Anton notes that the founders believed that the American Revolution was grounded in universal truths, “but they did not expect their declaration to revolutionize the world—nor were they under any illusion that it, or they, had the power to do so….America is—in the words of John Quincy Adams—‘the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all’ but also ‘the champion and vindicator only of her own.’”
Those who wish to restore these principles face a challenge of unprecedented severity. Anton argues that an elite based in certain blue states disdains ordinary Americans. “The core message of the meta-Narrative is that America is fundamentally and inherently racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic, and so on. The flaws and sins of America derive directly from those of its founding stock, who are natural predators, inherently racist, and malevolent.”
Elite policy is at its worst in California, now under the near-total domination of the left wing of the Democratic Party. “In modern California, hypocrisy and double-standardism aren’t merely part of the business climate; they’re endemic to the whole society….Sam Francis dubbed this system ‘anarcho-tyranny’: complete freedom—even exemption from the gravest laws—for the favored, maximum vindictive enforcement against the pettiest infractions on the disfavored.” Anton fears that if President Trump isn’t reelected, the Democrats will seek actively to suppress whomever in the red states challenges them, and they will prove very difficult to dislodge from power.
Who are the ordinary Americans the elite disdains, and who are the elite? The ordinary Americans are those whom Hillary Clinton called “deplorables,” i.e., white males who value their family, their religion, and their property, including their guns. “Funny thing, too: a core tenet of modern liberalism is supposed to be the sanctity of ‘one man, one vote.’ Except, you know, not really. The barely concealed presupposition of denouncing Republicans as ‘racists’ simply because whites vote for them is that all votes are not created equal. Votes of color are morally superior to white votes, which are inherently tainted. Which is why the left holds any election won by a Republican to be morally if not (yet) politically illegitimate.”
The elite consists at its core of wealthy financiers and business interests allied with government. It is buttressed by professionals who have attended top universities, especially those of the Ivy League. In a way that readers of Hunter Lewis on “crony capitalism” will recognize, Anton writes: “So-called ‘public-private cooperation’ will increase. This benign-sounding phrase—who could object to ‘cooperation,’ to government and business ‘solving problems together’? —masks a darker reality. What it really describes is the use of state power to serve private ends, at private direction. Hence foreign policy…will be further reoriented around securing trade, tax, and labor ‘migration’ patterns and paradigms that benefit finance and big business.”
If elite dominance continues, Anton predicts that those of us who dissent will be rigidly restricted. “Free speech as we have known it—as our founders insisted was the bedrock of political rights, without which self-government is impossible—will not survive coming leftist rule. The playbook is already being expanded to include banking and credit. Getting on the wrong side of elite-woke opinion is increasingly to find oneself locked out of the financial system: no bank account, no credit card, no ability to get a loan or pay a mortgage. Pay cash? The move to a ‘cashless society’…will obviate that option right quick.”
Anton cites an especially chilling instance of the policy of suppression. “A new regulation in the United Kingdom—which we must assume will be proposed here sooner or later—would allow Britain’s National Health Service to deny non-emergency care to those deemed ‘racist, sexist, or homophobic.’ Government bureaucrats, naturally, will be the ones doing the deeming.” Small wonder that Anton has had enough.
The author seems to me misguided in what he says about “industrial policy,” but I’ll pass over that in silence. He criticizes Murray Rothbard who suggested that the principle of secession has no logical stopping point, down to the level of each person. Anton says, “Every-man-a-government-unto himself is literally Hobbes’s ‘state of nature,’ yet Rothbard appears to approve.” This rests on a misunderstanding: it hardly follows that if you have a right to secede that you will in fact do so, and Rothbard did not favor a world of one-person “nations.” Also, Anton doesn’t understand John Rawls very well.
But enough of criticism. Anton’s rhetorical talents are remarkable, and I urge everyone to read his book.
What is Man?
