Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
That's where the MavPhil political punch-back is these days until such time as I am de-platformed for my quotidian violation of 'community standards.'
I will consider your 'friend' request if I can see from your page that you have the Right stuff.
The Language Nazi doesn't much cotton to the loose lingo that leftists love.
Hillary spoke of a "vast right wing conspiracy" directed against her husband. Maybe that's where the linguistic mischief started. How can a conspiracy be vast and composed of half the population?
A conspiracy is a clandestine agreement among a small group of people to achieve a nefarious end, typically by means of treason or treachery. The members of a conspiracy are called conspirators. They meet in secret and in small numbers. Hillary's abuse of English is plain: conservatives do not form a secret organization; they are not few in number; and their opposition to Bill Clinton and his policies was not nefarious, treasonous, or treacherous.
A conspiracy theory alleges that a conspiracy is under way or has occurred to bring about some event. An example is the theory that 9/11 was an 'inside job.' Some conspiracy theories are true, and some false; some are well-supported by evidence, others are not. None of the 9/11 conspiracy theories are well- supported in my opinion. But that in not the present point. The present point is that it is a mistake to assume that every conspiracy theory is false or baseless.
It is also a mistake to refer to any theory or any bit of groundless speculation as a conspiracy theory. Not every theory is a conspiracy theory. A conspiracy theory alleges a conspiracy where 'conspiracy' is defined as above.
Finally, it is a mistake to oppose theories to facts, as if no theory can be true.
Justice demands capital punishment in certain cases, and it doesn't matter what it costs, or whether there is any benefit to society, or even whether there is any society to benefit. Recall Kant's last man scenario from Metaphysics of Morals, Part II (emphasis added):
[6] But whoever has committed murder, must die. There is, in this case, no juridical substitute or surrogate, that can be given or taken for the satisfaction of justice. There is no likeness or proportion between life, however painful, and death; and therefore there is no equality between the crime of murder and the retaliation of it but what is judicially accomplished by the execution of the criminal. His death, however, must be kept free from all maltreatment that would make the humanity suffering in his person loathsome or abominable. Even if a civil society resolved to dissolve itself with the consent of all its members–as might be supposed in the case of a people inhabiting an island resolving to separate and scatter themselves throughout the whole world–the last murderer lying in prison ought to be executed before the resolution was carried out. This ought to be done in order that every one may realize the desert of his deeds, and that blood-guiltiness may not remain upon the people; for otherwise they might all be regarded as participators in the murder as a public violation of justice.
Kant's view in this passage is that capital punishment of murderers is not just morally permissible, but morally obligatory. (Note that whatever is morally obligatory is morally permissible, though not conversely, and that 'morally justified' just means 'morally permissible.')
Here is an interesting question. The U. S Constitution grants a near-plenary power of pardon to the president. (Here I go again, alliterating.) Does this extend to convicted mass murderers such as Timothy McVeigh? If yes, then Kant would not be pleased. The president would be violating the demands of retributive justice! This of course is a secular analog of the old theological problem of justice and mercy.
Memo to self: bone up on this! See what Carl Schmitt has to say about it specifically. Cf. his Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 56:
All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology.
This First Things article by Joshua Mitchell is well worth reading. Excerpts:
Marxism could never take hold in America because Americans believed in private property. Because property is the cornerstone of our republic, and cannot be removed, Marxism failed. Postmodernism could never really take hold in America because Americans believe that history has a meaning—and even that America has a special place in history. The reason identity politics has taken hold is because Americans suffer deep and abiding guilt, from two main sources: Christianity itself, and the legacy of slavery in this country. What the left could not do through Marxism or postmodernism, it now is doing through identity politics—namely, undermining every institution and every venerable historical memory in America.
[. . .]
Donald Trump was someone who, literally, could not exist in the world identity politics constructs. That is why the left needed “Russian collusion” to explain his election in 2016. Russian collusion was the deus ex machina that made it possible for Trump to infiltrate their world. The left had to destroy Trump if identity politics was to continue its reign of perverted righteousness. Many of us saw that clearly. That is why we voted for him. We wanted to contribute to the end of its reign.
