata are not social constructs.  Money, a social construct, does not grow on trees, but leaves do.  Foliage, tectonic plates, and animals, including human animals, are quite obviously not social constructs. The world cannot be social construction all the way down. And so you cannot change your sex. Once a biological male, always a biological male.  It follows that it is morally outrageous to allow biological males to compete against women in sporting events.  Metaphysical nonsense leads to moral nonsense. Nor can you change your race, as I argue rigorously, at Substack.  You can change your political affiliation, and you should if you are a Democrat; but membership in a race is not a political form of belonging. 

EQUALITY and EQUITY.  The transmogrification of the former into the latter is a third bone of contention between us and our political enemies. An old lie of leftists is compressed into one of their more recent abuses of language: ‘equity.’ So-called ‘equity’ is woke-speak for equality of outcome or result. ‘Equity’  in this obfuscatory sense cannot occur and ought not be pursued. It cannot occur because people are not equal either as individuals or as groups. Leftists won’t face this fact, however, because they confuse the world as they would like it to be with the world as it is. The default setting of the leftist  or ‘progressive’ is utopian. Utopia, however, is Nowheresville and he who pursues it is a Nowhere Man. 

‘Equity’ ought not be pursued because its implementation is possible only by the violation of the liberty of the individual by a totalitarian state apparatus precisely unequal in power to those it would equalize. Paradoxically, the pursuit of equality of outcome presupposes an inequality of power as between the equalizers and the equalized, which is to say: equality of outcome cannot be achieved.  The latter is a form of equality only if it is equal for all. But it cannot be equal for all for the reason given.

Again, people are not equal, by any empirical measure, either as individuals or as groups.  That “all men are created equal,” as per the Declaration of Independence, is not to the point.  Jefferson & Co. were obviously not making the manifestly false assertion that human beings  are equal in point of empirically measurable attributes.  As the word ‘created’ indicates, the Founders were maintaining that all human beings are equal in the eyes of God, the Creator. From a God’s eye point of view, all empirical difference vanish and we are equal as persons, as rights-possessors. And so each of us, regardless of race, sex, level of intellectual or physical prowess, etc., has an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  

CONCLUSION. Our political opponents are not mere opponents but enemies: they pose an existential threat to us. The source of that enmity and this threat is lack of common ground. We lack common ground as regards the three issues mentioned above, and for others as well. We are in dire straits and headed for full-on hot civil war.  That is an outcome no sane person could want. How avoid it?

Should We Just Tend Our Private Gardens?

A Substack shorty.

The piece ends:

I will have to find the passage in Plato’s Laws where he says that the good who refuse to get involved in politics will end up ruled by the evil.

I may have been thinking of a passage in The Republic. Dave Lull, Tony Flood and Dirck Storm pointed me to 347c.  Thank you, gentlemen. Mr. Storm writes:

Re: the end of your “Should We Just Tend Our Private Gardens?”, I believe that you may be recalling an observation made in The Republic, Bk 1, 347b-d:
“…διὰ ταῦτα τοίνυν, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, οὔτε χρημάτων ἕνεκα ἐθέλουσιν ἄρχειν οἱ ἀγαθοὶ οὔτε τιμῆς: οὔτε γὰρ φανερῶς πραττόμενοι τῆς ἀρχῆς ἕνεκα μισθὸν μισθωτοὶ βούλονται κεκλῆσθαι, οὔτε λάθρᾳ αὐτοὶ ἐκ τῆς ἀρχῆς λαμβάνοντες κλέπται. οὐδ᾽ αὖ τιμῆς ἕνεκα: οὐ γάρ εἰσι φιλότιμοι. δεῖ δὴ αὐτοῖς ἀνάγκην προσεῖναι καὶ ζημίαν, εἰ μέλλουσιν ἐθέλειν ἄρχειν—ὅθεν κινδυνεύει τὸ ἑκόντα ἐπὶ τὸ ἄρχειν ἰέναι ἀλλὰ μὴ ἀνάγκην περιμένειν αἰσχρὸν νενομίσθαι—τῆς δὲ ζημίας μεγίστη τὸ ὑπὸ πονηροτέρου ἄρχεσθαι, ἐὰν μὴ αὐτὸς ἐθέλῃ ἄρχειν: ἣν δείσαντές μοι φαίνονται ἄρχειν, ὅταν ἄρχωσιν, οἱ ἐπιεικεῖς, καὶ τότε ἔρχονται ἐπὶ τὸ ἄρχειν οὐχ ὡς ἐπ᾽ ἀγαθόν τι ἰόντες οὐδ᾽ ὡς εὐπαθήσοντες ἐν αὐτῷ, ἀλλ᾽ ὡς ἐπ᾽ ἀναγκαῖον καὶ οὐκ ἔχοντες ἑαυτῶν βελτίοσιν ἐπιτρέψαι οὐδὲ ὁμοίοις…”
“…For this reason, therefore,” I said, “the good aren’t willing to rule for the sake of money or honor. For they don’t wish openly to exact wages for ruling and get called hirelings, nor on their own secretly to take a profit from their ruling and get called thieves. Nor, again, will they rule for the sake of honor. For they are not lovers of honor. Hence, necessity and a penalty must be there in addition for them, if they are going to be willing to rule–it is likely that this is the source of its being held to be shameful to seek to rule and not to await necessity–and the greatest of penalties is being ruled by a worse man if one is not willing to rule oneself. It is because they fear this, in my view, that decent men rule, when they do rule; and at that time they proceed to enter on rule, not as though they were going to something good, or as though they were going to be well off in it; but they enter on it as a necessity and because they have no one better than or like themselves to whom to turn it over…” (Allan Bloom, translator, 1968)