He is an animal, but also a spirit — and thus a riddle to himself. He reasons and speaks, he objectifies, he says 'I' and he means it. He does not parrot the word 'I' in the manner of a parrot or a voice synthesizer; uttering 'I' he expresses self-awareness. Man has a world (Welt), not merely an environment (Umwelt). Man envisages a higher life, a higher destiny, whether within history or beyond it. And then he puzzles himself over whether this envisagement is a mere fancy, a delusion, or whether it presages the genuine possibility of a higher life.
More than an animal, he can yet sink lower than any animal, which fact is a reverse index of his spiritual status. He can as easily devote himself to scatology as to eschatology. The antics of a Marquis de Sade are as revelatory of man's status as the life of a St. Augustine. It takes a spiritual being both to willingly empty oneself into the flesh and to transcend it.
Kierkegaard writes that "every higher conception of life . . . takes the view that the task for men is to strive after kinship with the Deity . . . ." (Attack Upon Christendom, p. 265) We face the danger of "minimizing our own significance" as S. K. puts it, of selling ourselves short. And yet how difficult it is to believe in one's own significance! The problem is compounded by not knowing what one's significance is, assuming that one has significance. Not knowing what it is, one can question whether it is.
Kierkegaard solves the problem by way of his dogmatic and fideistic adherence to Christian anthropology and soteriology. Undiluted Christianity is his answer. My answer: live so as to deserve immortality. Live as if you have a higher destiny. It cannot be proven, but the arguments against it can all be neutralized. Man's whence and whither are shrouded in darkness and will remain so in this life. Ignorabimus. In the final analysis you must decide what to believe and how to live.
You could be wrong, no doubt. But if you are wrong, what have you lost? Some baubles and trinkets. If you say that truth will have been lost, I will ask you how you know that and why you think truth is a value in a meaningless universe. I will further press you on the nature of truth and undermine your smug conceit that truth could exist in a meaningless wholly material universe.
The image is by Paul Klee, Engel noch tastend, angel still groping. We perhaps are fallen angels, desolation angels, in the dark, but knowing that we are, and ever groping.
People and Their Works
This from a reader:
Your comment about Husserl's picture on your wall reminded me of a line from my notes: "I try to admire works but never people, as people invariably let you down." It's, I think, a line from Peter Hitchens.
People regularly, though not invariably, let one down. True. But being a person, I need persons to show me what is humanly possible and to serve as examples of how best to live. No book can render that service. While I cannot emulate (equal or excel) Husserl or Socrates in all respects, I can hope to do so in some, in respect of intellectual probity and devotion to the truth.
Sometimes we are at fault when others disappoint us. We pegged them too high. To be just in our assessments of others is extremely difficult. No man is worthy of worship and no man of utter contempt. No one is an angel and no one a demon. We regularly go to extremes.
One way to avoid disappointment in one's heroes is by not meeting them in the flesh. Distance permits idealization. Propinquity militates against it.
And if you want to avoid inspiring disappointment in those who haven't met you but will, request of your advocates and admirers that they not sing your praises! Let the former think that you are just an ordinary schmuck schlepping down the pike. And then surprise them.
Thomism and Husserlian Phenomenology: Combinable?
Over the phone the other night, Steven Nemes told me that his project is to synthesize Thomism and phenomenology. I expressed some skepticism. Here are my reasons.
Part I: Methodological Incompatibility
Essential to Thomism is the belief that the existence of God can be proven a posteriori by human reason unaided by divine revelation. Thus the Third of Aquinas's Five Ways begins with the premise that there are contingent beings, "things that are possible to be and not to be." From this starting point, by reasoning we needn't here examine, Aquinas arrives at the conclusion that there exists an absolutely necessary being. "And this all men call God."
