Retractiones – Maverick Philosopher

An Appeal to Democrat Voters

Righteously pissed off by the depredations of our political enemies and their long train of outrageous lies, abuses, and slanders, my tendency is to urge a girding of the loins for a long battle in which we give them a taste of their own 'medicine.' But there is a complementary approach that may work with the less vicious and self-enstupidated among them. After all, the majority of Dems are useful idiots who are, all things considered, not all that bad as people and somewhat open to a honeyed appeal. All avenues toward the betterment of our constitutional republic and the world as a whole must be explored. Hear Steve Cortes:

In the aftermath of any big victory in life, there is a natural human tendency to gloat a bit…or maybe a lot. But in the wake of the amazing Trump and America First electoral success of November 5th, those of us in the patriotic populist movement should, instead, make a humble, thoughtful, and heartfelt appeal to our fellow citizens who voted for the Democrats, but are persuadable.

Millions of them, no doubt, voted blue with the best of patriotic intentions. Many of them simply pursued the comfortable path of well-worn political behavior patterns. Others were surely misled by the constant barrage of propaganda from legacy media platforms. Still others live busy and complicated lives – especially in stressful times like these, created by Biden and Harris – and do not follow politics closely, for understandable reasons.

For all of these voters, here are the three most compelling reasons to at least consider joining our America First cause — and to vote Republican into the future.

A Minor Correction Anent ‘Absurd’ with a Little Help from Mark Rothko

In a Substack entry I distinguished four senses of 'absurd,' the logico-mathematical, the semantic, the existential, and the ordinary. About the existential sense I had this to say:

3) Existential. The absurd as the existentially meaningless, the groundless, the brute-factual, the intrinsically unintelligible. The absurdity of existence in this sense of 'absurd' is what elicited Jean-Paul Sartre's and his character Roquentin's nausea. The sheer, meaningless, disgusting, facticity of the chestnut tree referenced in the eponymous novel, for example, was described by Sartre as de trop and as an unintelligible excrescence.

That's pretty good, but it leaves out an important nuance. In "A Case in Reason for God's Existence?" Joseph Donceel, S. J. points out that it is not enough for a thing to count as absurd in what I am calling the existential sense that it be meaningless or unintelligible. For the absurd is not simply that which makes no sense; it is that which makes no sense, but ought to, or is supposed to. To say that life is absurd is not merely to say that it has no point or purpose; it is to say that it fails to meet a deep and universal demand or expectation on our part that it have a point or purpose. Donceel:

No one calls decorative painting absurd, but many people feel that most modern painting is absurd, because they expect it to make sense for them, and it does not. We understand what is meant when people say of reality or of life that it does not make sense. But their claim that it is absurd implies that it should make sense, that they expect it to make sense. (God Knowable and Unknowable, ed. Roth, Fordham UP, 1973, p. 181.)

The decadent 'art' of Mark Rothko et al., which is presumably intended to be art and not mere wall decoration or ornamentation meant to add a splash of color to an otherwise drab room, reflects the absurdist sensibility of the post-modern era. Healthy folk — as opposed to neurotic 'transgressive' NYC hipsters — find it absurd because it defeats their expectation that art should 'mean something' not just in the sense of representing something, but in the sense of representing something that inspires and uplifts and is beautiful in the Platonic sense that brackets (encompasses) the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

At the opposite end of the spectrum there is kitsch, the king of which is Thomas Kinkade. Bang on the hyperlink to see samples of his work. I am not for kitsch, but I will take it over the decadent stuff. It is less fraying of the fabric of civilization. At the present time, the anti-civilizational forces are on the march and in dire need of stiff-necked opposition. But now I am straying into aesthetics about which I know little. But that doesn't stop me since, as you know, one of my mottoes is:

Nescio, ergo blogo.

The Rachel Dolezal of American Politics

Here

You say you've forgotten who Dolezal is is? Too much Twitter! A weapon of mass distraction. Soon you'll be a tweeting twit with a mind fit only to flit.

Rachel Dolezal, The Black White Woman. I make a mistake at the end of this post that I will now correct. I represent Elizabeth Warren as the author of Pow Wow Chow when in fact she is merely a contributor to that by-now-famous recipe book. Her contribution, however, a recipe for lobster bisque — Cherokees were into haute cuisine? — was plagiarized!

Dolezal, Knowledge, and Belief

And while we are on the topic of Dem femmes, Hillary still doesn't get it. More here.

Rachel Dolezal Special Declared "White Privilege"

I Eat My Words!

With pleasure.

In January, in Trump's Traction and Conservative Inaction, I wrote:

. . . there is no way Trump can beat Hillary. He has alienated too many groups, women and Hispanics to name two. Add to that the fact that large numbers of conservatives will stay home, and Hillary is in like Flynn. Mark my words.

My prediction was not irrational; it was just WRONG. I underestimated the Jacksonian surge of support. It will be instructive to analyze how so many could have been so wrong.

In any case, Hillary the Corrupt is out like Stout, and thank God for that. What we have here is a stinging rebuke to the hate-America Left and their NeverTrump enablers.

I am already feeling Schadenfreude in anticipation of the howling of the likes of George Will and his band of bow-tied pussy-wussies.

This raises a very interesting question. Is there a righteous form of Schadenfreude or is it in every one of its forms as morally objectionable as I make it out to be here?

Brian Leiter, in despair at the election result, quotes Sartre, "We must live without hope." On the contrary. We now have real change and reason for hope. Maybe the Ladder Man — so-called because of his careerism and obsession with ratings and rankings — will leave the country. One can hope.

Change and hope.

UPDATE:

This just in from London Karl:

Am loving it, absolutely loving it. All those smug, arrogant, close-minded left/liberal patronising jerks getting it in the nuts.

