Continental Philosophy Criticized – Page 2

Is Reason a White Male Euro-Christian Construct?

I read John D.Caputo years ago, in the late '70s, in connection with work I was doing on Heidegger. I read a couple of his early Heidegger articles and a couple of his books. One of them, The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought, is in my library. Caputo seemed worth reading at the time. But he appears to have gone off the deep end. This from a New York Times Opinionator interview entitled "Looking White in the Face":

John D. Caputo: “White” is of the utmost relevance to philosophy, and postmodern theory helps us to see why. I was once criticized for using the expression “true north.” It reflected my Nordo-centrism, my critic said, and my insensitivity to people who live in the Southern Hemisphere. Of course, no such thing had ever crossed my mind, but that points to the problem. We tend to say “we” and to assume who “we” are, which once simply meant “we white male Euro-Christians.”

Postmodern theory tries to interrupt that expression at every stop, to put every word in scare quotes, to put our own presuppositions into question, to make us worry about the murderousness of “we,” and so to get in the habit of asking, “we, who?” I think that what modern philosophers call “pure” reason — the Cartesian ego cogito and Kant’s transcendental consciousness — is a white male Euro-Christian construction.

White is not “neutral.” “Pure” reason is lily white, as if white is not a color or is closest to the purity of the sun, and everything else is “colored.” Purification is a name for terror and deportation, and “white” is a thick, dense, potent cultural signifier that is closely linked to rationalism and colonialism. What is not white is not rational. So white is philosophically relevant and needs to be philosophically critiqued — it affects what we mean by “reason” — and “we” white philosophers cannot ignore it.

This is truly depressing stuff. It illustrates the rarefied, pseudo-intellectual stupidity to which leftist intellectuals routinely succumb, and the level to which humanities departments in our universities have sunk. We speak of 'true North' in distinction from 'magnetic North,' which is what a compass needle points to. The difference in location between the two is called declination and must be taken into account for accurate navigation. The phrase 'true North' has nothing to do with Nordo-centrism or insensitivity to those who live in the Southern Hemisphere. It is just a physical fact that compass needles track magnetic North, and that magnetic North is not the same as true North.

I feel as if I should apologize for pointing out something so obvious, but in the lunatic precincts of the postmodern, the obvious gets no respect. Does Caputo perhaps imagine that the Earth and its magnetic properties are social constructs? I hope not. One wonders what is going on in his head. Perhaps he is afraid of hurting the feelings of people who live in the Southern Hemisphere by his use of 'true North.' But for them to take offense at that phrase would be like a black person taking offense at 'black hole,' which, mirabile dictu, has actually happened. The phrase is from cosmology. Roughly, a black hole is a region of spacetime from which nothing can escape including no form of electromagnetic radiation such as light. Black holes have nothing to do with people of African-American descent or with black whores: 'hos' in black street idiom. And this is the case even when 'black hole' is used metaphorically to refer to, say, a windowless office.

It is the same with 'true North.' If used literally, it does not mean that the North is 'true' and the South 'false' or any such nonsense. And the same goes for the phrase used metaphorically.

People with basic common sense know that there is such a thing as taking inappropriate offense and that one should not cater to the whims of the absurdly sensitive. In this connection I remind you of the case of the poor schlep who lost his job because of his use of the perfectly innocuous English word 'niggardly,' which, of course, has nothing to do with 'nigger.' By the way, I just mentioned the word 'nigger'; I did not use it. I said something about the word; I did not apply it to anyone. (Is your typical Continental philosopher aware of the use-mention distinction?)

The purveyors of POMO need to be reminded that thinking is not association of ideas: if you associate 'niggardly' with 'nigger,' that is your problem and no basis for an argument to the conclusion that a user of 'niggardly' is a racist.

Should we question our presuppositions? Of course. That is essential to the philosophical enterprise. But one ought to do this without absurd exaggerations ("the murderousness of 'we' ") and double standards. I say we ought to question our presuppositions. Who am I referring to with my use of 'we'? To those of us who aspire to be reasonable and to seek the truth. I am afraid I don't see the "murderousness" of that. And I don't see how a white person is barred from referring to rational truth-seekers by his use of 'we' just because he or she is a white person.

Now to our title question. Is pure reason a white male Euro-Christian construction? This is just nonsense and is really beneath refutation. But given the sorry state of things, refutation is needed. Caputo is alluding to Kant's 1781 (2nd ed. 1787) Critique of Pure Reason. And Caputo must know that for Kant 'pure' means: free of empirical elements (CPR B 3) and that pure reason is the faculty that "contains the principles whereby we know anything absolutely a priori." (CPR A 11 B 24) This has nothing to do with racial purity.

Caputo is here instantiating the role of Continental mush-head: he is not thinking but engaging in argument by association, which is not argument at all, any more than another Continental favorite, argument by incantation, is argument at all.

But it is worse than this because Caputo is engaged in a sort of philosophical smear job. Here we have a great philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who is undertaking to evaluate the cognitive 'reach' of pure reason. His project is to assess the capacity of reason unaided by sensory input to secure knowledge in special metaphysics (metaphysica specialis) whose main objects are God, the soul, and the world as a whole. Corresponding to these objects are the highest concerns of humanity: God, freedom, and immortality.

And what does Caputo do? He conflates the purity that Kant speaks of with racial purity and then goes on to associate, scurrilously and irresponsibly, pure reason with "terror and deportation" and "colonialism." This of course is right out of the cultural Marxist's playbook.

For a leftist, anything a reasonable person says is 'code' for something else. The leftist cannot take anything at face value as meaning what it obviously means. He is out to debunk and deconstruct and unmask. As cultural Marxists, they are out to cut through 'false consciousness' and 'bourgeois ideology.' Theirs is the hermeneutics of suspicion. So 'pure reason' cannot mean what Kant says it means; it has to mean something else: it is a "cultural signifier" for terror and deportation and what all else. Or if I speak of truth and of seeking truth, then my use of 'truth' really signifies power and white privilege and what all else.

