For the Left, the Subject is not the Subject: Why Math is ‘Racist’

It has often been noted that for the Left, the issue is not the issue.  David Horowitz:

As President Obama’s political mentor, Saul Alinsky, put it in Rules for Radicals: “One acts decisively only in the conviction that all of the angels are on one side and the devils are on the other.” Here is another statement from Rules for Radicals: “We are always moral and our enemies always immoral.” The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the immorality of the opposition, of conservatives and Republicans. If they are perceived as immoral and indecent, their policies and arguments can be dismissed, and even those constituencies that are non-political or “low-information” can be mobilized to do battle against an evil party. (emphasis added)

"The issue is never the issue." The issue is the gaining and maintaining of power so as to "fundamentally transform America."  For example, if leftists (Democrats in U. S. politics) were really concerned about the spread of COVID-19, they would not open the borders to illegal aliens as the Biden administration has now done. Whatever concern they have about the spread of disease is trumped by considerations of how the problem can be exploited to enhance their power.  Power first, public health second, if that. Never let a crisis go to waste; that is, never let it go unexploited for ideological leverage.  And now a further step left: never let a crisis end.  

It occurred to me the other day that something structurally similar explains the absurd claim that mathematics is racist.  No one believes this, not even the most febrile of leftists, just as no one believes that a serious health crisis will be unaffected by allowing disease-carrying illegal aliens to flow into the country in great numbers unchecked and unvetted. 

So why do so many on the Left  say that math is racist? Because the subject is not the subject. The subject is not mathematics, a discipline about as far removed from ideological taint as can be imagined, but the supposed 'systemic racism' of American society.  There is no such thing, of course, but no matter: invocation of this nonexistent state of affairs is useful for the promotion of the leftist agenda just as he inefficacy of masks and the uselessness and outright deleteriousness of lock-downs is no reason not to make use of masks and lock-downs and draconian rules to further the destruction of the American republic as she was founded to be.

The Joshua Hochschild Affair

The Decline of the West proceeds apace as leftists infiltrate all of our institutions. The universities, for example, have devolved into leftist seminaries in which groupthink reigns and the traditional purposes of the university have been forgotten. Large numbers of contemporary collegians seem to have no appreciation of the classical values of open inquiry and free speech.  I now hand off to Jonathan Turley:

There is a campaign to fire Professor Joshua Hochschild who teaches philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University.  We have seen a number of these campaigns against faculty but the effort against Hochschild is striking because he is denounced for attending the protest in Washington on January 6th even though he is not accused of participating in the riot at the Capitol. The effort is part of a building narrative that anyone protesting the election was an insurrectionist even though the vast majority was peaceful and did not enter the Capitol. Hochschild denounced the riot in a column “Once Upon a Presidency” for the The American Mind. However, his acknowledgment of being present at the protest was enough to launch an effort to fire him.  The only thing missing is a claim that he is “corrupting the youth” with his dissenting views. In this case, it is not hemlock but discharge that is being sought for the teacher.

Read Hochschild's piece at The American Mind and decide for yourself whether his words are the ravings of an 'insurrectionist.'

Merit and ‘Equity’

Those who lack merit too often seek to achieve by political means what they cannot achieve by accomplishing something. Leftists aid and abet them. Equality before the law and equality of opportunity are not enough for leftists: they demand equality of outcome.  But this cannot arise naturally due to differences in interests, attitudes, abilities, and work habits among individuals and groups. So equality must be imposed by force by government. Thus arises what leftists now call 'equity.'  The word is an obfuscatory coinage of the sort one can expect from Orwellian language-abusers. The typical leftist is a stealth ideologue. His mendacity disallows an outright call for  equality of outcome or result, and merit be damned; he smuggles his thought into sleepy heads with 'equity' in violation of one of the traditional meanings of the word, namely, "justice according to natural law or right." (Merriam-Webster) "Equity' as used by a leftist language-hijacker has a meaning opposite to the traditional one. Hence my accusation of Orwellianism. 

(As you know, Orwell himself was not Orwellian, but the opposite. Interestingly, to call him Orwellian would itself be Orwellian.)

Among the things 'equity' obfuscates is the contradiction in enforced equality of result: the governmental agencies of enforcement are vastly unequal in power to those upon whom they seek to impose 'equity.'

Of late, Big Tech and 'Woke' Capital have proven to be exceptions  to the old rule: their Croesian* economic clout  allows them to buy off the governmental enforcers.  More on this, anon.