Charlie’s Murderers

This catalog should allay any doubts you may still have about the depth of human stupidity, depravity, and sheer viciousness. A friend, alluding to the world-wide celebration of Kirk’s life, tells me he has never been more hopeful. I believe he is fooling himself. We are spiraling downward. Hot civil war is now a clear and present danger.
You are living in a dream world if you think mutually respectful free speech and unrestrained dialog can save us. Wonderful things, no doubt, but they come too late, presupposing as they do common ground — which is precisely what we no longer have.  The problem of common ground has several sides. I will mention just one now. 
Suppose you agree with me that there is objective truth and that it is possible for us to know some of it. (That is something few will concede in these days of Claudine Gay and ‘my truth,’ but just suppose.) That concession’s a start, but if you and I are ‘siloed into our positions’ and we each believe we possess the truth about a particular question, then truth-seeking dialog is a sham. For if you already know the truth, or rather think you do, you will not be working with me to find the truth: one does not seek what one possesses. And vice versa: if I am convinced that I have the truth, then my conversation with you cannot be truth-seeking dialog. What we will each be engaged in is an attempt to change the other person’s mind.  For genuine truth-seeking dialog to occur, there must be a Socratic confession of ignorance on both sides, or at least an admission that one might be mistaken in one’s beliefs.   Kirk was no latter-day Socrates: he was not out to show people that they didn’t know what they thought they knew about things that he knew he knew little or nothing about so that they might reason together in search of the truth.  Kirk lacked the doxastic modesty of Socrates. His doxastic stance was more like the firm conviction of Christ. Doxastic modesty is what is lacking today on so many issues that divide us. Neither side admits that it might be wrong.  And this, I think, is a major source of all the rage, hatred, and violence, both verbal and physical.
So, while Charlie Kirk was morally superior to his enemies — and in particular greatly superior to those who rejoice in his assassination — he too was convinced that he was right as are his followers who are convinced  that he is now with Jesus in heaven. Kirk was also intellectually superior to most of his enemies: he could give reasons for his positions and they were better than the ones they could give for theirs.  He had unshakeable convictions and he could defend them rationally. Pressed on why he accepted the Resurrection of Christ, he replied that so many martyrs would not have gone to their deaths in that belief were it not true. The argument has some merit but it is hardly conclusive.  That would not be a problem if his interlocutors were not adamantly opposed to Christianity and all of its presuppositions.  But they are. Hence their hatred of him and his ideas and their fear that his powerful influence would lead to their suppression.  This fear is one, though not the only, factor that fueled their desire to see him assassinated. 
When there was still a large chunk of common ground, mutual respect came easy and conversation among political opponents was fruitful for the ironing out of details against the backdrop of commonly held values and presuppositions.  Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill differed politically but not as enemies; after hours they were on friendly terms. Those days are over. There is no longer any common ground to stand on.  Political opponents are now political enemies, enemies who see each other as existential threats.  When we see each other as existential threats is when the guns and knives come out, and when assassination becomes politically if not morally ‘justifiable.’
Addendum (9/15)
Is political assassination ever morally justifiable? I think most of us will agree that the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, Operation Valkyrie,  was morally justified, despite its being illegal by the laws of the Third Reich.  Morality trumps legality. So if Trump really were another Hitler, as our political enemies madly assert, then his assassination would be morally justifiable, and by extension so would the assassination of others such as Kirk who strongly supported Trump and his MAGA agenda.  Now surely seasoned politicians such as Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris who assert with a straight face that Trump is Hitler or a fascist do not believe what they assert, in fact, they know that what they assert is false: they are smearing him in an attempt to gain power for themselves and their party. Unfortunately, many naive, ignorant young people believe what their elders say, and some of these are willing to act on their beliefs. So I say that such contemptible liars as Clinton and Harris have Kirk’s blood on their hands, figuratively speaking, due to their egregiously irresponsible rhetoric.