And when I refute the POMO nonsense and show that it is self-contradictory, that too cannot be taken at face-value as meaning what it manifestly means and showing what it manifestly shows; it has to be 'deconstructed' as masking some sort of power play or re-affirmation of 'white privilege.'

Is Caputo trying to convince us of certain truths? Then he presupposes truth, in which case truth cannot be a social construct. It is not that there are no social constructs; the point is that not everything can be. Truth, for example. Who constructs it? White males collectively? But if this is so, then that is the case beyond all constructions, in which case truth cannot be a white male construction or a construction by any person or persons. Truth is absolute by its very nature.

Could reason be a social construct? When Caputo tries to convince us of something he appeals to our reason to convince us of what he takes to be reasonable and true. He gives arguments and adduces various considerations. He makes assertions that purport to be true. (And, of course, in purporting to be true, they purport to be objectively and absolutely true, which is to say: not merely true for me or for us or for this social class or that historical epoch.) But how can Caputo, who is a white male who enjoys all sorts of perquisites and privileges, appeal to reason if reason is a white male Euro-Christian construct?

Of course, it may be that Caputo has no intention of appealing to reason. It could be that his POMO verbiage is nothing but obfuscatory rhetoric that masks a bid for power for him and his ilk. I prefer not to believe this, if possible; I met the man once and he seemed like a decent human being.

Is Caputo appealing to a 'true reason' that is not a white male Euro-Christian construct? But he can't do this by his own constructivist, relativist principles. For then he would have to put a different construct in its place, say reason as a black female Afro-Islamic construct. But then he won't be able to convince us or himself of anything rationally. For that different construct would just be another contingent, unbinding framework. If there is a 'true reason,' then it cannot be any sort of contingent human construct vriable across races andf sexes, regions and religions.

The problem, very simply, is that if reason is culturally or racially or in any way relative, then there is no such thing as reason. Reason is like truth in this respect. Truth is absolute by its very nature; talk of relative truth is nonsense. Similarly, reason is normative and impartially adjudicative by its very nature. Talk of reason as reflective of class interests or racial biases is nonsense. So either there is no reason or it is not a social construct. And if it is not a social construct, then of course it is not a white male Euro-Christian construct.

Carnap and Clarity

This entry is installment #2 in a Carnap versus Heidegger series. Here is the first in the series. It couldn't hurt to at least skim through it. Part of what I am up to is an exploration of the origin and nature of the analytic-Continental split. To quote from the first installment:

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. And in fairness to Heidegger, we should note that he thinks he is doing something more radical than metaphysics. Metaphysics for Heidegger is onto-theology. Metaphysics thinks Being (das Sein) but always in reference to beings (das Seiende); it does not think Being in its difference from beings. Perhaps in a later post I will venture to explain what that means.)

Analytic philosophers prize clarity. And rightly so. For one thing, "clarity is courtesy," as Ortega y Gasset once said. (I suppose the Spaniard would count as Continental, and not just geographically.) One more parenthetical remark before getting down to business: I wish Erich Pryzwara had received the message that clarity is courtesy. Then perhaps he would not have written anything as unreadable as his Analogia Entis. Even the charitable German Thomist Josef Pieper so characterized it.

I need waste no words defending the thesis that clarity in thought and expression are to be preferred to obscurity. Avoidable obscurity must be avoided. But there is an empty and trivial clarity. A clarity worth pursuing is a clarity with content. Clarity ought not be pursued as an end in itself or as a cognitive value that trumps every other cognitive value. While avoidable obscurity must be avoided, some obscurity is bound to be unavoidable if our inquiries are serious, sustained, and worth pursuing. Such obscurity must be tolerated.

One day in class I was praising clarity and its importance. A student responded that reality is messy. My counter-response was that, while reality is messy, it does not follow that our thinking about it should also be. On the contrary! The present point, however, is that thinking worth doing ought to penetrate as far as it can into reality, as rich, dark, and messy as it is, and if some obscurity proves unavoidable, then so be it.

Rudolf Carnap's brand of clarity is sterile, arbitrary and as artificial as fluorescent light. What he does is enforce or impose an arbitrary standard of clarity across the board without regard to differences in subject matter. We ought to say about clarity what Aristotle said about precision near the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics: "it cannot be expected in the treatment of all subjects alike . . . ." (1094b10-15) Ethics, the Philosopher said, cannot be treated with mathematical precision. The same goes for metaphysics.

"Many words of metaphysics," Carnap tells us, are "devoid of meaning." ("The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language" in A. J. Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism, The Free Press, 1959, p. 65.) He chooses as his first example 'principle' "in the sense of principle of being, not principle of knowledge or axiom." (65) But since 'principle' in the ontological sense is not much used these days outside of scholastic circles, let me substitute 'ground' used ontologically. Thus there is a large body of literature in which truth-makers are described as the 'ontological grounds' of truths. It is clear that Carnap's accusations of (cognitive) meaninglessness apply as much to grounds as to principles. They also apply to other words and phrases in the vocabulary of truth-maker theorists such as 'makes true' and 'in virtue of.' For example, 'Peter is smoking' is true in virtue of Peter's smoking, or the fact of Peter's smoking makes true 'Peter is smoking.' Apart from truth-maker theory, 'in virtue of' has long been a favorite of philosophers. Some think it a 'weasel phrase' best banished from the vocabulary of philosophy. I disagree.

