It only got worse under his 'leadership.' David Harsanyi:
. . . the gratuitous groveling we do to allay the sensitivities of violence-prone Muslims (because who else are we attempting to placate?) has become a cringe-worthy aspect of American policy long before Barack Obama ever showed up. When the Bush administration, in the middle of the Danish carton controversy, claimed that “Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images, as anti-Christian images or any other religious belief,” it was equally wrong. As far as the state goes, they’re all “acceptable.”
But only one of those can put you on kill lists.
After the deadly terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, France, it’s worth remembering that there is no amount of conciliating rhetoric that will stop attacks on our liberal values – even undermining them. Which is something we’ve done.
Remember Molly Norris whose name appears on the above poster? I wrote about her on 16 September 2010:
Cartoonist Molly Norris Driven into Hiding by Muslim Extremism
Among the great religions of the world, where 'great' is to be taken descriptively not normatively, Islam appears uniquely intolerant and violent. Or are there contemporary examples of Confucians, Taoists, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, or Christians who, basing themselves on their doctrines, publically issue and carry out credible death threats against those who mock the exemplars of their faiths? For example, has any Christian, speaking as a Christian, publically put out a credible murder contract on Andres Serrano for his despicable "Piss-Christ"? By 'credible,' I mean one that would force its target, if he were rational, to go into hiding and erase his identity?
UPDATE 9/19/2010. Commentary by James Taranto here.
Reading John Anderson has enhanced my sense of the centrality of the question of levels of reality for those of us who view philosophy as a quest for the Absolute and a project of self-transformation. Of course it was more or less obvious to me all along, Plato's Allegory of the Cave being the richest depiction we have of the two-world theme.
Essential to religion is the belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order" (Varieties of Religious Experience, 53), a higher order, above or behind the phenomenal order of time and change, doubt and confusion, mendacity and evil.
The unseen order is to be affirmed without the phenomenal order being denied. So there are two levels of reality. How exactly they are related is the problem, or one problem. We will pursue the problem in due course in connection with John Passmore's discussion of the "Two-Worlds Argument" in his Philosophical Reasoning.
Memory loss points to the materiality of mind while memory's exercise points to its immateriality. Mind is mysterious, but memorial mind is even more so, situated as it is at the crossroads of intentionality and time.
A entirely typical example of liberals who want to do good, so long as it is with other people's money. And that reminds me of a cartoon that should resonate at this time of year.
John Anderson's rejection of God is radical indeed. A. J. Baker writes:
Anderson, of course, upholds atheism, though that is a rather narrow and negative way of describing his position given its sweep in rejecting all rationalist conceptions of essences and ontological contrasts in favour of the view that whatever exists is a natural occurrence on the same level of existence as anything else that exists. From that position it follows, not merely that the traditional 'proofs' of the existence of God can be criticised, but that the very conception of a God or a supernatural way of being is an illogical conception — God is an ontological category mistake as we may say. (Australian Realism: The Systematic Philosophy of John Anderson, Cambridge UP, 1986, 118-119)
If someone said that the average thought has such-and-such a volume, you would not say that he was factually incorrect; you would say that he had committed a category mistake inasmuch as a thought is not the sort of item that could have a volume: it is categorially disbarred from having a volume. Someone who says that God exists is saying that there exists something whose mode of being is unique to it and that everything other than God has a different mode of being. But the idea that there are two or more modes of being or two or more levels of reality, according to Anderson, is 'illogical" and ruled out by the exigencies of rational discourse itself. To posit God, then, is to involve oneself in a sort of ontological category mistake, in the words of A. J. Baker.
Let's see if we can understand this. (This series of entries is booked under Anderson, John.)
The Andersonian thesis is an exceedingly strong one: the very concept of God is said to be illogical. It is illogical because it presupposes the notion, itself illogical, that there are levels of reality or modes of existence or ways of being. What makes the argument so interesting is the implied claim that the very nature of being rules out the existence of God. So if we just understand what being is we will see that God cannot exist! This is in total opposition to the tack I take in A Paradigm Theory of Existence (Kluwer 2002) wherein I argued from the nature of existence to (something like) God, and to the tack taken by those who argue from truth to God.