Free Speech Absolutism?

Time was when leftists were latitudinarian to the point of extremism on the question of free speech. But of late a “sea change into something rich and strange” (Shakespeare, The Tempest) has occurred, the ‘trigger’ being the liberation of Twitter by Elon Musk and its rebranding as ‘X.’  Leftists are now spooked by the specter of ‘free speech absolutism.’ And not only leftists, but certain of their pseudo-con fellow travelers such as the bootless Max Boot.

I will now argue against free speech absolutism, and in so doing illustrate a responsible exercise of the moral, and also legal, right to free speech.

To discuss the topic sensibly we need a definition.  One thing it should do is to specify that the topic is public expression, whether in speech or writing, not what occurs in private or in solitude.

And let’s be clear that the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution protects speech against abridgment  by the Federal government alone: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . . .” (emphasis added) You have no right to free speech in my home, which is my castle, or on this weblog, which is my cyber-castle. I, however, do have the right to evict you from my castles, whether physical or cybernetic.

We also need to agree on what it means to say that a right is absolute. A right is absolute if and only if it is (i) inviolable (in the sense that it ought not be violated), (ii)  exceptionless, and (iii) equal, i.e., the same for everyone.  

Free speech absolutism, then, is the view that everyone has the moral right to express publicly, whether in speech or in writing, whatever one wants to express, on any topic, anywhere, and before any audience. 

This is what I mean by free speech absolutism. (I also think that this is what everyone ought to mean by it.) Is that what you mean? There is no point in discussing this question or any question unless we agree on what exactly we are talking about.  If you don’t agree with my definition than you ought to provide and defend a different one.

Note that if the right to free expression is absolute, then whatever anyone anywhere expresses publicly to anyone, whether true, false, meaningless, incitive of violence, etc., ought to be tolerated. This follows from the correlativity of rights and duties.   If the right to free expression is absolute, then the duty to tolerate is absolute and therefore exceptionless and the same for all. But then we get toleration extremism, a position defended by J. S. Mill which I demolish in a Substack article.

Free speech and open inquiry must be defended, but no intelligent and morally sane person could support free speech absolutism. For the inciting of violence cannot be condoned. And that is just one example of intolerable speech. The speech-suppressive Left aided and abetted by cranky neo-cons such as the bootless Boot have created a bogeyman.

Terry Wilson’s inciting of violence at a Charlie Kirk vigil is therefore not protected speech.  And then there is “Kerosene Maxine” Waters and her incendiary remarks . . . .

Political Violence: Some Underlying Issues and Questions, Part I

Opponents or Enemies? In response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk yesterday (9/10/25), numerous well-meaning individuals such as former president George W. Bush and current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson have said that our opponents on the Left are not political enemies, but fellow citizens. Setting aside the question of how many of these ‘citizens’ are illegal aliens, I have serious reservations with respect to the conciliatory remarks of Bush, Johnson, et al. We should of course all calm down and not make things worse with incendiary words and gestures. But more important than reining in emotions is using our intellects to penetrate to the truth of the matter.

A strong case can be made that our political opponents on the Left are indeed enemies. This is because they pose an existential threat to us. An existential threat is not primarily one to our physical lives, but to our way of life which encompasses our beliefs, values, religious and non-religious traditions, in a word: our culture.  To live a healthy life in political dhimmitude cuts against the American cultural grain, to put it mildly.  “Give me liberty or give me death!” (Patrick Henry) “Better dead than red.” (1950s slogan)  Better dead than under Sharia. (So say I.) An  American in the normative sense values life, liberty, and property.  Not just that, but at least that. And of course the liberty in question is not an untrammeled liberty unrestrained by duties, responsibilities, prudential considerations, and the like.  The classical liberalism of the Founders is part of a broader conservatism. Or so say I.  A normative American as I am using the term  is one who subscribes to the basic positions articulated in the founding documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the amendments thereto, in particular, the Bill of Rights, which are better described as additions rather than as amendments to the great document. There is a lot to be said here, but  brevity, the soul of wit, is also the soul of blog, as some wit lately observed.

