Author: Bill Vallicella

Philosophy is Dialectical and Aporetic

Gustav Bergmann, Meaning and Existence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959, p. vii):

Philosophy is dialectical. This means, among other things, that critical examination of the positions he rejects is an important part of a philosopher's argument for the position he adopts.

I would add that philosophy is also aporetic. The positions a philosopher affirms are responses to problems and cannot be understood otherwise. The problems are logically primary; solutions in the form of theories and theses are logically secondary. As Plato puts it at Theaetetus 155, "wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder."   This passage is expressive of the aporetic sense.

Philosophical Vulgarity

Is it not vulgarity in a philosopher to think that he will settle the ultimate questions in short order? One thinks of the Tractarian Wittgenstein and of Ayn Rand. Connected with this is the philistinism of certain forms of clarity such as that of the logical positivist. One recalls Rudolf Carnap's pathetic refutation of Heidegger. And then there is the vulgarity of the later Wittgenstein's speleo-conservatism which, leaving everything in the Cave just as it was, takes the form, not of facile solutions to problems, but of their very denial.

Kolakowski: No God, No Meaning

Leszek Kolakowski, Freedom, Fame, Lying, and Betrayal: Essays on Everyday Life (Westview 1999), pp. 116-117:

. . . our reason naturally aspires to encompass the totality of being; and our will for order and our need to make sense of existence lead us instinctively to seek that which is both the root and the keystone of existence, and gives it its meaning. Even atheists, Nietzsche among them, knew this: order and meaning come from God, and if God really is dead, then we delude ourselves in thinking that meaning can be saved. If God is dead, nothing remains but an indifferent void which engulfs and annihilates us. No trace remains of our lives and our labours, there is only the meaningless dance of protons and electrons. The universe wants nothing and cares for nothing; it strives toward no goal; it neither rewards nor punishes. Whoever says that there is no God and all is well deceives himself.

Stalin on Philology

For insight into the depredations suffered by science and scholarship in Stalin's USSR, I recommend Chapter 4 of Volume III of Leszek Kolakowski's magisterial Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford, 1978). It is astonishing what happened to literature, philosophy, economics, physics, cosmology, and genetics in the Workers' Paradise. Not even philology was spared. Kolakowski, pp. 141-142:

In the first few days of the Korean War, when international tension was at its height, Stalin added to his existing titles as the leader of progressive humanity, the supreme philosopher, scientist, strategist, etc., the further distinction of being the world's greatest philologist. (As far as is known, his linguistic attainments were confined to Russian and his native Georgian.) In May 1950 Pravda had published a symposium on the theoretical problems of linguistics and especially the theories of Nikolay Y. Marr (1864-1934). Marr, a specialist in the Caucasian languages, had endeavoured towards the end of his life to construct a system of Marxist linguistics and was regarded in the Soviet Union as the supreme authority in this field: linguists who rejected his fantasies were harassed and persecuted. His theory was that language was a form of 'ideology' and, as such, belonged to the superstructure and was part of the class system. . . .

Stalin intervened in the debate with an article published in Pravda on 29 June, followed by four explanatory answers to readers' letters. He roundly condemned Marr's theory, declaring that language was not part of the superstructure and was not ideological in character. . . .

The Marrists were ousted from the domain of linguistics. . . .

Don't say it can't happen here.  It is happening here as witness the ideological tainting of climatology by the gasbags of global warming.

Political Discourse as Unavoidably Polemical: the Converse Clausewitz Principle

A regular reader writes:

I would urge some caution withyour recent political cartoon.  This is only because you may unjustly be treated with less seriousness than your blog deserves if someone wants to peg you in a certain way.  I'm certainly not being PC or suggesting that political satire is problematic — it's primarily a tactical point.

I couldn't agree more, of course, that liberalism (and, in particular, it's diseased and mutated zombie baby of multiculturalism) is attempting, even if unwittingly, to destroy its host body.  The cartoon is a very powerful one, indeed!

Point taken.  It's a tricky issue.  But I think it is important to let our opponents know that we will oppose them.  There is no way not to be unfairly pegged by the nimrods and numbskulls of the Left.  So conservatives shouldn't worry about it.  Janeane Garofalo's comment that the 'tea-baggers' as she derisively refers to them are racists and rednecks is, I am afraid, representative of the scum-baggery widespread on the Left.  We should stand up to them and speak the truth with courage.