"But these words are ambiguous and vague." (65) Thus Carnap. Insofar as they have a clear meaning, their meaning is empirical, not metaphysical; insofar as they are metaphysical, they are meaningless. I would put the Carnapian argument as follows in terms of the following dilemma:

Either metaphysical grounding (as it occurs in the putative relation between a truth-maker and a truth-bearer) is a causal relation or it is a logical relation. But it is neither. It is not a relation of empirical causation. Truth-maker theorists insist on this themselves. Nor is it a logical relation such as entailment. Logical relations hold between and among truth-bearers; a truth-maker, however, though proposition-like on some theories, is not a truth-bearer. 'Truth-making,' then has neither the meaning of 'causing' nor the meaning of 'entailing.'

Yet, no criterion is specified for any other meaning. Consequently, the alleged 'metaphysical' meaning which the word is supposed to have here in contrast to the mentioned empirical meaning, does not exist. [. . .] The word is explicitly deprived of its original meaning . . . . (65)

The word 'making' is stripped of its empirical meaning, but no new meaning is supplied. The word becomes an "empty shell." (66) The associations and feelings attached to the word used in the old empirical way remain in play. But these do not give meaning to the word used in the new 'metaphysical' way: "it remains meaningless as long as no method of verification can be described." (66)

The same holds for all specifically metaphysical terms. There are one and all "devoid of meaning." (67) Carnap mentions the following: the Idea, the Absolute, the Unconditioned, the Infinite, and "the being of being," which I take to be a reference to Heidegger's das Sein des Seienden, which is better translated as 'the Being of beings.' But also: non-being, thing-in-itself, absolute spirit, objective spirit, essence, being-in-itself, being-in-and-for-itself, the Non-Ego.

These terms are meaningless because empirical truth-conditions of their use cannot be supplied. Hence the alleged statements of metaphysics which contain them are one and all pseudo-statements that are bare of sense and assert nothing. (67)

Perhaps the best response to Carnap and those of his ilk is brutal contradiction: "You're just wrong!" The words you would dismiss as meaningless just obviously have meaning and you're just obviously wrong to think otherwise.

For example, it is clear enough what it means to say that some truth-bearers need truth-makers, that a sentence such as 'Peter is smoking' cannot just be true but is true because of something external to the sentence, something external on the side of the object, not on the side of the subject, i.e., on the side of the one who asserively utters the sentence. And it is clear enough that this use of 'because' is not an empirical-causal use of the term. It is also clear enough what 'in virtue of' and 'making' mean in this context.

Another devastating response to Carnap is the obvious point that his Verifiability Criterion of Cognitive Significance cannot satisfy its own demand. "Every cognitively meaningful statement is either empirically verifiable in principle or a logical/analytic truth" is neither empirically verifiable in principle nor a logical/analytic truth. Therefore, the Verifiability Criterion is cognitively meaningless. So does it then have a merely emotive meaning? Is is a mere suggestion as to what to allow as meaningful? If the latter, then no thank you!

It's an easy rebuttal, but none the worse for that. Sometimes, simplex sigillum veri.

Carnap is to philosophy what a philistine is to the arts: just crude and ignorant . So I dismiss him as a philosophistine. I coined this word ten years or so ago in a polemic against David Stove another philosophistine whose crudity is on shameful display in his The Plato Cult.

My rule is: no polemics in philosophy. But if the other guy starts it . . . . Or the shade of the other guy . . . .

Against Historical Relativism: Adorno on What is No Longer Believable After Auschwitz

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno is exasperating but exciting. Although as sloppy as one expects Continental thinkers to be, he is nonetheless a force to be reckoned with, a serious man who is seriously grappling with ultimates at the outer limits of intelligibility. Derrida I dismiss as a bullshitter; indeed, to cop a line from John Searle, he is someone who "gives bullshit a bad name." But I can't dismiss Adorno. I confess to being partial to the Germans. They are nothing if not serious, and I'm a serious man. Among the French there is an excess of façade and frippery. But now let's get to work — like good Germans.

Suppose we focus on just part of one of Adorno's serpentine sentences. This is from Negative Dialektik (Suhrkamp, p. 354):

Dass das Unveraenderliche Wahrheit sei und das Bewegte, Vergaengliche Schein, die Gleichgueltigkeit von Zeitlichem und ewigen Ideen gegeneinander, ist nicht laenger zu behaupten . . . .

Adorno is telling us that

It can no longer be asserted that the true is the unchangeable while the mobile and mutable is mere appearance, or that eternal Ideas and the temporal realm are indifferent to each other . . . .

So what is our man saying? He is saying that after Auschwitz — where 'Auschwitz' collects all the genocidal and totalitarian horrors of the Third Reich — one can no longer take Platonism seriously, or the people's Platonism either, Christianity. And indeed most traditional philosophy, consisting as it does, in Whitehead's phrase, of a series of footnotes to Plato. The old metaphysics is dead, the metaphysics according to which Being itself has a positive and hence affirmable character. An experience has refuted the old metaphysics, the experience of Auschwitz.

But if it can no longer be asserted that that the true is the immutable, then it once could be asserted. And indeed, by 'assert' is intended assert with truth or at least justification. Note the ambiguity of 'assertible' as between capable of being asserted and worth of being asserted. And make a meta-note of how a broadly analytic thinker like me pedantically points out something like this whereas your typical Continental head would find my procedure boorish or somehow gauche. "How low class of you to be so careful and precise!"

But I digress. My point, again, is that if a proposition can no longer be asserted and believed, then it once could be asserted and believed. But if a metaphysical proposition was once true or believed with justification, then it is now true or believable with justification. For a metaphysical assertion is necessarily true if true at all. The structure of being cannot be contingent upon our contingent experiences, even experiences as shattering as that of the Nazi horror. (It is telling of course that Adorno, good man of the Left that he is, does not mention the Stalinist horrors which were known since 1956 — but that is a separate post.)