The Andersonian argument seems to be as follows:
1. There is a single way of being.
2. The single way of being is spatiotemporal or natural being.
3. If God exists, then his way of being is not spatiotemporal or natural.
Therefore
4. God does not exist.
Note that the argument extends to any absolute such as the One of Plotinus or the Absolute of F. H. Bradley or the Paradigm Existent of your humble correspondent. Indeed, it extends to any non-spatiotemporal entity.
The crucial premise is (1). For if 'way of being' so much as makes sense, then surely (3) is true. And anyone who accepts (1) ought also to accept (2) given that it is evident to the senses that there are spatiotemporal items. So the soundness of the argument pivots on (1). But what is the argument for (1)?
Note that (1) presupposes that 'way of being' makes sense. This is not obvious. To explain this I first disambiguate 'There are no ways of being.' Someone who claims that there are no ways of being could mean either
A. There are no ways of being because there is a single way of being.
or
B. There are no ways of being because the very idea of a way of being, whether one or many, either makes no sense or rests on some fallacious reasoning: either a thing exists or it does not. There is no way it exists. We can distinguish between nature (essence) and existence but not among nature, existence and way of existence. What is said to belong to the way a thing exists really belongs on the side of its nature. A drastic difference such as that between a rock and a number does not justify talk of spatiotemporal and non-spatiotemporal ways of being: the drastic difference is just a difference in their respective natures.
Many philosophers have championed something like (B). (See Reinhard Grossmann Against Modes of Being. Van Inwagen, too, takes something like the (B)-line.) If (B) is true, then Anderson's argument collapses before it begins. But I reject (B). So I can't dismiss the argument in this way.
Anderson's view is (A). The problem is not with the concept of a way of being; the problem is with the idea that there is more than one way of being. This is clear from his 1929 "The Non-Existence of Consciousness," reprinted in Studies in Empirical Philosophy, wherein we read, "If theory is to be possible, then, we must be realists; and that involves us in . . . the assertion of a single way of being (as contrasted with 'being ultimately' and 'being relatively') [a way of being] which the many things that we thus recognise have." (SEP 76) Thus what Anderson opposes is a duality, and indeed every plurality, of ways of being, and not the very notion of a way of being. One could say that Anderson is a monist when it comes to ways of being, not a pluralist. To invoke a distinction made by John Passmore, one to be discussed in a later entry, Anderson is an existence-monist but not an entity-monist.
Now what's the argument for (1)? As far as I can tell the argument is something like this:
5. Truth is what is conveyed by the copula 'is' in a (true) proposition.
6. There is no alternative to 'being' or 'not being': a proposition can only be true or false.
Therefore
7. There are are no degrees or kinds of truth: no proposition is truer than any other, and there are no different ways of being true. (5, 6)
8. (True) propositions are concrete facts or spatiotemporal situations: propositions are not intermediary entities between the mental and the extramental. They are not merely intentional items, nor are they Fregean senses. The proposition that the cat is on the mat just is the concrete fact of the cat's being on the mat. And the same goes for the cat: the cat is identical to a proposition. Anderson's student, Armstrong, holds that a thick particular such as a cat is a proposition-like entity, a state of affairs; but Anderson holds the more radical view that a cat is not merely proposition-like, but is itself a proposition. But if a cat is a proposition, then
9. Being (existence) = truth.
Therefore
1. There is a single way of being. (from 7, 9)
Therefore, by the first argument above,
4. God does not exist.
Critique
A full critique is beyond the scope of this entry especially since brevity is the soul of blog, as some wit once said. But what I am about to say is, I think, sufficient to refute the Andersonian argument.
If everything exists in the same way, what way is that? Anderson wants to say: the spatiotemporal way. He is committed to the proposition that
A. To be is to be spatiotemporally
where this is to be construed as an identification of being/existence with spatiotemporality. Good classical metaphysician that he is, Anderson is telling us that the very Being of beings, das Sein des Seienden, is their being spatiotemporal.