Consider our rights.  Where do they come from? Not from government.  That is the essential point. Call it the negative thesis about the origin of rights. Tim Kaine, HRC’s running mate in 2016, believes otherwise:

“The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator — that’s what the Iranian government believes,” he said. “It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia (sic) law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities. They do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So, the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.” (Quoted here.)

Tim Kaine is my political enemy.  There is nothing troubling about the statement that our rights do not derive from  governments or the positive laws, the laws posited by legislatures.  On the contrary, it would be troubling in excelsis were our rights subject to the whims of men.  That way lies tyranny. Never forget, the people in government are like the rest of us, finite, fallible, and far from wholly virtuous; indeed many of them are far worse than many of us, both morally and intellectually.

We should also be clear that even if one were to hold  that God is the source of natural rights, that would not commit one to theocracy, Islamic or otherwise.  But I won’t waste any more words on the sheer stupidity of Kaine’s outburst. That would be the dialectical equivalent of beating up a cripple or rolling a drunk. It it hard to believe that this guy has a J. D. from Harvard.

Now suppose that Kaine and I both accepted the negative thesis, but differed on the question whether rights come from God or are simply given with (inscribed in) human nature.  The question could be put like this: If one accepts that there are natural rights, must one also accept the existence of God as the source of those rights, or could one coherently and reasonably accept that there are natural rights and be an atheist, i.e., one who rejects the existence of God? People might reasonably debate this question while accepting the fundamental negative thesis about the origin of rights.  The debaters would then be political opponents, as I am using the term, but not political enemies.  If Kaine were merely my opponent in this debate he would not pose an existential threat, a threat to my way of life. As it is, however, he and others of his ilk are such a threat and are therefore my enemies.

Since they are my political enemies, I want to see them politically dead. That is, I want them to have no political power.  That is not to say that I want them physically dead. But of course, if an enemy is physically dead, then he is also politically dead.

We now come to a vexing question. Suppose our enemies fail to defeat us politically within the existing constitutional  framework as they manifestly did fail in 2024, and this despite all their dirty tricks, e.g. the Russia collusion hoax, etc.  Most of our enemies sincerely believe  that it is right, proper, noble, and for the ultimate benefit of humanity that they rule.   Failing to defeat us within the existing constitutionally-based system, would they not feel justified in resorting to extra-political means to attain their ends? One such extra-political means is assassination.

We don’t yet know, but it is a good bet that Kirk’s assassin was not a lone crazy man but part of a well-orchestrated plot.  Suppose that is the case, and that you sincerely believe that Trump is Hitler, MAGA members are maggots, and so on. Suppose further that you are a hard-core secularist who believes that there is only one world, this physical world, no God, no soul, no post-mortem rewards and punishments, none of that religious claptrap.  Could you not see your way clear to embracing politics by assassination?  Assassination would then be politics by other means. The conceptual distance between the political and the extra-political would then be lessened if not obliterated.  

Bear in mind that Kirk was not assassinated because of his opinions, as some have said, but because his opinions have practical consequences, consequences that stand in the way of the Left’s agenda.  The glorious end, heaven on earth, the immanentization of the eschaton, justifies any and all means to its realization.  People who say that Kirk was assassinated for his opinions, views, beliefs are probably imagining that political discourse is a gentlemanly debate  conducted according to the dialectical equivalent of the Queensberry Rules, or that there is this marketplace of ideas in which the better ideas win.  

One more vexing question and then I’ll stop for today. Suppose the foregoing is essentially correct. What should we American conservatives do to defend ourselves.?  Seek common ground with our enemies? There is no common ground.  Give in to them? No way!  Accept political dhimmitude? No way!  Commit suicide? No. Allow them to put us to the sword? No. Divide the country into Red and Blue halves? That would weaken us vis-à-vis our geopolitical adversaries. 

They want us, and we want them, politically dead. If they resort to extra-political means to achieve their end, must we not do the same to achieve ours?

I shudder at the thought.