[. . .]
Identity politics is a profound deformation of Christianity, a ghastly and crippled derivative that seeks the redemption of the world through the scapegoating of one group by another. For the moment, it has in its sights heterosexual white males. It will not stop there. White women will be next; followed, I suggest, by “heteronormative” black men. Like all revolutionary movements, it will eventually come for its early proponents, in a final reign of terror.
How does the current terror end? The identity politics reign of righteousness will end when we return to the orthodox Christian understanding that only the divine scapegoat, Christ, can take away the sins of the world. That insight once transformed the world. It can do so again.
There is a competing view of how we got into the present identity-political mess, and what the solution is. On this alternative Right view, to which I do not subscribe, it is not a deformation of Christianity that lead us to the present pass, but Christianity itself. I now hand off to Matthew Rose:
There is no better introduction to alt-right theory than his [Alain de Benoist's] 1981 work On Being a Pagan. Its tone is serene, but its message is militant. Benoist argues that the West must choose between two warring visions of human life: biblical monotheism and paganism. Benoist is a modern-day Celsus. Like his second-century predecessor, he writes to reawaken Europeans to their ancient faith. Paganism’s central claim is simple: that the world is holy and eternal. “Far from desacralizing the world,” Benoist tells us, paganism “sacralizes it in the literal sense of the word, since it regards the world as sacred.” Paganism is also a humanism. It recognizes man, the highest expression of nature, as the sole measure of the divine. God does not therefore create men; men make gods, which “exist” as ideal models that their creators strive to equal. “Man shares in the divine every time he surpasses himself,” Benoist writes, “every time he attains the boundaries of his best and strongest aspects.”
Benoist’s case against Christianity is that it forbids the expression of this “Faustian” vitality. It does so by placing the ultimate source of truth outside of humanity, in an otherworldly realm to which we must be subservient. In his Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth notoriously described Christian revelation as the “abolition” of natural religion. Benoist is a Barthian, if selectively. He accuses Christianity of crippling our most noble impulses. Christianity makes us strangers in our own skin, conning us into distrusting our strongest intuitions. We naturally respect beauty, health, and power, Benoist observes, but Christianity teaches us to revere the deformed, sick, and weak instead. “Paganism does not reproach Christianity for defending the weak,” he explains. “It reproaches [Christianity] for exalting them in their weakness and viewing it as a sign of their election and their title to glory.”
Benoist’s theology is in the service of a political warning, and it is this, more than his Nietzschean posturing, that attracts the alt-right. Christianity is unable to protect European peoples and their cultures. Under Christianity, the West lives under a kind of double imprisonment. It exists under the power of a foreign religion and an alien deity. Christianity is not our religion. It thereby foments “nihilism.” The allegation is explosive. Benoist means that Christianity renders Western culture morally lethargic and culturally defenseless. Most perniciously, its universalism poisons our attachments to particular loyalties and ties. “If all men are brothers,” Benoist claims, “then no one can truly be a brother.” Politics depends on the recognition of both outsiders and enemies, yet the Christian Church sees all people as potential members, indeed potential saints.
And here we reach Benoist’s remarkable conclusion. The decadent West has never been more Christian. Christianity imparted to our culture an ethics that has mutated into what the alt-right calls “pathological altruism.” Its self-distrust, concern for victims, and fear of excluding outsiders—such values swindle Western peoples out of a preferential love for their own. Benoist’s ideas have reached the margins of American conservatism, perhaps no more noticeably than in the writings of the late Sam Francis. A former contributor to leading conservative publications, his thinking took a late turn toward what we would now call the alt-right. “Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it,” he announced in an influential 2001 article. Francis’s essay was a lament as much as a protest (he was received into the Church on his deathbed), but his work is receiving a new hearing.
This from a reader:
Jordan Daniel Wood . . . affirms that God does not have possibilities within himself to actualize and thus the Incarnation—God becoming a human being—must in some way [be] actual prior to its historical event; God does not become a human being but in some way already is a human being . . . .