Now there is a big problem with this. A little thought should convince you that (A) fails as an indentification even if it succeeds as an equivalence: one cannot reduce being/existence to spatiotemporality. For one thing, (A) is circular. It amounts to saying that to exist is to exist in space and time. Now even if everything that exists exists in space and time, the existence of that which exists cannot be identified with being in space and time. So even if (A) is true construed as telling us what exists, it cannot be true construed as telling us what existence is. A second point is that, while it is necessary that a rock be spatiotemporal, there is no necessity that a rock exist, whence it follows that the existence of a rock cannot be identified with its being spatiotemporal.
Now if (A) fails as an identification, it might still be true contingently as an equivalence. It might just happen to be the case that, for all x, x exists iff x is spatiotemporal. But then it cannot be inscribed in the nature of Being (as a Continental philosopher might say) that whatever is is in space and time. Nor can it be dictated by "the nature and possibility of discourse" (SEP 2) or by the possibility of "theory" (SEP 76). Consequently, the Andersonian battle cry "There is only a single way of being!" cannot be used to exclude God.
For any such exclusion of God as an "ontological category mistake" can only proceed from the exigencies of Being itself. What Anderson wants to say is that the very nature of Being logically requires the nonexistence of God. But that idea rests on the confusion exposed above. For his point to go through, he needs (A) to be an identification when at most it is an equivalence.
The quality of 'elite' publications such as The New Yorker leaves a lot to be desired these days. Adam Gopnik's recent outburst on Newtown is one more example of a downward trend: it is so breathtakingly bad that I am tempted to snark: "I can't breathe!" Could Gopnik really be as willfully stupid as the author of this piece? Or perhaps he was drunk when he posted his screed one minute after midnight on January 1st.
Luckily, I needn't waste any time disembarrassing this leftist goofball of his fallacies and fatuosities since a professional job of it as been done by John Hinderaker and Charles Cooke.
Again I ask myself: why is the quality of conservative commentary so vastly superior to the stuff on the Left?
A tip of the hat and a Happy New Year! to Malcolm Pollack from whom I snagged the above hyperlinks. Malcolm is a very good writer as you can see from this paragraph:
The New Yorker‘s essayist Adam Gopnik — whom I have always considered to be quite lavishly talented, despite his dainty and epicene style — beclowned himself one minute into this New Year with a stupendously mawkish item on gun control. It is so bad, in fact — so completely barren of fact, rational argument, or indeed any serious intellectual effort whatsoever — that I was startled, and frankly saddened, to see it in print. It is the cognitive equivalent, if one can imagine such a thing hoisted into Mr. Gopnik’s rarefied belletrist milieu, of yelling “BOSTON SUCKS” at a Yankees-Red Sox game, at a time when Boston leads the division by eleven games.
Leftists like to call themselves 'progressives.' We can't begrudge them their self-appellation any more than we can begrudge the Randians their calling themselves 'objectivists.' Every person and every movement has the right to portray himself or itself favorably and self-servingly. "We are objective in our approach, unlike you mystics."
But if you are progressive, why are you stuck in the past when it comes to race? Progress has been made in this area; why do you deny the progress that has been made? Why do you hanker after the old days?
It is a bit of a paradox: 'progressives' — to acquiesce for the nonce in the use of this self-serving moniker – routinely accuse conservatives of wanting to 'turn back the clock,' on a number of issues such as abortion. But they do precisely that themselves on the question of race relations. They apparently yearn for the bad old Jim Crow days of the 1950s and '60s when they had truth and right on their side and the conservatives of those days were either wrong or silent or simply uncaring. Those great civil rights battles were fought and they were won, in no small measure due to the help of whites including whites such as Charlton Heston whom the Left later vilified. (In this video clip Heston speaks out for civil rights.) Necessary reforms were made. But then things changed and the civil rights movement became a hustle to be exploited for fame and profit and power by the likes of the race-baiters Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
Read almost any race screed at The Nation and similar lefty sites and you wil find endless references to slavery and lynchings and Jim Crow as if these things are still with us. You will read how Trayvon Martin is a latter-day Emmett Till et cetera ad nauseam.