What I am objecting to is Adorno's apparent historical relativism. By this I mean the view that truth itself is historically conditioned and thus capable of being different in different historical epochs. Metaphysical conceptions are of course historically variable, but not their objects, the structures of being. Adorno is doing the the Continental Shuffle, sliding from the epistemic/doxastic to the ontic and back again. That views of truth are historically conditioned is trivial and scarcely in need of being pointed out; but that truth itself is historically conditioned is incoherent.

More fundamentally, what I am objecting to is Adorno's lack of any argument for his view that historical experience can refute a metaphysical thesis and his lack of consideration of the sort of (obvious) objection I am now raising.

The Continental 'trope' or 'move' — such-and-such can no longer be believed –ought to be defended or dropped. Why, for example, should it no longer be possible to believe in God after the horrendous events of the 20th century when people believed in God at the time of the Lisbon earthquake and the time of the Bubonic plague? What is so special about these 20th century horrors? The fact of evil may well rule out the existence of God, or more generally, the affirmability of Being. But if it does, this is surely no recent development.

The Unlimited Obfuscation of Some Continental Writers

I hesitate to call them philosophers. David Gordon serves up for our delectation and instruction the following tidbit of Continental balderdash (I quote the whole of Gordon's entry and then add a comment of my own):

The philosophy of Roy Bhaskar, who died November 19, would ordinarily hold little interest for readers of the Mises Blog. Bhaskar was a Marxist, who in his later years veered off toward a fuzzy spirituality. It is worth taking note of him, though, because he was an extreme example of a besetting sin of the contemporary academic world. His prose style made him unreadable; and one of his sentences was selected by the journal Philosophy and Literature as the winner of its 1996 Bad Writing Contest. This was the winning sentence:

Indeed dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal — of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and/or psycho-somatically buried source) new and old alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy with its ontic dual; of the analytic problematic laid down by Plato, which Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist monovalent analytic reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling dialectical connection, while in his hubristic claims for absolute idealism he inaugurated the Comtean, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean eclipses of reason, replicating the fundaments of positivism through its transmutation route to the superidealism of a Baudrillard.

To call this 'bad writing' and 'unreadable' is unduly charitable. I am currently studying Erich Pryzwara's Analogia Entis, trs. Betz and Hart, Eerdman's, 2014. It is poorly written and deserves to be called 'unreadable.' I plan to post on it later. But if you really know your stuff and are willing to read and read and re-read and work very hard, you can more less follow what Pryzwara is saying. His book embodies real thought. The above passage, however, reads like a parody of Continental bullshitting. Continentals love to name-drop. But the above is name-dropping on stilts.

Is This a Joke?

"Principles of Non-Philosophy is a treatise on the method, axioms and objectives of non-philosophy and represents François Laruelle's mature philosophy."

That sounds like a joke. Maybe it is. With Continental bullshitters you never know.

Here. Via Andrew Sullivan. HT: Dave Lull. I am surprised that NDPR published a review of this book, and an uncritical one at that.

Deconstructing God: Gutting Interviews Caputo

Another in the NYT Opiniator series. This one is particularly bad and illustrates what is wrong with later Continental philosophy. Earlier Continental philosophy is good: Brentano, Meinong, Husserl, early Heidegger, early Sartre, and a whole host of lesser lights including Stumpf, Twardowski, Ingarden, Scheler, von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, et al. The later movement, however, peters out into bullshit with people like Derrida who, in the pungent words of John Searle, "gives 'bullshit' a bad name."

This is the third in a series of interviews about religion that I am conducting for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is John D. Caputo, a professor of religion and humanities at Syracuse University and the author of “The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion.”

Gary Gutting: You approach religion through Jacques Derrida’s notion of deconstruction, which involves questioning and undermining the sorts of sharp distinctions traditionally so important for philosophy. What, then, do you think of the distinction between theism, atheism and agnosticism?

John Caputo: I would begin with a plea not to force deconstruction into one of these boxes. I consider these competing views as beliefs, creedal positions, that are inside our head by virtue of an accident of birth. There are the people who “believe” things from the religious traditions they’ve inherited; there are the people who deny them (the atheism you get is pegged to the god under denial); and there are the people who say, “Who could possibly know anything about all of that?” To that I oppose an underlying form of life, not the beliefs inside our head but the desires inside our heart, an underlying faith, a desire beyond desire, a hope against hope, something which these inherited beliefs contain without being able to contain.

One could be forgiven for stopping right here, though I read the whole thing. First of all, it is simply false to maintain that one is a theist or an atheist or an agnostic "by virtue of an accident of birth." Some are brought up theists and become atheists or agnostics. Some are brought atheists and become theists or agnostics. And so one. It is also wrong for Caputo to imply that those brought up theist or atheist can have no reasons for their theism or atheism. Then there is the silly opposing of beliefs and desires, head and heart. And the talk of a form of life as if it does not involve beliefs. Then the empty rhetoric of desire beyond desire. Finally, the gushing ends with the contradictory "contain without being able to contain."

The interview doesn't get any better after this. But there is an insight that one can pick out of the crap pile of mush and gush: there is more to religion than doctrinal formulations: the reality to which they point cannot be captured in theological propositions.

Retractio 3/11. Joshua H. writes,

As one of your loyal "continental"-trained readers, I must say I agree that Caputo's performance in the NYT elicits a rather terrible odor of self-congratulatory BS. But surely "later" continental philosophy as a whole doesn't suffer from this unfortunate illness?! Gadamer, Frankfurt School, Ricoeur, among others? Surely Gadamer-Habermas and Habermas-Ratzinger are some of the most interesting debates the discipline has produced in the last 50+ years?

As someone who, back in the day, spent his philosophical time mainly on Gadamer and Habermas and Adorno and Horkheimer and Levinas and Ricoeur, et al., I must agree that Joshua issues a well-taken corrective to what I hastily wrote above at the end of a long day of scribbling. The later movement cannot be dismissed the way I did above. I would, however, maintain that the quality declined as the movement wore on and wears on.