The argument moves within what Husserl calls the natural attitude, from contingent beings that are taken to exist in themselves to a causa prima that is taken to exist in itself. Note also that when the Third Way in enacted by a person who works his way through it, in an attempt to arrive at a justified belief that God exists, the particular judgments and inferences made by the person in question are themselves psychic realities in nature that exist in themselves with the earlier following the later in objective time. With the suspension of the natural attitude by the phenomenologist, all of this must be eingeklammert, placed within brackets. This includes the starting point (the existence in themselves of contingent beings), the ending point (the existence in itself of God), and the sequence of judgmental and inferential steps that the person who enacts the argument must run through in order to generate within himself the belief that God exists. No use can be made of any of this by the phenomenologist qua phenomenologist.
It seems we ought to conclude that Thomas's dialectical procedure is unphenomenological both at its starting point and at its ending point. The dialectical procedure itself, the arguing with its judgments and inferences, is also unphenomenological in that the judgments are posited as true in themselves, and the inferences as valid in themselves.
To summarize the argument up to this point:
a) Thomists are committed to the proposition that God's existence is provable, equivalently, that there are sound arguments for God's existence, arguments that move from premises that record what to Thomists are obvious facts of sense perception such as that trees and rocks exist in themselves (independently of us and our consciousness of them), that they exist contingently, that they are in motion, etc., arguments that end in a conclusion that records the existence in itself of a divine first cause.
b) Phenomenologists operate under a methodological restriction: the thesis of the natural standpoint is ausgeschaltet, disconnected, and the objects in the natural attitude are eingeklammert, bracketed. The existence of these objects is not denied, or even doubted; no use is made of their existence. (Cf. Ideas I, secs. 31, 32) Now if we abstain from affirming the existence of contingent beings, then the question cannot arise within the phenomenological epoche as to whether or not they have a cause of their existence. But this is a question that Thomists ask and answer by positing the existence of God.
Therefore
c) Thomism and Husserlian phenomenology are incompatible and cannot be synthesized.
Part II: Metaphysical Incompatibility
Things are worse for the proposed synthesis when we consider that Husserlian phenomenology is not just a study of the modes and manners of the appearing of things, but implies transcendental idealism, a theory about the mode of existence of the things themselves. To state the incompatibility bluntly: Husserl is an idealist; Thomas is a realist.
At its starting point, the argument a contingentia mundi presupposes the existence in themselves of contingent beings. If these beings existed only for (finite) consciousness, then one could not arrive at an absolutely transcendent divine cause of their existence that exists in itself. Phenomenology, however, is committed to transcendental idealism, according to which contingent beings do not exist in themselves but only for transcendental subjectivity. Here is a characteristic passage from Husserl:
Alles, was ich je als wahrhaft Seiendes einsehen kann, ist gar nichts anderes als ein intentionales Vorkommnis meines eigenen — des Erkennenden — Lebens . . . . (Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Zweiter Teil, Theorie der Phaenomenologischen Reduktion, Husserliana Band VIII, S. 184 f.)
Whatever I can recognize as a genuine being is nothing other than an intentional occurrence of my own — the knower's — life . . . .
For Husserl, the very Being of beings is their Being for consciousness, their being constituted in and by consciousness. Their Sein reduces to Seinsinn, and that Sinn points back to the transcendental ego from which all sense derives. So the Sinn is not Original Sinn, pun intended, but derivative Sinn. Therefore, on transcendental idealism, contingent beings have no need for a divine ground of their existence, their existence being adequately accounted for by transcendental subjectivity. And since they have no need of a divine ground, one cannot prove that they must have such a ground.
At its ending point, too, cosmological arguments such as the Third Way are unphenomenological since they posit an absolutely transcendent cause of existence that is not given as it is in itself, and cannot be so given and whose identity and existence cannot be grounded subjectively. It makes some sense to say that the tree in the garden is a unity of noemata the unity of which is brought about by the synthetic, unifying activity of my transcendental ego. But it makes no sense to say this of God. This would be tantamount to saying that the unity and existence of the divine being derives from the synthetic activities of the creature's ego.