For a race-hustler like Jesse Jackson, It Is Always Selma Again. Brothers Jesse and Al and Co. are stuck inside of Selma with the Oxford blues again.
In case you missed the allusions, it is to Bob Dylan's 1962 Freewheelin' Bob Dylan track, "Oxford Town" and his 1966 Blonde on Blonde track, "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again."
Wake up you 'progressive' Rip van Winkles! It is not 1965 any more.
I now hand off to Rich Lowry who comments on the movie Selma.
This is a revision of an entry originally posted on 11 February 2010.
Ernst Bloch, like Theodor Adorno, is a leftie worth reading. But here are two passages replete with grotesque exaggeration and plain falsehood. Later, perhaps, I will cite something from Bloch that I approve of. The offensive passages are from the essay, "Karl Marx, Death, and the Apocalypse" in Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (Herder and Herder, 1970, p. 32. The translation is by E. B Ashton):
. . . the law as a whole, and the greater part of the criminal law as well, is simply an instrument by which the ruling classes maintain the legal standards that protect their interests . . . If there were no property, there would be no law and no need for its sharp-edged though hollow categories.
No property, no need for law? That is plainly and inexcusably false. Obviously, not all crimes are crimes against property; there are also crimes against persons: rape, assault, battery, murder. Even if the State owned all the cars, there would still be drunk driving. And so on. So even without private property, there would still be the need for laws.
Laws reasonable and just are the positive expressions of (some of) what we believe to morally permissible, impermissible, and obligatory. As along as there is a gap between what people do and what they ought to do and leave undone — that is, as long as people exist — there will be need for positive law, the law posited or enacted by legislatures. And since laws are useless unless enforced, there is need of agencies of enforcement, which are state functions.
But of course the very notion that a society in which no one owned anything would be desirable is ludicrous as well. Private property is the foundation of individual liberty. When the State owns everything and I own nothing, then concretely speaking my liberty is nonexistent. But of course, Bloch, leftist utopian that he is, thinks that the State will wither away:
Though for a time it may continue to function in a bolshevist form, as a necessary transitional evil, in any socialist perspective a true conception of the State demands its withering away — its transformation into an international regulator of production and consumption, an immense apparatus set up to control inessentials and no longer containing, or capable of attracting, anything of import. (p. 33)
Sorry, Ernst, but this is just nonsense. The State cannot both "wither away" and be tranformed into an "immense apparatus" that regulates production and consumption. But even apart from this incoherence, no State powerful enough to establish socialism — which of course requires the forcible redistribution of wealth — is going to surrender one iota of its power, no matter what socialists "demand." Power always seeks its own consolidation, perpetuation, and expansion. That is one thing that Nietzsche got right.
This brings us to the fundamental contradiction of socialism. Since forcible equalization of wealth will be resisted by those who possess it and feel entitled to their possession of it, a revolutionary vanguard will be needed to impose the equalization. But this vanguard cannot have power equal to the power of those upon whom it imposes its will: the power of the vanguard must far outstrip the power of those to be socialized. So right at the outset of the new society an inequality of power is instituted to bring about an equality of wealth — in contradiction to the socialist demand for equality. The upshot is that no equality is attained, neither of wealth nor of power. The apparatchiks end up with both, and their subjects end up far worse off than they would have ended up in a free and competitive society. And once the apparatchiks get a taste of the good life with their luxury apartments in Moscow and their dachas on the Black Sea, they will not want to give it up.
The USSR withered away all right, but not in approved Marxist fashion: it just collapsed under the weight of its own evil and incompetence — with some helpful kicks from Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II.
Albert Camus, one of the luminaries of French existentialism, died on this day in 1960, in a car crash. Not tragically, straining hubristically against limits, but absurdly, a passenger in a recklessly-piloted vehicle. "In his coat pocket was an unused train ticket. He had planned to travel by train with his wife and children, but at the last minute he accepted his publisher's proposal to travel with him.[15]" (Wikipedia)
Here I remember my former colleague, Xavier Ortiz Monasterio, whose philosophical hero was Camus and who also, curiously enough, died on January 4th (2011).