I will also hazard the observation, sure to anger many, that just as one becomes more conservative and less liberal with age, and rightly so, one becomes more analytic and less Continental, and rightly so. It is the same with enthusiasm for Ayn Rand and Nietzsche. Adolescents are thrilled, but as maturity sets in the thrill subsides, or ought to.

I present some reasons for my aversion to much of the later Continental stuff — an apt word — in The Trouble with Continental Philosophy: Badiou.

Analytic versus Continental Joke

I found it here:

There is an old joke that goes "the Anglo-Saxon philosopher will accuse the continental of being insufficiently clear, while the continental philosopher accuses the Anglo-Saxon of being insufficiently."

Another Specimen of Bad Continental Philosophy: Slavoj Zizek on Christian Universalism

Over lunch a while back, a young friend asked me what I thought of Zizek. "Not much," was my reply. Here is a bit of justification, an old post (20 September 2004) from my first weblog.

……………..

Slavoj Zizek in On Belief (Routledge, 2001, pp. 143-144) has this to say:

What is perceived here as the problem is precisely the Christian universalism: what this all-inclusive attitude (recall St. Paul’s famous "There are no men or women, no Jews and Greeks") involves is a thorough exclusion of those who do not accept inclusion into the Christian community. In other "particularistic" religions (and even in Islam, in spite of its global expansionism), there is a place for others, they are tolerated, even if they are condescendingly looked upon. The Christian motto "All men are brothers," however, means ALSO that "Those who are not my brothers ARE NOT MEN." [Emphasis in the original.] Christians usually praise themselves for overcoming the Jewish exclusivist notion of the Chosen People and encompassing all of humanity – the catch here is that, in their very insistence that they are the Chosen People with the privileged direct link to God, Jews accept the humanity of the other people who celebrate their false gods, while Christian universalism tendentially [sic! tendentiously?] excludes non-believers from the very universality of humankind.

What a delightfully seductive passage!

What Zizek is saying here is that the Christian universalism expressed by "All men are brothers" excludes non-Christians from the class of human beings. Zizek supports this surprising assertion with an argument. Made explicit, the argument is that

1. All men are brothers
Therefore
2. All who are not my brothers are not men.
But
3. All who are not Christians are not my brothers.
Therefore
4. All who are not Christians are not men.

Having made Zizek’s argument explicit, we can easily see what is wrong with it. The problem is (3). Without (3), one cannot validly infer the conclusion (4). But (3) is false: no Christian holds that all who are not Christians are not his brothers; they are his brothers whether or not they accept Christianity. For whether or not they accept Christianity they are sons of a common Father, God. Or if you insist that (3) is true, I will say that there is an equivocation on ‘brother’ as between (2) and (3). In one sense, two people are brothers if they have a common father. In this sense, all men are brothers if they have a common father, i.e., God. In a second sense, two people are brothers if they are members of a common organization or religion. Two teamsters, for example, are union brothers even if they do not share a common earthly father. The same for two members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In sum, Zizek makes a highly dubious assertion and then tries to support it with a worthless argument.

It is important to see that he really is giving an argument in the above passage, but that, like many Continentals, he argues in a slip-shod, half-baked way. It’s as if he wants the advantange of an argument without having to do the hard analytic work. In this regard, the above passage is characteristic of a lot of Continental philosophy.

On Throwing Latin, and a Jab at the ‘Analysts’

If you are going to throw Latin, then you ought to try to get it right. One of my correspondents sent me an offprint of a paper of his which had been published in American Philosophical Quarterly, a very good philosophical journal. The title read, Creation Ex Deus. The author's purpose was to develop a notion of creation out of God, as opposed to the traditional notion of creation out of nothing (ex nihilo). He knew that 'God' translates as Deus, and that 'out of' is rendered by ex. Hence, ex Deus. But this is bad Latin, since the preposition ex takes the ablative case. Deus being a second declension masculine noun, its ablative form is Deo. Ex Deo would have been correct. Mistakes like this are not as rare as they ought to be, and we can expect more of them in the future.

It says something that the error just mentioned was caught neither by the author, nor by the editor, nor by the referees, nor by the proofreader. It says something in particular about 'analytic' philosophers. I am sorry to report that many of them are ignoramuses (indeed, ignorabimuses) wholly innocent of foreign languages, knowledge of history (both 'real' history and the history of ideas), and of high culture generally. One name analyst implied in print that the music of John Lennon was on the level of that of Mozart. There are Ph.D.s in philosophy who have never read a Platonic dialogue, and whose dissertations are based solely on the latest ephemera in the journals. Here, as elsewhere, ignorance breeds arrogance. They think they know what they don't know. They think they know what key theses in Kant and Brentano and Meinong mean when they have never studied their texts. And, not knowing foreign languages, they cannot determine whether or not the available translations are accurate. Not knowing the sense of these theses, they read into them contemporary notions. And if you told them that this amounts to eisegesis, they wouldn't know what you are talking about.

Not all analytic philosophers are ignoramuses, of course. Hector-Neri Castañeda, for example, had a grounding in classics. When he founded Noûs, a top analytic journal, in 1967, he placed Nihil philosophicum a nobis alienum putamus on the masthead. It is a take-off on Terence, philosophicum replacing humanum. It is telling that the Latin motto was removed by Castañeda's successors after his untimely death in September, 1991. Princeton University, I understand, removed the language requirement for the Ph.D. in philosophy in 1980. An appalling development. It has been said that if you don't know a foreign language, you don't know your own.