The God of classical theism, the numero uno representative of which is the doctor angelicus, is by definition absolutely transcendent. He is not transcendent in relation to our consciousness like the blooming tree in Husserl's garden. He cannot be transcendentally constituted. Even in the Beatific Vision God will not be given to us as he is in himself. His reality infinitely surpasses anything we will ever have evidence for. It should therefore be quite clear that Husserlian phenomenology and classical theism are logically incompatible.
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Addendum 10/22. A reader comments,
I've just read your post on Thomism and phenomenology. Subsuming Husserl to a Weltanschauung philosophy is to deeply and badly miss the point and much of the value of his work.
This is a just criticism of Nemes' proposed synthesis. Husserl sharply distinguishes between world view philosophy and philosophy as strict science. Thomism is a worldview philosophy. This is another reason why the proposed synthesis is dubious. The issues here are extremely deep and complicated. But to simplify, the specifically philosophical portions of the Thomistic system are in the service of a body of beliefs that Thomas will hold to no matter what sober philosophical inquiry establishes. If unaided human reason can be enlisted in the service of the teachings of the Church, well and good; if not, that is no reason to doubt any of the teachings. Philosophia ancilla theologiae. Perhaps we can say that philosophy in relation to theology is ancillary but not necessary.
For details on the whole messy problematic, see my Genuine Inquiry and Two Forms of Pseudo-Inquiry: Sham Reasoning and Fake Reasoning.
God as Uniquely Unique
I hit upon 'uniquely unique' a while back as an apt predicate of God. But it is only the formulation that is original; the thought is ancient.
To be unique is to be one of a kind. It will be allowed that nothing counts as God unless it is unique. So at a bare minimum, God must be the one and only instance of the divine kind. (This kind could be thought of as the conjunction of the divine attributes.) Beyond that, it will be allowed that whatever counts as God must be essentially unique: nothing that just happens to be uniquely of the divine kind could count as God. What's more, it will be allowed that nothing counts as God that is not a necessary being. Putting these three allowances together, I say that God is not just essentially, but necessarily unique. (In the patois of 'possible worlds,' God is unique in every metaphysically possible world in which he exists, and he exists in every such possible world. By contrast, Socrates is essentially human, but not necessarily human inasmuch as he does not exist in every metaphysically possible world.)
But some of us want to go further still. We want to say that God is uniquely unique. His uniqueness extends to his mode of being unique. He is unique in a way that no other thing is unique. Suppose there is more than one necessarily unique being. The necessarily unique God would then be just one of many necessarily unique beings. In that case he would not be uniquely unique. He would share the property of being necessarily unique with other items. (Fregean Gedanken and Bolzanian Saetze an sich and other platonica are epistemically possible candidates.)
But then something greater could be conceived, namely, a being that transcends the distinction between kind and instance in terms of which uniqueness is ordinarily defined. If I asked someone such as Alvin Plantinga wherein resides the divine uniqueness, he would presumably say that it resides in the fact that the there is one and only one possible instance of the divine nature: this nature exists in every world and God instantiates it in every world. But then God is just another necessarily unique necessary being.
A truly transcendent God, however, must transcend the ontological framework applicable to everything other than God. So he must transcend the distinction between kind and instance. In a truly transcendent God there cannot be real distinctions of any kind and thus no real distinction between kind and instance, nature and individual having the nature.
Now if God transcends the distinction between instance and kind/nature, and is uniquely unique, unique in a way that no other being is or could be unique, then that is equivalent to maintaining that God is ontologically simple. (See my SEP entry.)
But why think that God is ontologically simple and uniquely unique? Here is where the paths diverge.
Some of us feel impelled to say that a God worth his salt cannot be anything other than the absolute reality, the Absolute. So God cannot be relative to anything or dependent on anything or immanent in anything as he would be if he were just one more being among beings. For then he would be immanent to what I earlier called the Discursive Framework. It is rather the case that God transcends this framework. If God is the Absolute, then he must be simple; otherwise he would depend on properties distinct from himself to be what he is.