Would that I could avoid this stuff.  But I cannot in good conscience retreat into my inner citadel and let my country be destroyed — the country that makes it possible for me to cultivate the garden of solitude, retreat into my inner citadel, and pursue pure theory for its own sake.

Political discourse is unavoidably polemical. The zoon politikon must needs be a zoon polemikon. ‘Polemical’ is from the Greek polemos, war, strife. According to Heraclitus of Ephesus, strife is the father of all: polemos panton men pater esti . . . (Fr. 53) I don't know about the 'all,' but strife  is certainly at the root of politics.  Politics is polemical because it is a form of warfare: the point is to defeat the opponent and remove him from power, whether or not one can rationally persuade him of what one takes to be the truth. It is practical rather than theoretical in that the aim is to implement what one takes to be the truth rather than contemplate it.  'What one takes to be the truth': that is the problem in a nutshell.  Conservatives and leftists disagree fundamentally and nonnegotiably.

Implementation of what one takes to be the truth, however, requires that one get one’s hands on the levers of power. Von Clausewitz  held that war is politics pursued by other means. But what could be called the converse-Clausewitz principle holds equally: politics is war pursued by other means.

A political cartoon like the one I posted surely won't convert any leftists.  How could it, when the 281 patiently argued pages of David Horowitz's Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Regnery 2004) made no impression on them?  The Left cannot be persuaded; they must be opposed.

Zombie Girl: But She’s Not There!

This Halloween Saturday Night at the Oldies features The Zombies,  a 1960's British Invasion rock group that had a couple of smash singles before vanishing into the oblivion whence they sprang. Out and about the other day, surfing the FM band, I came across one of their hits, She's Not There. I have heard it countless times, and it is probably playing in your head right now, dear reader. (I apologize for the meme infestation.)

Suddenly, after all these years, the song assumed New Meaning, Deep Meaning. The Zombies were singing about a philosophical zombie! The refrain, "But she's not there" referred to the light (of consciousness) being out in the poor lass.

A Heideggerian can gloss the situation as follows. To be there is to be a case of Dasein, Da-Sein. The girl was vorhanden all right, and perhaps even zuhanden (as a tool for sexual gratification), aber sie war nicht da, nicht ein Fall vom Dasein. She was a Black Forest zombie.  There was no 'there'  there.

Hartshorne and Immortality Subjective and Objective

The following is excerpted from a letter from an uncommonly astute correspondent, Brodie Bortignon:

. . . some time ago I read a series of your posts on immortality. You covered what are the orthodox views on immortality, including the various materialist denials. What you didn't address was one of the views of some process theologians, one that has a claim to being the 'orthodox' process view. Immortality, for them, is the eternal, unblemished remembrance of the individual in the divine mind: 'objective immortality'. This, they say, is all the immortality worth wanting. In the words of Hartshorne, to desire 'a career after death' is, in a sense, blasphemous: it is the vaunted wish to attain the everlasting existence distinctive of God, and only God. In Dombrowski's words, 'To think that we should live forever in subjective immortality is hubris. What makes God distinctive is necessary existence and other perfections' (Rethinking the Ontological Argument, p.134).

For my own part, this is deeply inadequate. Take the example of a child who was born into an abusive family; she was beaten, sexually assaulted, emotionally abused. She finally dies from neglect. That God will eternally remember her abuse, or that he will somehow 'redeem the memories' he has of her life, seems wholly inadequate–perhaps not to God, but certainly to the girl. Such a view of immortality would then, to my mind, reflect negatively on the love and justice of God, which process theologians of this stripe do not wish to deny. 'God will remember your horrible life' is hardly recompense for that horrible life; there is no redemption there, or justice.

What is supposed to be the philosophical basis for this 'divine memory' view of immortality seems to me obviously unsound. It is based, I think, on a false equivocation between everlastingness and immortality. When people, such as you, speak of personal immortality, they are not speaking of everlastingness in the sense of being wholly uncreated, that is, of having existed at all times necessarily (I assume most people don't believe in the pre-existence of individual souls). There was a time when I came into existence; if human immortality is true, there will never be a time when I go out of existence. But this sort of immortality isn't the same as divine everlastingness. To put it differently, all everlasting persons are immortal, but not all immortal persons are everlasting. This conflation of two clearly distinct types of immortality–created and uncreated–renders the charge of 'hubris' against believers in an unending afterlife philosophically unjustified. Or so it seems to me.