The fact that many analytic philosophers lack historical sense, knowledge of foreign languages, and broad culture is of course no excuse to jump over to the opposite camp, that of the 'Continental' philosophers. For lack of historical sense, they substitute historicism, which is just as bad. For lack of linguistic competence, they substitute a bizarre linguisticism in which the world dissolves into a text, a text susceptible of endless interpretation and re-interpretation. For lack of broad culture, they substitute a super-sophistication that empties into a miasma of sophistry and relativism. Worse, much of Continental philosophy, especially much of what is written in French, is border-line bullshit. Indeed, to cop a line from John Searle, one he applied to Jacques Derrida, Continental philosophy gives bullshit a bad name. Some substantiation here. It is therefore no surprise that the Continental types jump to embrace every loony idea that emanates from the Left.

You can see that I am warming to my theme. I am also brushing in very broad strokes. But details and documentation are readily supplied and have been supplied elsewhere on this site. In short, a pox on both houses. Be a maverick.

What inspired this post was a query of a correspondent. He wanted to know how to render 'seize the world' into Latin. Well, we know that 'seize the day' goes into Latin as carpe diem. And we should have picked up by now that 'world' is mundus. 'Seize' takes the accusative, and since mundus is a second declension masculine noun, we get: Carpe mundum. If I am wrong about this, Michael Gilleland will correct me.

And another thing. I find it appalling that so many people nowadays, college 'educated' people, are completely innocent of grammatical terminology. Words like 'genitive,' 'dative,' 'ablative,' etc. elicit a blank stare. Grammar being a propaedeutic to logic, it is no wonder that there are so many illogical people adrift in the world.

Now have a nice day. Seize it and squeeze it.

Nausea at Existence: A Continental Thick Theory

A reader wants me to comment on the analytic-Continental split. Perhaps I will do so in general terms later, but in this post I will consider one particular aspect of the divide that shows up in different approaches to existence. Roughly, Continental philosophers espouse the thick theory, while analytic philosophers advocate the thin theory. Of course there are exceptions to this rule: Your humble correspondent is an analytic thick theorist and so is Barry Miller. Whether there are any Continental thin theorists I don't know.

Why should analytic philosophers prefer the thin theory? Part of the reason, some will say, is that analysts tend to be superficial people: they are logically very sharp but woefully lacking in spiritual depth. They are superficial specimens of what Heidegger calls das Man, the 'they': lacking authenticity, they float along on the superficies of things. Bereft of a depth-dimension in themselves, they are blind to the world's depth-dimension. Blind to the world's depth-dimension, they are blind to existence. A Heideggerian might say that they are not so much blind as forgetful: they have succumbed to die Vergessenheit des Seins. The analysts, of course, will not admit to any such deficiencies of sight or memory. They will turn the tables and accuse Continentals such as Heidegger and Sartre of being muddle-headed mystics and obscurantists who commit school-boy blunders in logic. (Carnap's famous/notorious attack on Heidegger is a text-book case.)

So we have a nice little fight going, complete with name-calling. Perhaps a little exegesis of a passage from Sartre will help clarify the issue. I have no illusions about converting any thin theorist. I aim at clarity, not agreement. I will be happy if I can achieve an exact understanding of what we are disagreeing about and why we are disagreeing. When that goal is attained we can cheerfully agree to disagree.

So let's consider the famous 'chestnut tree' passage in Jean-Paul Sartre's novel, Nausea. The novel's protagonist, Roquentin, is in a park when he has a bout of temporary aphasia while contemplating the roots of a chestnut true. Words and their meanings vanish. He finds himself confronting a black knotty mass that frightens him. Then he has a vision:

It left me breathless. Never, until these last days, had I understood the meaning of 'existence.' I was like all the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, all dressed in their spring finery. I said, like them, 'The ocean is green; that white speck up there is a seagull,' but I didn't feel that it existed or that the seagull was an 'existing seagull'; usually existence hides itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can't say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it. When I believed I was thinking about it, I must
[have] believe[d] that I was thinking nothing, my head was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word 'to be.' Or else I was thinking . . . how can I explain it? I was thinking of belonging, I was telling myself that the sea belonged to the class of green objects, or that that green was a part of the quality of the sea. Even when I looked at things I was miles from dreaming that they existed; they looked like scenery to me. I picked them up in my hands, they served me as tools, I foresaw their resistance. But that all happened on the surface.

If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered, in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form that was added to external things without changing anything in their nature. And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence
had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder — naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness. (p. 127 tr. Lloyd Alexander, ellipsis in original.)

This marvellous passage records Roquentin's intuition (direct nonsensory perception) of Being or existence. (It would be interesting to compare in a subsequent post Jacques Maritain's Thomist intuition of Being with Sartre's existentialist intuition of Being.) Viewed through the lenses of logic, 'The green sea exists' is equivalent to 'The sea is green' and 'The sea belongs to the class of green objects.' For the (standard) logician, then, 'exists' and cognates is dispensable and the concept of existence is fully expressible in terms of standard logical machinery. Anything we say using 'exists(s)' we can also say without using 'exist(s). To give another example, 'Dragons do not exist' is logically equivalent to 'Everything is not a dragon.' If we want, we can avoid the word 'exist(s)' and substitute for it some logical machinery: the universal quantifier and the tilde (the sign for negation) as in our last example.

But why would a man like Peter van Inwagen — the head honcho of the thin theorists — want to avoid 'exist(s)'? Because he wants to show that existence is a thin notion: there is nothing more to it than can be captured using the thin notions of logic: quantification, negation, copulation, and identity. He wants to show that there is no reason to think that there is any metaphysical depth lurking behind 'exist(s)' and cognates, that there is no room for a metaphysics of existence as opposed to a logic of 'exist(s)'; nor room for any such project as Heidegger's fundamental ontology (Being and Time) or Sartre's phenomenological ontology (Being and Nothingness).

And why does the thin theorist go to all this deflationary trouble? Because he lacks this sense or intuition of existence that philosophers as diverse as Wittgenstein, Maritain, and Sartre share, a sense or intution he feels must be bogus and must rest on some mistake. He fancies himself the clear-headed foe of obfuscation and he sees nothing but obfuscation in talk of Being and existence.