Very interesting.
The simple God is actus purus. Purely actual, he embodies no unrealized powers or unactualized potentialities. He is, eternally, all that he can be. We think of the Incarnation, however, as a contingent event. In the patois of 'possible worlds': The triune God exists in all metaphysically possible worlds, but the Second Person of the Trinity becomes human in only some of them. The following argument suggests itself:
1) The Word became flesh and dwellt among us.
2) The Word's becoming flesh is a contingent event.
3) There is no contingency and no becoming in any of the three divine persons: the Word cannot become flesh, that is, assume human nature.
Therefore
4) The Word (Logos, Second Person) had a divine and human nature from all eternity.
How could a classical Christian trinitarian theist rebut this argument? (Part of being a classical Christian theist is accepting the divine simplicity.)
My title above. A long-time reader sends us his thoughts. Here are some of them, with my edits and a bit of commentary.
Every so often I reflect on causes of the Leftist mentality, and all the madness it leads to. If we scan across favourite activities of the current woke age, such as racialism and its attendant theories on the left (the evil of colonialism, white privilege, white fragility etc), the socialist project, trans-activism and biological denialism and so on, there lurks a common deep assumption which is that the (authentic) left does not accept the inherent and unavoidably fallen state of man.
This is equivalent to denying the human condition as a protracted battle to overcome our own worst instincts and live good lives. According to this assumption, it is possible to be individually sinless, one just has to find the correct Utopian ideology and practice it, and to evangelise it to others. If one thinks one can be personally morally irreproachable, one can be self-righteous, and one may sit on a higher moral plane.
Now of course, only some individuals can attain moral perfection. Leftism is fundamentally about a two level society: those who know and control the doctrine of the one true way, and those who need to be controlled. If certain chosen individuals can be perfect, there's no need for God, indeed they can create their own church. In Leftist thinking, this is usually something called 'the Party'. Those not in the Party or completely deferential to it are against it and to be castigated, publicly flogged or imprisoned.From the rejection of inherent human baseness and the delusion of perfectibility spring a torrent of other terrible ideas, starting with the idea that everyone can, if correctly enabled, be equal. The idea of innate difference – of intelligence, ambition, diligence, or any other capability – is simply unacceptable. But if a person can be perfect, given the right help, all persons can be equally perfect, and thus perfectly equal. Anyone rejecting difference and thus equality is against the church, and must be punished.
Happiness eluded this student of happiness despite his career success and the admiration of his peers. So at age 38 he jumped off a tall building.
People talk glibly about wasting time on this, that, and the other thing — but without reflecting on what it is to waste time. People think they know which activities are time-wasters, philosophy for example. But to know what wastes time, one would have to know what is a good, a non-wasteful, use of time. And one would presumably also have to know that one ought to use one's time well. One uses one's time well when one uses it in pursuit of worthy ends. But which ends are worthy? Does this question have an answer? Does it even make sense? And if it does, what sense does it make? And what is the answer? Now these are all philosophical questions.
What's more, he who holds that philosophy is a waste of time must uncritically assume that those who give a different answer are simply wrong. And that involves a further unexamined assumption, namely, that one's own faculties are immeasurably superior to those of others. It is as if one thinks to oneself, "I am so well-endowed that I just know, without inquiry or self-examination, which ends are choice-worthy." Or one uncritically assumes that one's culture knows, or one's religion.
A thoughtful person, therefore, cannot dismiss philosophy as a waste of time. But Pascal was a thoughtful person, and didn't he dismiss philosophy as a waste of time? "Not worth an hour's trouble," he said with Descartes in his sights.
Pascal wrote a big fat book of Pensées — and a magnificent book it was. But why did he bother if philosophy is not worth an hour's trouble? Because he made an exception in his own case: his philosophy, he felt, was different! Well, all philosophers feel that way. All feel themselves to be questing for the truth as for something precious, even when they, like Nietzsche, perversely deny truth. None feel themselves to be engaged in 'empty speculation' or 'mental masturbation' or 'meaningless abstraction.'