Again, if God is the Absolute, then he cannot be one of many; he must be the ONE that makes possible the one and the many. As such he transcends the Discursive Framework in which the one opposes the many. The ONE, however, is the ONE of both the one and many. It cannot be brought into opposition to anything.
"But such a God as you are describing is ineffable! I want a God that that can be addressed in petitionary prayer, a God that is a Thou to my I."
What you want is to stop short at a highest finite object, when the religious-metaphysical quest is animated by dissatisfaction with every finite thing. The truly religious quester is a nihilist with respect to every finite object. A God worthy of our highest quest must be absolute, simple, transcendent, and ineffable.
Excerpts from Enzo Paci, Phenomenological Diary
Glory has no meaning, power has no meaning, your personal success has no meaning. Vanity. That vanity which Husserl always fought. And he was sincere. He did indeed love truth and live for truth. Glory is the mundane, and the meaning of life reveals itself only in the negation of the mundane, in operating within the world without being prisoner of the world. I firmly believe it.
BV: Me too. Sic transit gloria mundi.
February 5, 1958
Today Father Van Breda arrived. Rognoni and I went to pick him up at the station. In our conversations a slow approach to Husserlian problems, especially through the French interpretations. News about the "Archives." [The reference is to the Husserl Archives in Louvain.]
February 8, 1958
Father Van Breda's lectures: in Milan on the 6th and in Pavia on the 7th. The difficulty of understanding the problem of intentionality in its proper sense. Van Breda says that until the end of his life Husserl refused to interpret phenomenology as a metaphysics. Perhaps it is a metaphysics, but not of the ens qua ens, but of the ens qua verum. I like the formula, but without the ens. In other words, I think that in Husserl being resolves itself in the intentional horizon of truth and therefore that phenomenology can be considered neither a metaphysics nor an ontology in the traditional sense of the two terms. It seems to me that the problem is that of the relation between time and the horizon of truth of time.
Enzo Paci is characteristically Continental in his lack of clarity. It is almost enough to drive one into the camp of the nuts-and-bolts analysts. The last of Paci's sentences is rather less than pellucid.
But he is on to something important, and deeply problematic in both Husserl and Heidegger: the reduction of ens qua ens to ens qua verum.
See my "Heidegger's Reduction of Being to Truth," The New Scholasticism, vol. LIX, no. 2 (Spring 1985), pp. 156-176. I wrote it in 1980.
Water Analogies for the Trinity
T.O. suggests the following:
‘Divine’ is a mass term, and so when we say “the father the son and the spirit are God”, we are really saying that all three are equally divine or participate in divinity.
I don't quite know what my reader is driving at, but perhaps he has a water analogy in mind. The following is based partially on H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, Volume One: Faith, Trinity, Incarnation (Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 359-363.
Hippolytus: The Logos comes from the Father as water from a fountain.
Tertullian: The Father is to the Logos as fountain is to river. One substance assumes two forms.
Lactantius: The Father is an overflowing fountain, the Son a stream flowing from it.
Zeno of Verona: Father and Son are two seas filled with the same water which, though two, are yet one.
Vallicella of Arizona: Water occurs in three distinct states, the gaseous, the liquid, and the solid. One and and the same quantity of water can assume any of these three states. Distinctness of states is compatible with oneness of substance.
Of the water analogies, I like the last one best (!) despite its being as worthless as the others. All four involve an equivocation on ‘substance.’ The sense in which water is a substance is not the sense in which God is a substance. Water is a substance in the sense of a stuff; God is a substance in the sense of a hypostasis (that which stands under) or hypokeimenon (that which is placed under), or as I prefer to say, an individual. Note also that a quantity of H2O can be in the three states only successively not simultaneously whereas God is 'simultaneously' the three Persons. (I leave open the question whether God is omnitemporal or eternal.)