________________

*An adjectival form of 'Croesus.' You know who he was.  After coining the (non-obfuscatory) adjective, a little Internet pokey-wokey searching assures me that the adjective is in use in such publications as WSJ and Forbes.  

Should Felons Have the Right to Vote?

Obviously not, as I argue at Substack.

But at this late date in the Decline of the West, appeals to reason are becoming increasingly pointless.

From a purely theoretical point of view, it is fascinating to watch one's country enter the ash can of history. It is a philosophical moment  inasmuch as "The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk." (Hegel) Some consolation may be derived therefrom. 

Unfortunately, we are not mere spectators of life's parade; we are condemned to march in it as well.

Having given up polemics for Lent, I will say only this much to you who voted for the Senile Puppet: You have a lot to answer for.

Nominalism, Existence, and Subsistence

Here are five versions of nominalism by my current count:

Mad-Dog Nominalism: No word has an extra-linguistic referent, not even proper names such as 'Peter' and 'Paul.' 

Extreme Nominalism: The only words that have existing referents are proper names like 'Peter' and Paul'; nothing in reality corresponds to such predicates as 'blond.' And a fortiori nothing corresponds to copulae and logically connective words such as 'and' and 'or.'

Nominalism Proper: Particulars (unrepeatables) alone exist: there are no universals (repeatables). This view allows that something in reality corresponds to predicates such as 'blond' as in 'Peter is blond.' It is just that what this predicate denotes is not a universal but a particular, a trope say, or an Aristotelian accident. What I am calling nominalism proper also allows for abstract particulars where an item is abstract just in case it is non-spatio-temporal and causally inert. Mathematical sets, for example are abstract particulars. The set: {x: x is a prime number and x is less than 1o} is abstract because it has no spatiotemporal location and is causally inert. It is particular because it is unrepeatable which is equivalent to saying that it is not possibly such as to be instantiated. Sets have members — the null set aside — but no instances. (Quiz for the reader: tell me the cardinality of the set just mentioned.)

Reistic Nominalism: Attach the codicil 'There are no abstract items' to nominalism proper and the result is reistic nominalism.  On this view only particulars exist, and all particulars are concrete (non-abstract).  Franz Brentano is his later years was a reist.  See the SEP entry, Reism.

Methodological Nominalism: This is the view that we ought never assume that for each word there is a corresponding entity.

I hope no one is crazy enough to be a mad-dog nominalist, and that everyone is sane enough to be a methodological nominalist. The three middle positions, however, are subject to reasonable controversy. They are not obviously false and they are not obviously true. What I am calling extreme nominalism has little to recommend it, but I think nominalism proper is quite a reasonable position.  As it seems to me, there has to be something extra-linguistic (and extra-mental) corresponding to the predicate in 'Peter is blond,' but it is not obvious that it must be a universal.  

Thomas Beale sent me to a blog post of his that begins as follows:

Nominalism is a philosophical doctrine usually understood to entail a rejection of universals, in favour of the belief that only the concrete exists. Universals are understood as instantiable entities, i.e. something like types. Another flavour of nominalism involves rejection of abstracta, such as mathematical entities, propositions, fictional entities (including possible worlds). 

I personally think that most nominalist arguments are straightforwardly wrong, but not for the usual reasons that universals and/or abstracta are said by realists to exist, but for the opposite reason: types and abstracta are just there, even if they don’t ‘exist’, in the sense of being spatio-temporally concretised. The real problem is that we misuse the word exists at least half the time in philosophy. The way we should talk is to say things like: there are universals . . . .

So that’s why nominalists are wrong. There are universals, but they don’t exist. 

First of all, it is no misuse of 'exist/exists' to use these expressions interchangeably with 'is/are.' It is standard English to use them interchangeably. Examples: I am; I exist. God is; God exists. Island volcanoes exist; there are island volcanoes. Unicorns do not exist; unicorns are not; there exist no unicorns; there are no unicorns.  Scollay Square once existed; Scollay Square once was.  Socrates would never have come to be had his parents never met; Socrates would never have come to exist had his parents never met. And so on.

Nevertheless, we are not the slaves of ordinary language and one is free to distinguish between existence and being as Bertrand Russell did in Principles of Mathematics. 