A Point of Logic

Jouni Lappi, having read the Substack article on Heidegger and Carnap, writes:

One thing I cannot get my head around is this part:
’Nothing is F’ => ’Everything is not F’
Maybe there is some syntactic agreement behind the ’Everything is not F’, that I do not understand. In my layman ears it sounds strange and wrong. I would understand ’it is true for every thing, that it is not F’. Say in my universe there is A, B and F.
’Nothing is F’ is false, ’Everything is not F’ is true.
This is probably some newbie error in thinking. And especially because of that,  I would appreciate if you could explain this to me and point out where I think wrong.
First of all, what you express as a conditional is really a biconditional. Thus
1) Nothing is F <=> Everything is not F. 
Bear in mind that ‘F’ is a predicate. If it names anything, it names a property, not an individual. (Properties, by definition, are instantiable items; individuals are not.)  So an instance of (1) is 
2)  Nothing is fragile if and only if everything is not fragile.  
Surely (2) is true; indeed it is necessarily true.  In a universe U in which there are exactly two individuals, a and b, and one property F-ness, if neither a nor b instantiates F-ness, then every/each  individual in U does not instantiate F-ness, and vice versa. 
Are you perhaps  confusing individuals and properties?  Or perhaps you do not appreciate that ‘everything’ is being used above as a distributive, not a collective term? ‘Everything’ means each thing; it does not mean the collection of things.  

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Perils of Pleasure Along the Lost Highway

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis:

The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a FLANEUR, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.

Compare the words Plato puts in the mouth of Socrates in the Phaedo:

. . . every pleasure and pain has a kind of nail, and nails and pins her [the soul] to the body, and gives her a bodily nature, making her think that whatever the body says is true. (tr. F. J. Church St. 83)

Oscar Wilde

From Oscar Wilde to Plato to Hank Williams here channeled hauntingly through Kurt Nilsen and Willie Nelson:

I’m a rollin’ stone all alone and lost
For a life of sin I have paid the cost
When I pass by all the people say
Just another guy on the lost highway

Just a deck of cards and a jug of wine
And a woman’s lies make a life like mine
On the day we met, I went astray
I started rollin’ down that lost highway

I was just a lad, nearly 22
Neither good nor bad, just a kid like you
And now I’m lost, too late to pray
Lord I paid the cost, on the lost highway

Now boys don’t start your ramblin’ ’round
On this road of sin are you sorrow bound
Take my advice or you’ll curse the day.
You started rollin’ down that lost highway.

Tom Petty version.

The Byrds, Life in Prison

Warren Zevon, Carmelita

Nina Simone, House of the Rising Sun

Doc Watson, Tom Dooley.  The Kingston Trio’s ‘collegiate folk’  version from 1958.

Merle Haggard, The Fugitive

Marty Robbins, Devil Woman

Heidegger, Carnap, and Das Nichts

A Substack entry wherein I diagnose Rudolf Carnap’s Heidegger Derangement Syndrome. Rudi was down with a very bad case of it. Thanks to him it spread to a crapload of analytic bigots. Excerpt:

One of the reasons I gave my weblog the title Maverick Philosopher is because I align neither with the analytic nor with the Continental camp. Study everything, I say, and drink from every stream. “Nothing human is foreign to me.” (Terence)

Reverting to the camp metaphor, when did the camps become two? In dead earnest this occurred when Heidegger burst onto the scene in 1927 with Being and Time. I agree with Peter Simons: “Probably no individual was more responsible for the schism in philosophy than Heidegger.” (Quoted in Overgaard, et al., An Introduction to Metaphilosophy, Cambridge UP, 2013, 110.) It is not as if Heidegger set out to split the mainstream whose headwaters were in Franz Brentano into two tributaries; it is just that he started publishing things that the analytic types, who had some sympathy for Heidegger’s main teacher Husserl, could not relate to at all.

If I were were to select two writings that best epitomize the depth of the Continental-analytic clash near the time of its outbreak, they would be Heidegger’s 1929 What is Metaphysics? and Carnap’s 1932 response, “On the Overcoming of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language.” (In fairness to Carnap, let us note that his Erkenntnis piece is more than a response to Heidegger inasmuch as it calls into question the meaningfulness of all metaphysics.)