And if Pascal really believed that philosophy was a waste of time, why did he scribble, scribble, scribble? Why didn't he spend all his time in religious observances and mathematical studies? One might put a similar question to other philosophizing denigrators of reason such as that prodigious literary engine, Kierkegaard.
The consistently thoughtful, therefore, cannot dismiss philosophy as a waste of time. Its questions are inevitable, and one who does not find them so merely betrays his incapacity. But although philosophy raises questions, it is not very good at answering them. It is much better at questioning answers than at answering questions. And herein lies the rub of our strange predicament.
If we are thoughtful, we see that we cannot live blindly, thoughtlessly, dogmatically, accepting this and rejecting that without ever attempting to give an account of our reasons for and against. But when we set about to give our reasons we find the task daunting and interminable and not at all generative of consensus. What is to be done?
Since there is no going back to doxastic naivete, I have nothing better to say than that we should blunder on in quest of a light that may one day dawn. The quest itself is worthwhile whatever the upshot. I closed this morning's meditation session in the way I have closed many such a session, with a renewal of vows: I dedicate my life to the ultimate truth, the ultimate light, the ultimate insight. And if death ends it all? And nothing s revealed? Then so be it.
The quest itself suffices whatever the upshot. In the end, and at last, this world has nothing to offer us compared to what the quest promises us.
Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (Pantheon, 1950, tr. Dru), #691:
Spiritual blindness differs from physical blindness in this, that it is not conscious. That is the essence of error invincibilis.
Compare Blaise Pascal, Pensees #98 (Krailsheimer tr., p. 55):
How is it that a lame man does not annoy us while a lame mind does? Because a lame man recognizes that we are walking straight, while a lame mind says that it is we who are limping.
Please forgive the following reformulation. Point out to a man that he is crippled, and he won't contradict you, though he might take umbrage at your churlishness. But point out to a man that his thinking is crippled and he is sure to reply, "No! It is your thinking that is crippled."
This annus horribilis of 2020 makes my annual Thanksgiving homily ring somewhat hollow, especially the penultimate line:
And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.
Still and all, we still have much to be grateful for. But we will have to redouble our efforts to preserve the objects of our gratitude, in particular, our liberty, our "sweet land of liberty."
The following passage from Concluding Unscientific Postscript embodies a penetrating insight:
. . . the legal authority shows its impotence precisely when it shows its power: its power by giving permission, its impotence by not being able to make it permissible. (p. 460, tr. Swenson & Lowrie)
My permitting you to do X does not make X permissible. My forbidding you to do X does not make X impermissible. My permitting (forbidding) is justified only if what I permit (forbid) is in itself permissible (impermissible). And the same goes for any finite agent or collection of finite agents. A finite agent may have the power to permit and forbid, but it cannot have the power to make permissible or impermissible. Finite agency, then, betrays its impotence in exercising its power.
For example, the moral permissibility of killing in self-defense is what it is independently of the State's power to permit or forbid via its laws and their enforcement. The State cannot make morally permissible what is morally permissible by passing and enforcing laws that permit it. Nor can the State make morally impermissible what is morally permissible by passing and enforcing laws that proscribe it.
Here below Might and Right fall asunder: the powerful are not always just, and the just are not always powerful. But it would be a mistake to think that the mighty cannot be right, or that the right cannot be mighty. The falling asunder is consistent with a certain amount of overlap. But the overlap will always only be partial.
Power does not confer moral justification, but neither does impotence. (For example, the relative weakness of the Palestinians relative to the Israelis does not confer justification on the Palestinian cause or its methods.) See The Converse Callicles Principle: Weakness Does Not Justify.
The State is practically necessary and morally justifiable. Or so I would argue against the anarchists. But fear of the State is rational: its power is awesome and often misused. Communist governments murdered some 100 million during the twentieth century alone. This is why the State's power must be hedged round with limits. The Founders of the United States of America understood this. It is an understanding that is approaching its nadir as 2020 fades.