Schadenfreude aplenty to be had here in this hysterical piece and the comments.

I May Have to Eat My Words

In January, in Trump's Traction and Conservative Inaction, I wrote:

. . . there is no way Trump can beat Hillary. He has alienated too many groups, women and Hispanics to name two. Add to that the fact that large numbers of conservatives will stay home, and Hillary is in like Flynn. Mark my words.

A bold asseveration somewhat justified by what had transpired up to that point. Things look differently now. I may have to eat my words. And I hope I do. I also wrote:

Let's hope that Trump does not get the Republican nomination. But if he gets it, you must vote for him. For the alternative is far worse. Politics is a practical business. It is not about maintaining your ideological purity, but about getting something accomplished in murky and complex circumstances. It is always about the lesser or least of evils. Trump would be bad, but Hillary worse.

That's right except that I no longer use the misleading phrase 'lesser of evils.' It seduces people into asking, 'Why vote for either if both are evil?' when in the vast majority of political contests like these none of the contenders is evil in a way that would justify voting for neither.

Not 'lesser of evils' but 'better and worse.' Trump is better than Hillary policy-wise even if not much better character-wise.

The state is not about to wither away. She shall abide, to oppress, but also to guide and provide. It obviously matters who has his hands on the levers of power. It matters who sets the tone and influences the culture in Washington and beyond.

Some are tempted to withdraw and have nothing to do with politics. That would make sense if one could expect politics to reciprocate by having nothing to do with one. A highly unreasonable expectation, especially when the Dems are in power. Never forget that the Left is totalitarian to the core and will lie brazenly to achieve its ends. A good example is the pack of brazen lies put forth by Obama and Co. to ram through ObamaCare, the unaffordable Affordable Care Act.

Hillary too lies brazenly as should be evident to all by now when it is helpful unto her personal ambition and the leftist agenda (in that order).

You know what you have to do come Tuesday.

Abraham, Isaac, and Trumping ‘From Above’: A Partial Retraction

I say on my Welcome page:

I write about what interests me whether I am expert in it or not. Some find this unseemly; I do not. I oppose hyper-professionalization and excessive specialization. Every once in a while I post something that is mistaken, someone corrects me, and I learn something. I admit mistakes if mistakes they be.

Time to admit a mistake. Johannes Argentus comments and I respond (in blue):

Dear Dr. Vallicella,

You wrote in your June 01 post:

"To get a feel for how there might (epistemic use of 'might') be a trumping or suspension of the moral/ethical, consider the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac. This is an example of what could be called 'trumping from above.' On Dylan's telling, God said to Abraham: "Kill me a son!" But Isaac was innocent and in killing him Abraham would be violating God's own Fifth Commandment. Had Abraham slaughtered his son he could not have justified it in terms of the moral code of the Decalogue; nor can I imagine any consequentialist line of moral reasoning that could have justified it; but he could have justified it non-morally by saying that God commanded him to sacrifice his son and that he was obeying the divine command. If God is absolutely sovereign, then he is sovereign over the moral code as the source of its existence, its content and its obligatoriness. He is outside of it, not subject to it; it is rather subject to him and his omnipotent will. We are in the vicinity of something like Kierkegaard's "teleological suspension of the ethical" as conveyed in Fear and Trembling."

The key factor for a correct understanding of God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac is the timing of the event with relation to God’s gradual revelation, and with relation to human reason’s gradual illumination and liberation, by God’s word, from the darkness into which it had fallen since the time of original sin.

According to the timing of the event with relation to God’s gradual revelation, there was no problem in God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son because it was centuries before He decreed the prohibition of human sacrifices in the Law given through Moses (Deut 18:10). Thus the command did not contradict any positive divine law known by Abraham.

BV: Excellent criticism. I mistakenly ignored the proper sequence of Biblical events. Contrary to what I suggested, God was not putting Abraham in a situation where he had a non-moral reason to override a known divine absolute moral command. Nevertheless, in commanding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac God was commanding an absolutely immoral act. The act-type — slaughtering an innocent human being — was no less ojectively immoral for being unknown to Abraham.

And according to the timing of the event with relation to human reason’s gradual liberation from darkness, there was no problem either because that process was just starting, and Abraham lived within a culture in which it was a common practice to sacrifice the firstborn son to the personal or local god. Thus the command did not contradict the clouded knowledge that Abraham had of natural law.

The command, then, was not a case of 'trumping from above' a rationally discovered or divinely revealed moral commandment, because Abraham was not aware of any such commandment forbidding the sacrifice of his firstborn, which in his cultural environment was a fairly common practice.

BV: Argentus is right.

Neither does the command necessarily show that God is arbitrarily sovereign over the moral code, which would be the case only if the event had taken place after the revelation of the Decalogue. Rather, the event is wholly dependent on Abraham's (and his contemporaries') state of ignorance regarding moral law and more broadly the meaning of life, which required the establishment of the only base on which the whole edifice could be built: absolute trust and obedience to Absolute Being.

Thus, the pedagogical and "that-time-only" nature of the event is fully consistent with the notion that moral law is inherent to human nature and therefore fully determined once human nature is, so that the acts forbidden by the Ten Commandments are not morally bad because they are forbidden, but rather they are forbidden because they are bad, because they are against human nature. Thus, God is absolutely sovereign to design human nature (except of course for logical contradictions), but once designed, He cannot contradict the moral law inherent in that nature because He cannot contradict Himself. Moral design is already in the ontological design.

BV: Whatever the solution to the Euthyphro Dilemma, it remains the case that God commanded Abraham to do something objectively immoral, even if Abraham did not know it was immoral or believed it was not immoral.