But as I have been arguing ad nauseam (so to speak) over many a blog post, published article and book, sentences like 'The sea is green' presuppose for their truth that the sea is an existing sea. Compare the reference above to an existing seagull. And, as Sartre has Roquentin says, "usually existence hides itself." It hides itself from all of us most of the time when we are immersed in what Heidegger calls average everydayness (alltaegliche Durchschnittlichkeit, vide Sein und Zeit), and existence hides itself from the logician qua logician all the time. For all of us most of the time, and for logicians all of the time, existence is "nothing, simply an empty form."

In fact, that is a good statement of the thin theory: existence is nothing at all, apart from an empty logical form. Sea, seagull, bench, tree, root — but no existence of the sea, of the seagull, of the bench, etc. Sea, seagull, bench, tree, root, and some logical concepts. That's it.

"Usually existence hides itself." This invites mockery from the thin theorists. What? Existence plays hide-and-seek with us?! [Loud guffaws from the analytic shallow-pates.] To the existence-blind it must appear a dark and indeed incomprehensible saying. But of course to the blind that which is luminous must appear dark. Perhaps we can recast Sartre's loose and literary formulation in aseptic terms by saying that existence is a hidden and taken-for-granted presupposition of our discourse that for the most part remains hidden and taken-for-granted. Let me explain.

'The sea is green' and 'The green sea exists' are logically equivalent. But this equivalence rests on a tacit presupposition, namely, that the sentences are to be evaluated relative to a domain of existing items. The reason we can make the deflationary move of replacing the latter sentence with the former is because existence is already present, though hidden, in 'The sea is green.' 'The sea is green' can be parsed as follows: The sea is (exists) & the sea (is) green, where the parentheses around 'is' indicate that it functions as a pure copula, a pure predicative link and nothing more. The parsing makes it clear that the 'is' in 'The sea is green' exercises a dual function: it is not merely an 'is' of predication: it is also an 'is' of existence. Therefore, translation of 'The green sea exist' as 'The sea is green' does not eliminate existence as the thin theorist falsely assumes.

In material mode, the point is that nothing can have a property unless it exists. The sea cannot be green or slimy or stinky unless it exists. This existence of the sea, seagull, etc., however, is a presupposition that remains hidden as long as we comport ourselves in Heidegger's "average everydayness" manipulating things for our purposes but not wondering at their very existence. We have to shift out of our ordinary everyday attitude in order to be struck by the sheer existence of things. Perhaps the thin theorist is incapable of making that shift. But he really doesn't need to if he has followed my reasoning.

What the thin theorist does is to substitute logical Being for real Being. Note that I am not endorsing Sartre's theory of real Being: that it is an absurd excrescence, de trop (superfluous), unintelligible, etc. What I am endorsing is his insight that real Being is extralogical, that it is not a thin notion exhausted by the machinery of logic. Thus I am endorsing what is common to Sartre, Maritain, Wittgenstein, and others, namely, that existence is real not merely logical.

But what if you are one of those sober types who has never experienced anything like Heideggerian Angst or Sartrean nausea or Wittgenstein's wonder at the existence of the world? Well, I think you could still be brought by purely discursive methods to understand how existence cannot reduce to a purely logical notion. We shall see.

Blanshard on Santayana’s Prose Style

Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style (Indiana University Press, 1967), pp. 49-50. Originally appeared in 1954. Emphasis added.

The most distinguished recent example of imaginative prose in philosophy is certainly George Santayana. Santayana was no man's copy, either in thought or in style. He consistently refused to
adopt the prosaic medium in which most of his colleagues were writing. To read him is to be conducted in urbane and almost courtly fashion about the spacious house he occupies, moving noiselessly always on a richly figured carpet of prose. Is it a satisfying experience as one looks back on it? Yes, undoubtedly, if one has been able to surrender to it uncritically. But that, as it happens, is something the philosophical reader is not very likely to do. Philosophy is, in the main, an attempt to establish something by argument, and the reader who reads for philosophy will be impatient to know just what thesis is being urged, and what precisely is the evidence for it. To such a reader Santayana seems to have a divided mind, and his doubleness of intent clogs the intellectual movement. He is, of course, genuinely intent on reaching a philosophic conclusion, but it is as if, on his journey there, he were so much interested also in the flowers that line the wayside that he is perpetually pausing to add one to his buttonhole. The style is not, as philosophic style should be, so transparent a medium that one looks straight through it at the object, forgetting that it is there; it is too much like a window of stained glass which, because of its very richness, diverts attention to itself.

There is no reason why a person should not be a devotee of both truth and beauty; but unless in his writing he is prepared to make one the completely unobtrusive servant of the other, they are sure to get in each other's way. Hence ornament for its own beautiful irrelevant sake must be placed under interdict. Someone has put the matter more compactly: "Style is the feather in the arrow, not the feather in the hat."

It seems to me that far too much Continental philosophy is plagued by the same "divided mind" and "doubleness of intent."

A Note on Analytic Style

The precise, explicitly argued, analytic style of exposition with numbered premises and conclusions promotes the meticulous scrutiny of the ideas under discussion. That is why I sometimes write this way. I know it offends some. There are creatures of darkness and murk who seem allergic to any intellectual hygiene. These types are often found on the other side of the Continental divide. "How dare you be clear? How dare you ruthlessly exclude all ambiguity thereby making it impossible for me to yammer on and on with no result?"

Ortega y Gasset somewhere wrote that "Clarity is courtesy." But clarity is not only courtesy; it is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of resolving an issue. If it be thought unjustifiably sanguine to speak of resolving philosophical issues, I have a fall-back position: Clarity is necessary for the very formulation of an issue, provided we want to be clear about what we are discussing.