We don't know whether God exists. But we do know that nothing is worthy of being called God unless it is the perfect harmonization and coalescence of Might and Right, of Power and Justice, of Will and Reason.
This coalescence is a mystical unity that cannot be achieved by human effort. The Eschaton cannot be immanentized. If this divine mystical unity exists, it does not exist in the here and now, or in the future of the here and now. If this unity does not exist, it cannot be for us an ideal. Only what is realizable by us can serve as an ideal for us.
Kierkegaard the Corrective is an anti-Hegel and an anti-Marx. Hegel held that the unity existed already, here below. Marx, recognizing the professorial bluster for what it was, turned Hegel upon his head, urging that it be brought about. "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it." (The Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach.) But the conception itself was fatally flawed, already in Hegel.
We saw the sequel. It was a road to slavery and the gulag.
Horribile dictu, having learned nothing, we are about to repeat the same mistakes.
There is no heaven on earth and there cannot be. Because there cannot be, heaven on earth cannot without disaster be pursued as an ideal. If there is heaven, it is Elsewhere, beyond the human horizon.
Believers and unbelievers can live in peace, or at least in the absence of war, if the unbelievers on the Left eschew their totalitarianism, which is a perversion of the dogmatic certainties of the Age of Belief. But they cannot be reasonably expected to do so. It is not 'who they are' in their silly way of speaking.
We who love liberty are in for the burden of a long twilight struggle against forces of darkness in the gloaming.
Escapism is a form of reality-denial. One seeks to escape from reality into a haven of illusion. One who flees a burning building we do not call an escapist. Why not? Because his escape from the fire is not an escape into unreality, but into a different reality, one decidedly superior to that of being incinerated. The prisoner in Plato's Cave who ascended to the outer world escaped, but was not an escapist. He was not escaping from, but to, reality.
Is religion escapist? It is an escape from the 'reality' of time and change, sin and death. But that does not suffice to make it escapist. It is escapist only if this life of time and change, sin and death, is all there is. And that is precisely the question, one not to be begged.
You tell me what reality is, and I'll tell you whether religion is an escape from it.
You say that you know what reality is? You bluster!
There is a nuance I ought to mention. In both Platonism and Buddhism, one who has made "the ascent to what is" (Republic 521 b) and sees aright, is enjoined to return so as to help those who remain below. This is the return to the Cave mentioned at Republic 519 d. In Buddhism, the Boddhisattva ideal enjoins a return of the enlightened individual to the samsaric realm to assist in the enlightenment of the sentient beings remaining there.
To return to the image of the burning building. He who flees a burning building is no escapist: he flees an unsatisfactory predicament, one dripping with dukkha, to a more satisfactory condition. Once there, if he is granted the courage, he reconnoiters the situation, dons fire-protective gear, and returns to save the trapped.
Both the Cave and the samsaric realm are not wholly unreal, else there would be no point to a return to them. But they are, shall we say, ontologically and axiologically deficient.
I pity the poor secularist who believes in nothing beyond them.
Gilbert Ryle once predicted with absurd confidence, "Gegenstandstheorie . . . is dead, buried, and not going to be resurrected." (Quoted in G. Priest, Towards Non-Being, Oxford, 2005, p. vi, n. 1.) Ryle was wrong, dead wrong, and shown to be wrong just a few years after his cocky prediction. Variations on Meinong's Theory of Objects flourish like never before due to the efforts of such brilliant philosophers as Butchvarov, Castaneda, Lambert, Parsons, Priest, Routley/Sylvan, and Zalta, just to mention those that come first to mind. And the Rylean cockiness has had an ironic upshot: his logical behaviorism is temporarily dead while Meinongianism thrives. But Ryle too will be raised if my parallel law of philosophical experience — Philosophy always resurrects its dead — holds.
Parallel to what?
Parallel to Etienne Gilson's famous observation that "Philosophy always buries its undertakers." That is the first of his "laws of philosophical experience." (The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Scribners, 1937, p. 306) As a metaphilosophical pronunciamento it is hard to beat. It is equally true that philosophy always resurrects its dead. Let that be my first law. The history of natural science is littered with corpses, none of which is an actual or potential Lazarus. Not so in philosophy.