The young Martin Heidegger

 

The Existential versus the Merely Theoretical: Some Responses to a Reader

A young Brazilian reader, Vini, refers to an article of mine, Retorsion Revisited: How Far Does it Reach and What Does it Prove? and asks me some questions about it. He is clearly one of those whose interest in philosophy is deeply existential and not merely theoretical or academic.  ‘Existential’ has several meanings both inside and outside of philosophy.  I am using it roughly in the way it is used by such so-called existentialists as Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Marcel, early Sartre, and many others.  For such as these, philosophy is not an academic game. It is not about solving intellectual puzzles, or about achieving a merely theoretical, and thus impersonal view of the world that abstracts from the lived life of the individual truth-seeker who seeks a truth  that is subjectively appropriable and personally transformative. On an existential understanding of philosophy’s task and goal it cannot be science given that science aims at a wholly  impersonal, or third-personal, or objective view of things, as if Being could be wholly objectified.  Being cannot be wholly objectified  because, in Jaspersian terms, Being is das Umgreifende, the Encompassing, which includes both subject and objects  

Now either you understand what I am driving at with these sketchy remarks or you don’t. If what I have just written doesn’t resonate with you, if you have no idea what I am getting at, then you are wasting your time reading my work. For everything I write, no matter how tediously technical or politically polemical, is oriented toward One Thing, the achieving of my  individual, personal, intellectual-cum-spiritual salvation, even if such salvation requires the dissolution of the ego or separative self and its absorption into the eternal Atman or a Buddhist or Christian equivalent or near-equivalent thereof. Sounds paradoxical doesn’t it?  How could the salvation of the self require the dissolution of the self? But paradox, contradiction, absurdity and mystery are endemic to our predicament and must be addressed by the philosopher who knows what he is about and is serious about penetrating to the truth of our predicament.  Science, by contrast, seeks to banish mystery.

Again, you either catch my drift or you don’t.  Young Vini, I suspect, does. He comes across as vexed and tormented by questions that to the superficial are merely academic puzzles.  What he has written strikes me as a cri de coeur, and so I feel I ought to be of what little assistance I can be.  My years of Sturm und Drang lie 50 years in the past, but their animating spirit remains for me tutelary, guarding and guiding, daimonic in the Socratic sense.   

Vini writes,

4) On your post “Retorsion Revisited: How Far Does it Reach and What Does it Prove?”, you said: “3.  I exist.  The thought that I do not exist is unthinkable salva veritate.  Only I can think this thought, and my thinking of the thought falsifies its content, and this is so even if ‘I’ picks out merely a momentary self.  (I am not committed by this to a substantial self.)  So we have performative inconsistency.  Unfortunately, this does not show that I exist apart from my thinking.” So, I must ask: do you think that the self is a substance, or have you changed your mind? This got me a little bit confused, since I may have missed the context.

BV:  I think you have missed the context. What I am asking in the post is whether retorsion/retortion is a philosophical procedure or tool that can secure metaphysical results.  I wrote:

To be a successful metaphysical tool, a retorsive argument must establish the target proposition as true unconditionally and not merely on condition that there exist contingent beings like us who occasionally and contingently engage in such intellectual operations as affirmation and denial.    Otherwise, it would have no metaphysical significance, but merely a transcendental one.  (‘Transcendental’ is here being used in roughly the Kantian way.)

I am not addressing the question whether the self is a substance as opposed to a bundle of experiences. The point I am making is that retorsion does not establish the existence of the self on either conception.  The argument I gave commits me neither to a substantial self nor to a momentary self.  When you ask whether I changed my mind, you are assuming that in my “Chariot” article and the other posts directed against the Pali Buddhist ‘no self’ doctrine I am affirming a substance view of the self. But please note that if propositions P, Q are logically contradictory (i.e., cannot both be true and cannot both be false), and I show that the arguments for P are not rationally coercive, it does not follow that (a) I must find the arguments for Q rationally coercive, or (b) that I accept Q.  After all, the problem may be insoluble by us. In the anti-Buddhist articles and entries I was showing that there are good reasons for rejecting the Buddhist anatta/anatman doctrine. A good reason needn’t be rationally coercive or rationally compelling or philosophically dispositive. (I am using these phrases interchangeably.)

To take a different example, if I reject every version of presentism in the philosophy of time, it does not follow that I must accept some version of anti-presentism.