John Williams' 1965 novel Stoner with its overcast feel proved to be a perfect read for a deep and dark December. An underappreciated and unfortunately titled masterpiece, it is about one William Stoner, an obscure professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia. At its publication in '65 it pretty much fell still-born from the press, but the years have been kind to it and it is now valued as the great novel that it is. Unfortunately, Williams, who died in 1994, did not live to see its success.
(4.) John Williams, Stoner (1965). Based on the life of J. V. Cunningham and especially his disastrous marriage to Barbara Gibbs. Easily the best novel ever written about the determined renunciations and quiet joys of the scholarly life. Stoner suffers reversal after reversal—a bad marriage, persecution at the hands of his department chair, the forced breakup of a brief and fulfilling love affair with a younger scholar—but he endures because of two things: his love for his daughter, who wants nothing more than to spend time with her father while he writes his scholarship, and his work on the English Renaissance. His end is tragic, but Stoner does not experience it that way. A genuinely unforgettable reading experience.
"Genuinely unforgettable" sounds like hype, but this is one novel I, for one, will not forget. For more by Myers on Stoner, see here.
My copy of the novel sports a blurb by Myers: "It will remind you of why you started reading novels: to get inside the mystery of other people's lives." Yes.
What is the difference between the philosopher and the novelist? Perhaps this: the philosopher tries but fails to articulate the Impersonal Ineffable; the novelist tries but fails to articulate the Personal Ineffable, the 'inside' of a person's life, the felt quality of it. In both cases, there is the attempt to speak the Unspeakable.
Two very different uses of language and thought in a reach for what is Unreachable by those routes. And perhaps by any route.
Put that it in your pipe, John Anderson. And smoke it.
Communists are not against religion. We are against capitalism.
A communist who is not against religion would be like a Catholic who is not against atheism or a teetotaler who is not against drinking alcoholic beverages.
What we have here is further proof that truth is not a leftist value.
Leftists, like Islamists, feel justified in engaging in any form of mendacity so long as it promotes their agenda. And of course the agenda, the list of what is to be done (to cop a line from V.I. Lenin), is of paramount importance since, as Karl Marx himself wrote, "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it." (11th Thesis on Feuerbach). The glorious end justifies the shabby means.
As for Islamists, their doctrine in support of deception is called taqiyya.
Islamism is the communism of the 21st century.
You should not take at face value anything any contemporary liberal says. Always assume they are lying and then look into it. Obama, of course, is the poster boy for the endlessly repeated big brazen lie. It is right out of the commie playbook. "If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan."
Hypocrites are those who will not practice what they preach. They espouse high standards of behavior — which is of course good — but they make little or no attempt to live in accordance with them. Hypocrisy is rightly considered to be a moral defect. But what are we to say about those people who will not preach what they practice? For want of a better term, I will call them hypocrites in reverse.
Suppose a person manifests in his behavior such virtues as honesty, frugality, willingness to take responsibility for his actions, ability to defer gratification, respect for others, self-control, and the like, but refuses to advocate or promote these virtues even though their practice has led to the person's success and well-being. Such a person is perhaps not as bad, morally speaking, as a hypocrite but evinces nonetheless a low-level moral defect akin to a lack of gratitude to the conditions of his own success.
These hypocrites-in-reverse owe much to the old virtues and to having been brought up in a climate where they were honored and instilled; but they won't do their share in promoting them. They will not preach what they themselves practice. And in some cases, they will preach against, or otherwise undermine, what they themselves practice.
The hypocrite will not honor in deeds what he honors in words. The reverse hypocrite will not honor in words what he honors in deeds.
I am thinking of certain liberals who have gotten where they are in life by the practice of the old-time virtues, some of which I just mentioned, but who never, or infrequently, promote the very virtues whose practice is responsible for their success. It is almost as if they are embarrassed by them. What's worse, of course, is the advocacy by some of these liberals of policies that positively undermine the practice of the traditional virtues. Think of welfare programs that militate against self-reliance or reward bad behavior or of tax policies that penalize such virtuous activities as saving and investing.