There is one more objection leveled against the believer in subjective immortality by the orthodox process theologian: the claim that such a belief leads to an immoral and socially dangerous renunciation of material existence. But this objection is not unique to process theology, so I won't go into it. Needless to say I don't find it very convincing.

Do you have any opinion on the 'objective immortality' view of process theology?

If I understand it, then, the 'orthodox process view' of Charles Hartshorne and some of his students is that (i) we are objectively immortal in that our lives, in every last detail, continue to exist as objects of divine memory, and that (ii) subjective immortality — immortality as a continuing subject of experience — is neither available to us in the nature of things nor worth wanting.  My reaction to this is that it is a rather sorry substitute for the Genuine Article.

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Why Are We Bothered by our Temporal but not our Spatial Limitations?

Our lives have definite limits both in space and in time. At any given time, my body occupies a vanishingly small portion of space, and if one were to plot my path over time, the resulting space-time ‘trajectory’ would pass through an exceedingly small number of spatiotemporal positions. And yet my spatial limitations do not bother me. What bothers me is that my life is approaching a temporal limit. Setting aside questions of a possible survival of bodily death, this temporal limit looms as a sort of calamity, unlike my spatial limits which I accept with equanimity. It bothers me that my life will not extend much beyond three score and ten, but it bothers me not at all that my height does not extend beyond 6' 1". I suspect that this difference in attitude, the difference between dread at coming to an end in time, and equanimity at coming to an end in space, is shared by most of us. If the difference in attitude is justified, it would seem to point to a fundamental difference between spatial and temporal limits, and thus between space and time.

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Is Religion Dangerous? Is Philosophy?

Is Religion Dangerous? is the title of a very good book by Keith Ward (Lion Hudson, 2006).  It is a good answer to the Dawkins-Hitchens junk-critique of religion as dangerous.  I've got the book on loan from the local university library, but some fellow had the chutzpah to issue a recall.  So I must return the book today, and cannot say anything further about it until I get it back again.

Consider the parallel question, Is philosophy dangerous? 

The question makes little sense seeing as how there is no such thing as philosophy as doctrinal system.  There are only philosophies, many of them, in conflict with one another.  At most one could say that there is philosophy as a type of inquiry.  (But the minute we ask what type of inquiry, by what method or methods, we will find ourselves confronted with a host of competing metaphilosophical  answers.  The nature of philosophy is itself a philosophical question, and metaphilosophy, despite the meta, is a branch of philosophy.)

One cannot therefore sensibly ask whether philosophy is dangerous.  There is no such doctrinal system as philosophy.  One can, however, sensibly ask whether, say, Kant's philosophy is dangerous.  The same goes for religion.  It makes little or no sense to ask whether religion is dangerous.  For there is no such thing as religion as a system of doctrines and practices.  One can however ask, with a show of sense, whether Islam is dangerous.  But even here one must be careful.  No doubt certain sects of Islam are dangerous as hell, but would you say the same about Sufism, Islam's mystical branch?  The Whirling Dervishes of Konya seem not to be much of a threat to anyone.

Why Must the Left be Totalitarian?

A reader inquires,

I was wondering if you could expand on a statement you made in Political Correctness and Gender Neutral Language . . . .  The statement is as follows: "The Left is totalitarian by its very nature and so it cannot leave any sphere of human concern unpoliticized."  I wholeheartedly agree with your statement, but I was wondering if you would explain why the Left must be totalitarian.  All I know right now is that it is, and has been from at least the days of Woodrow Wilson and especially FDR.  

A huge and daunting topic, but I'll hazard a little sketch.

My statement telescopes two subclaims and an inference.  The first subclaim is that the Left is totalitarian, while the second is that it totalitarian by its very nature (as opposed to accidentally).  From these two subclaims the conclusion is drawn that the Left cannot (as opposed to does not) leave any sphere of human concern unpoliticized.

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