5) I think this question is one of the most important ones: Can I really rest assured that the self does exist, and it is like a Substance? To be completely honest with you, Bill, one thing that this whole 6-year experience showed me is that I know nothing or almost nothing about the world. I never thought in my life that we could even doubt about the reality of things such as the self. Back in the day, this shocked me. I was (and still somehow am) very afraid of things that I don’t know, like “what if there is a hidden argument that I don’t know,” “what if they are right,” and so on. I’m 27 years old, and I got a lot of things wrong in my life — but this is one I don’t want to be wrong about. You know, there are a lot of things with an intellect far, far superior to mine, such as Butchvarov, Husserl, and so on, that you are well aware of, that may have found arguments that I couldn’t even imagine in my lifetime. But, at the same time, I think that philosophy, above all else, can give definitive and satisfactory answers to life. It’s not an empirical science ‘guessing game,’ where things can flip from right to wrong in the bat of an eye (like, if someone got something wrong, he will be wrong no matter what, and that’s what I think about Buddhists, Harris and Co. on these matters). But, at the same time, I have this insecurity of getting things wrong, of something that might not be “sufficient” to show what I want to understand (in that case, the self), since I know so little of philosophy. So how could I rest assured that, no matter the hard work, they will be wrong? The self can’t be a guessing game. I think that there must be a way to establish the truth of this, regardless of the endless discussions that philosophers may have in the future (if he’s right, he’s right; if wrong, he’s wrong). I’m very afraid of being wrong, getting something wrong, and that there is an “unknown argument” that may tumble down what I think is right, but, at the same time, if I had all these dialectical worries since 2019, how could I possibly not exist (as a Substance)? I’m confused, since I also lend more value to what others said rather than my own experience… I don’t know how to think this through. Can you share your thoughts about this? A word of experience from someone who saw a lot more in life than I ever had would be very comforting to hear, especially from a philosopher. Even though your motto is “study everything, join nothing,” I really think that you can have a definitive answer on that matter. 

In all of that, sorry for the gigantic, torah-like email. I tried my best to express my worries as quickly as possible and tell you all of them in one shot. As I said, I really hope God touches your heart to help me with these questions. I really, really hope you could spare or find some time to answer me this. Even though for some people these questions are trivial, for me, I think they are life-changing and something that we live up to. I know I sound a little bit platonic (maybe I am), but I think the same centelha [scintilla, see here]of philosophy that resides in you will find and understand the questions in mine. 

May God bless you, Bill.

BV:  There are different types of philosopher. In another place in your Torah-like e-mail, you say you like Ed Feser’s work.  Ed is an ultra-competent expositor and defender of the metaphysics underpinning traditional Roman Catholicism. For him the ultimate truth, which is a salvific truth, is housed in the (trad) RCC.  He believes that he found the Answer there, his Answer, but also the Answer, the Answer for everyone whether they accept it or not.   I classify him as a dogmatic affirmer. The polar opposite is the dogmatic denier. I am neither. I am a critical inquirer in the Socratic tradition. Feser thinks the existence of God can be proven.  I deny that the existence of God can be proven, but I also deny that the existence of God can be disproven.  What holds for God, holds for the soul, and all the rest of our highest concerns.

You want to know (with objective certainty) whether the self is a substance that persists, numerically self-same over time, an immaterial substance, capable of existing whether or not it is embodied.  This burning desire to know is what distinguishes the true philosopher from the academic hacks and functionaries who dominate our universities. Many of them are clever, and some are brilliant, but they suffer from existentielle Bodenlosigkeit (Karl Jaspers).   Their work is a game, a job, a way of filling their bellies. It does not well up from their Existenz.  Their real lives are elsewhere.  They don’t live for philosophy, but from it, and they would drop it like a hot potato if they could no longer fill their bellies from it. The great Augustine said he wanted to know, more than anything else, two things:, God and the soul: deum et animam scire cupio.  So, Vini, you and I are in good company.

So are God and the soul (immaterial substantial self) real or not?  Can we KNOW the answer to that question? You say it can’t be a guessing game. You are right about that.  It can’t be a matter of flipping a coin or making a guess. That way of talking trivializes the question, as does, I am afraid, Pascal’s talk of a wager.  The great Pascal betrays the depth and seriousness of his thought with talk like that, though one understands how a great mathematician and contributor to probability theory would think like that.  Be that as it may.

It’s not a guessing game, but nonetheless in the end you must decide what you will believe and how you will live. There are no objective certainties and no knock-down proofs  in this life with respect to the Big Questions and the Ultimate Objects.  Genuine knowledge in these precincts is unattainable by us here below. Our cognitive architecture is not up to the task. Our reason is weak and merely discursive. And the noetic consequences of sin may have to be factored in.

“I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith,” wrote Kant in the preface to the 2nd edition of his Critique of Pure Reason. The great Kant was on the right track. Reason is dialectical in his sense and simply not up to the task of laying bare the nature of the ultimate.