It may be worth noting that if philosophy resurrects its dead then it can be expected to raise the anti-philosophical (and therefore philosophical) positions of philosophy's would-be undertakers. Philosophy, she's a wily bitch: you can't outflank her and she always ends up on top.
There is righteous anger. But how much of what is called 'righteous anger' is righteousness and how much anger? The righteous know; the merely angry fool themselves.
Logic is prescriptive and proscriptive. Logic prescribes how we ought to think if we would arrive at truth. It also proscribes those ways of thinking that lead to error. But 'ought' implies 'can.' How we ought to think must be really possible, indeed really possible for us, where what is really possible for us is grounded in how we actually and contingently are. A real possibility of thinking this way or that must be based in actual abilities, actual abilities of real minds in the real order. The logically normative must be psychologically implementable. The ideal patterns residing in the ὑπερουράνιος τόπος of Plato must be realizable in enmattered minds.
There look to be the makings here of an argument for a defensible psychologism. (Logic cannot be a part of empirical psychology, but how could it have nothing to do with the latter?)
The above train of thought is from a couple of years ago. (Journal vol. XXXIII, pp. 22-23, entry of 4 January 2019) Now I find the following in the Martin Kusch SEP article on psychologism, referenced in the immediately preceding entry:
1. Normative-prescriptive disciplines — disciplines that tell us what we ought to do — must be based upon descriptive-explanatory sciences.
2. Logic is a normative-prescriptive discipline concerning human thinking.
3. There is only one science which qualifies as constituting the descriptive-explanatory foundation for logic: empirical psychology.
Ergo, logic must be based upon psychology.
The above is the second of five patterns of psychologistic reasoning that Kusch distinguishes. He attributes it to Wilhelm Wundt. My thought above runs along parallel rails.
Logic, prescribing as it does how we OUGHT to think, by the same stroke prescribes how we ought to THINK. The abstract patterns definitive of the oughts and ought nots of inference may reside in Plato's timeless heaven, but thinking and thus judging is in time and takes time. Inference, in particular, takes time. Its analog up yonder is implication. And so the abstractly logical must touch ground in the matter of minds in time. An abstract entity can't think.
But a concrete hunk of intracranial meat can't think either. And meat can't mean. Minds mean. If we were just meatheads we couldn't think or mean. Thinking is a psychic function. Arguably, though, it is not the psyche as objectified and manifest to inner sense that thinks but the psyche as subject, the psyche as pre-objective, pre-mundane, and thus transcendental. But from Descartes on it has proven to be a bear of a task to get a good solid grip on the transcendental. Husserl struggled with it life-long and yet couldn't drag it out of the dreck into the clear light of day. And where the great Husserl failed we lesser luminaries and flickering lights are even less likely to succeed.
Must we regress to the spiritual? But how can we get a grip on it without objectifying it? We cannot help but reify, but the Cogitans is not a res, not spiritual substance.
The noetic as such embraces the logical, the psychological, the transcendental and the spiritual.
On that gnomic note I end this meditation.
Related: Martin Kusch, Psychologism (from Ralph Dumain's Autodidact Project)
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Thanks, Dmitri. Couldn’t find it when I last checked, six months ago.
Hi Bill Addis’ Nietzsche’s Ontology is readily available on Amazon, Ebay and Abebooks for about US$50-60 https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=addis&ch_sort=t&cm_sp=sort-_-SRP-_-Results&ds=30&dym=on&rollup=on&sortby=17&tn=Nietzsche%27s%20Ontology
It’s unbelievable that people who work with the law are among the ranks of the most sophists, demagogues, and irrational…
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Watched. Read. Wept.
Hey Bill, Got it now, thanks for clarifying. I hope you have a nice Sunday. May God bless you!
Vini, Good comments. Your command of the English language is impressive. In my penultimate paragraph I wrote, “Hence their hatred…
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