Now if existence is the mode of being enjoyed by all and only spatiotemporal items, then abstracta and transcendent universals do not exist. (A transcendent universal is one that needn't be instantiated to be. An immanent universal is one that cannot be unless it is instantiated.) If transcendent universals are, but do not exist, then they enjoy the mode of being called subsistence. This seems to be what Mr Beale is telling us. 

Here is an interesting question. Suppose with David Armstrong that universals are immanent –ones-in-many, not ones-over many — and that first-order immanent universals are constituents of thick spatio-temporal particulars. Would not these universals be "spatio-temporally concretised" in Beale's words?  Suppose universal U is a constituent of a, b, and c — concrete existing spatiotemporal particulars — and is wholly present in each without prejudice to its unity as a universal. Would U then not be "spatio-temporally concretised" and therefore existent?

One more question. If there were a good argument for either nominalism proper and/or reistic nominalism, would  that not also be a good argument against universals and abstracta that are but do not exist?  He who fights shy of multiplying entities beyond necessity does not care whether the entities exist or subsist.

Finally, aren't there good objections to the notion that there are modes of being?

Too Late Again!

Every once in  while I will get the notion to send  'fan mail' to a philosopher whose work I am reading and for whose work I am grateful.  But I am sometimes too late. The search for an e-mail address turns up an obituary. The last time this occurred was when I wanted to congratulate Robert C. Coburn for his excellent The Strangeness of the Ordinary.  I tell the story here and reproduce the obit.

The other day, Ronald Bruzina's Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology 1928-1938 (Yale UP, 2004) arrived. It's a stomping tome of 627 pages. But it reads like a novel to this old Husserl man who spent a year (1976-1977) in Freiburg im Breisgau where he studied unpublished manuscripts in the Husserl archive there.  Every morning I read a few pages of Bruzina's book hugging myself with mental delight as I am reminded of so many details, people, and places.

I wanted to say to Bruzina, "You have written a wonderful book, man, quite obviously a labor of love, and I am having a blast with it."

But too late again.

We all owe a debt of gratitude to friends and strangers alike who have enriched our lives, wittingly or not, in this way or that. Say it and pay it now if you are so inclined.

Heute rot, morgen tot.

The ‘Summons’ of Meditation

This has happened often. I go to the black mat to begin my session.  I go there and assume the cross-legged posture. My purpose is  to enter mental quiet and elevate my mind to the highest. But a petty thought obtrudes. I begin to enact or realize this 'centrifugal' thought by attending to it. But then I receive a 'summons' in the form of a light, sometimes blue, sometimes white, sometimes small, sometimes large, sometimes pulsating, sometimes not, usually subtle but phenomenologically  unmistakable.  Nothing so dramatic as to throw me off my horse were I riding a horse.  Just a light, but one that calls me to the topic and into focus, and away from the diaspora of the petty. And then it goes out.

I know that the source of the light is not something physical external to my body.  Perhaps the cause is in my brain. But that is pure speculation, and easily doubted. The phenomenon is what it is and cannot be gainsaid: I can doubt the cause but I cannot doubt the datum in its pure phenomenality. It is indubitable as a pure givenness.  Perhaps the 'summons' is a call from the Unseen Order which lies beyond all sensible 'visibility.' But that too is speculation. Perhaps there is no Unseen Order. In that case the 'summons' would not be a summons.  I cannot be sure that it is and I cannot be sure that it isn't.

Neither underbelief nor overbelief is justified by the experience itself.  But the facts are the facts. The phenomenological facts are that I and other dedicated meditators  have this 'summons' experience and it is followed by mental focus or onepointedness which is some cases takes the more dramatic form of a 'glomming onto' the theme of the meditation.

So am I not within my epistemic rights — assuming that it even makes sense to speak of rights and duties with respect to matters doxastic — in treading the path of overbelief? 

Related:

Unusual Experiences and the Problems of Overbelief and Underbelief

Overbelief and Romans 1: 18-20

 

Courage

Courage is the hardest and hence the rarest of the four cardinal virtues. A Substack 'sermon.' Leftists hate sermons, which is good reason to give them.

The best sermon, however, is one's own existence. (Kierkegaard)

Do not go maskless . . .

. . . into that open air.

Or leave your house at night.

But rage, rage against the pusillanimity of your fright.

Your soul's a pussy that cannot take a dare.

So rage, rage against those who masklessly enjoy the open air.

………………………………..

Addendum (3/7). Is there an etymological connection between 'pussy and 'pusillanimous'? Here is the answer.