You say, “I think that there must be a way to establish the truth of this.” That is precisely what I deny assuming by ‘establish’ you mean conclusively prove.  Reasoned belief is as far as we can go. Th  dogmatic affirmers, driven by overpowering doxastic security needs, fool themselves when they pass off arguments that are objectively inconclusive as proofs. I am not saying that they are intellectually dishonest; I am saying that they are in the grip of an overpowering need to be secure in their beliefs.

But more on this later, if you like. I welcome your objections, Vini.  Please respond here on this blog, the latest version of Maverick Philosopher. If you do so you will have the honor of being the first to anoint my combox with comments.

The Concept of Standoff in Philosophy

Substack latest.

A second example:

3. God by his very nature as divine is a concrete being who exists of metaphysical necessity.

4. Nothing concrete could exist of metaphysical necessity.

By ‘concrete’ I mean causally active/passive. The God in question is not a causally inert abstract object like a number or a set-theoretical set. Clearly, (3) and (4) form a contradictory pair and so cannot both be true. And yet one can argue plausibly for each.

This is not the place for detailed arguments, but in support of (3) there are the standard Anselmian considerations. God is ens perfectissimum; nothing perfect could be modally contingent; ergo, etc. God is “that than which no greater can be conceived”; if God were a merely contingent being, then a greater could be conceived; ergo, etc.

In support of (4), there is the difficulty of understanding how any concrete individual could exist necessarily. For such a being, possibility suffices for actuality: if God is possible, then he is actual. But this possibility is not mere possibility; it is the possibility of an actual being. (God is at no time or in any possible world merely possible, if he is possible at all.) The divine possibility — if it is a possibility at all and not an impossibility — is a possibility that is fully actualized. Possibility and actuality in God are one and the same in reality even though they remain notionally distinct for us. (In classical jargon, God is pure act, actus purus.) Equivalently, essence and existence in God are one and the same in reality even if they must remain notionally distinct for our discursive/dianoetic intellects. It is God’s nature to exist. God is an existing essence in virtue of his very essence. God’s existence is in no way subsequent to his essence, not temporally, of course, but also not logically or ontologically. So it is not quite right to say, as many do, that God’s nature entails his existence; God’s nature is his existence, and his existence is his nature.

If you think this through very carefully, you will realize that the ground of the divine necessity is the divine simplicity. It is because God is an ontologically simple being that he is a necessary being. If you deny that God is simple but affirm that he is necessary, then I will challenge you to state what makes him necessary as opposed to impossible. If you say that God is necessary in virtue of existing in all possible worlds, then I will point out that that gets us nowhere: it is simply an extensional way of saying that God is necessary. You have also faied to distinguish God from such ‘garden variety’ necessary beings as numbers and sets.

Divine simplicity implies no real distinctions in God, and thus no real distinction between essence and existence. It is the identity of essence and existence in God that is the root, source, ground of the divine necessity. The problem is that we, with our discursive intellects, cannot understand how this could be. Anything we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as nonexistent. (Hume) The discursive intellect cannot grasp the possibility of a simple being, and so it cannot grasp the possibility of a necessary concretum. Here then we have the makings of an argument that, in reality, every concretum is contingent, which is equivalent to the negation of (4).

So if one philosopher urges (3) and his interlocutor (4), and neither can convince the other, then the two are in a standoff.

Now you may quibble with my examples, but there are fifty more I could give (and you hope I won’t).

Sartorial Incongruity and TDS

There’s President Trump in his expensive bespoke suit with a ridiculous red cap on his head, a “prole cap” — one size fits all! — emblazoned with “Trump was right about everything.” Gaucherie, braggadocio, exaggeration. Lefties and never-Trumping righties are ‘triggered,’ albeit in different ways, by these low-class characteristics and hate him in consequence. Their mindless hatred blinds them to the great things Mr. Trump has done for the USA and the world. Wittingly or unwittingly he drives our political enemies crazy while we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable enjoy the show. You won’t find TDS in the DSM, but it is undeniably real. How else do you explain the puerile histrionics of “Tampon Tim” Walz and the rest of his clownish colleagues?

Let me mention just two great things Trump has accomplished. He sealed the U. S. border and he set back the Iranian nuclear program for years to come. Both of these accomplishments, neither of which any Democrat could pull off, have benefited both us and the world. How does the securing of our borders benefit the world? It should be obvious: the survival of Western civilization, resting as it does on two main pillars, one Judeo-Christian, the other Graeco-Roman, depends on the USA. If we fall, it falls. No other Anglospheric nation is up to the job.  The mother country, in particular, is fast becoming a woke joke.