Continental Philosophy Criticized: Levinas

Another example of Continental obscurity in my ongoing series comes from a philosopher I mainly respect, Emmanuel Levinas. The following passage is from Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, tr. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985, p. 106). It first appeared in French in 1982. It goes without saying that the numerals in brackets are my interpolation.

[1] The "invisible God" is not to be understood as God invisible to the senses, but as [2] God non-thematizable in thought and nonetheless as [3] non-indifferent to the thought which is not thematization, and [4] probably not even an intentionality.

Got that? I will go through this passage bit by bit to show you what is wrong with this sort of writing and thinking.

Ad 1. To be properly formulated, this first clause must contain a word like ‘merely’ right after ‘understood.’ God is obviously invisible to the senses, and a formulation that suggests that he is not is inept. This sort of mistake is often made. For example, if what you want to say is that religion is not merely matter a matter of doctrine (because it is a matter of practice as well), then don’t say: Religion is not a matter of doctrine. For if you say the latter, then you say something that is just plain false.

Ad 2. We are being told that God is non-thematizable in thought. In plain English: God cannot be a theme or topic or object of thought. I am very sympathetic to this idea if what is intended is that God cannot be reduced to a mere object of thought whose being is exhausted by his objecthood. But since we are talking about God right now, there is some sense or other in which God is an object of thought. In some sense, we are thematizing God; we are thematizing him as a being whose being surpasses his thematicity.

You will note that I am now starting to write like a Continental philosopher. I know the idiom and can break into it when it suits me. I know their typical moves, althought they wouldn’t say ‘move’ inasmuch as that suggests something rigorous and logical like chess — and we can’t have that. The point, however, is that there is a problem here, and Levinas and Co. don’t do enough — or much of anything — to bring it into the open. The problem is to explain how we can think correctly of God as nonthematizable in thought if God has this very property. Or at least that is one aspect of the problem.

Ad 3. We are being told that there is a non-thematizing or non-objectifying mode of thinking and that God is non-indifferent to this mode of thinking. But what does ‘non-indifferent’ mean? Does it mean not different, so that the non-objectifying thinking of God just is God? Or does it perhaps mean that God cares about this mode of thinking? Who knows? And that’s the problem. Levinas takes no pains to be clear about what he means. And the context does not help.

Ad 4. Finally, we are informed that the non-objectifying mode of thinking is "probably not even an intentionality." ‘Intentionality’ is a philosopher’s term of art for the peculiar of-ness, aboutness, or directedness of (some) mental states to their objects. So what Levinas is saying is that the non-objectifying mode of thinking lacks aboutness. But then what is it? Something like a mute sensory state, a pain, for example? Clearly, there is some sense in which a non-objectifying mode of thinking about God is about God – and about nothing else. This sense needs clarification.

To sum up. I am not trying to ‘refute’ Levinas. I like him and agree with some of his ideas in Totality and Infinity, his critique of Heidegger for example. I am not charging him with incoherence or self–contradiction above. What I am objecting to is the lack of time and energy spent on clarification, and on setting forth clearly the problems and questions implied by his ideas. Brentano, Husserl, and the early Sartre were clear-headed thinkers. After that, the early standards go by the board.

More on Texts and Translations

A regular reader responds to On Reading Philosophical Texts in Their Original Languages:

Nice piece on the necessity of studying texts in their original languages. The very question puzzles me. Why would someone assume he knows what Kant said and meant by reading Kemp Smith? I don't know what shape the Kant MSS are in—are there serious problems with some works?— but the problem of working with translations becomes even more acute with classical texts like Cicero and Aristotle. Often the texts are in bad shape with extensive lacunae and obvious ancient editioral tampering. Restorations rely on ancient paraphrases in languages like Arabic or Syriac. Or the restorations are pure conjectures (the 19th century German scholars were very quick to restore).

All of this is concealed in a typical English translation. The Greekless young scholar thinks he is reading Aristotle, but perhaps only 80-90% of his text is well established. Crucial passages often turn out to be corrupt in big or small ways. The scholar who wishes to be able to say "Aristotle said…" instead of "W.D. Ross' translation says…" needs to be familiar with his text at the level of the so-called critical or variorum edition, where (hopefully) all the textual problems are owned up to and the scholar can make his own informed judgment about what the best text is.

For this reason, college reading editions like the Loeb texts are not good enough, because they are not critical texts. Some editors do a better job than others in noting problems, but the Loeb Greek or Latin is once again often a heavily restored text. You need to work with the Teubners or the OCT's or special critical editions by individual scholars.

The truly dedicated scholar should in fact go one step further back and consult the MSS themselves. Often no one has taken a good critical look at the MSS in the years since some German did the original MSS work in the 19th century. The Germans made mistakes! And they restored and otherwise edited. The MS is not the same in many ways as their transcription. With the new optical technology, it is time and overtime for scholars to revisit the MSS and recover better texts. Where some competent scholar has just done this work, perhaps new MSS work is unnecessary, but where the critical text is 100+ years old, it is not reasonable to trust it.

If you are a young philosopher or classicist and reading this story does not excite and challenge you, if you are too unmotivated to master a language and its texts, then for God's sake don't pretend to be doing scholarship in the history of philosophy with a bunch of translations at hand. I'm preaching to the converted, right?

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The Trouble with Continental Philosophy: Tillich

Today’s example of Continental muddle-headedness is not from a philosopher, strictly speaking, but from a theologian who was influenced by a philosopher, Heidegger, and who has had a great deal of influence on philosophers. Paul Tillich (1886-1965) writes:

Atheism can only mean the attempt to remove any ultimate concern – to remain unconcerned about the meaning of one’s existence. Indifference toward the ultimate question is the only imaginable form of atheism. Whether it is possible is a problem which must remain unsolved at this point. In any case, he who denies God as a matter of ultimate concern affirms God, because he affirms ultimacy in his concern. (Dynamics of Faith; quoted from White, Eternal Quest, p. 94)

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