Of course, there are better physical analogies, light for example, and also nonphysical analogies such as the soul (Augustine). Something on this later. My only point is that these water analogies do nothing to render the Trinity doctrine intelligible, hence no one should be convinced by them.
It is better to accept mystery than to be taken in by pseudo-intelligibility.
How could there be a mundane model for the Absolutely Unique?
Is it Rational to be Politically Ignorant?
A re-post from March 2016. Was in Georgia 10 pt; now in 12 pt. Slightly emended. Stands up well. Internal hyperlink verified.
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There are those who love to expose and mock the astonishing political ignorance of Americans. According to a 2006 survey, only 42% of Americans could name the three branches of government. But here is an interesting question worth exploring:
Is it not entirely rational to ignore events over which one has no control and withdraw into one's private life where one does exercise control and can do some good?
I can vote, but my thoughtful vote counts for next-to-nothing in most elections, especially when it is cancelled out by the vote of some thoughtless and uninformed person. I can blog, but on a good day I will reach only a couple thousand readers worldwide and none of them are policy makers. (I did have some influence once on a Delta airline pilot who made a run for a seat in the House of Representatives.) I can attend meetings, make monetary contributions, write letters to senators and representatives, but is this a good use of precious time and resources? It may be that Ilya Somin has it right:
. . . political ignorance is actually rational for most of the public, including most smart people. If your only reason to follow politics is to be a better voter, that turns out not be much of a reason at all. That is because there is very little chance that your vote will actually make a difference to the outcome of an election (about 1 in 60 million in a presidential race, for example). For most of us, it is rational to devote very little time to learning about politics, and instead focus on other activities that are more interesting or more likely to be useful.
Is it rational for me to stay informed? Yes, because of my intellectual eros, my strong desire to understand the world and what goes on in it. The philosopher is out to understand the world; if he is smart he will have no illusions about changing it, pace Marx's 11th Thesis on Feuerbach.
Another reason for people like me to stay informed is to be able to anticipate what is coming down the pike and prepare so as to protect myself and my stoa, my citadel, and the tools of my trade. For example, my awareness of Obama's fiscal irresponsibility is necessary if I am to make wise decisions as to how much of my money I should invest in precious metals and other hard assets. Being able to anticipate Obaminations re: 'gun control' will allow me to buy what I need while it is still to be had. 'Lead' can prove to be useful for the protection of gold, not to mention the defense of such sentient beings as oneself and one's family.
In brief, a reason to stay apprised of current events is not so that I can influence or change them, but to be in a position so that they don't influence or change me.
A third reason to keep an eye on the passing scene, and one mentioned by Somin, is that one might follow politics the way some follow sports. Getting hot and bothered over the minutiae of baseball and the performance of your favorite team won't affect the outcome of any games, but it is a source of great pleasure to the sports enthusiast. I myself don't give a damn about spectator sports. Politics are my sports. So that is a third reason for me to stay on top of what's happening. It's intellectually stimulating and a source of conversational matter and blog fodder.
All this having been said and properly appreciated, one must nevertheless keep things in perspective by bearing in mind Henry David Thoreau's beautiful admonition:
Read not The Times; read the eternities!
For this world is a vanishing quantity whose pomps, inanities, Obaminations and what-not will soon pass into the bosom of non-being.
And you with it.
BLEG: An Impecunious Reader Needs a Copy of Husserl’s The Paris Lectures
Got one to give away or sell for a few bucks? Let me know in the ComBox below.
Ruminations on the Dative of Disclosure
Steven Nemes comments on my long Husserl entry:
[Robert] Sokolowski’s reflections in his Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge University Press, 2000) are also helpful. He maintains that the transcendental ego is not substantially different than the empirical ego. In other words, the transcendental ego is not some different substance from the empirical ego, i.e. the [animated] human body. It is simply this empirical ego considered from the point of view of its being a dative of disclosure, a mihi to whom the world is disclosed.
I don't consider this helpful. To be blunt, I consider it confused.
The claim seems to be that the transcendental ego is just the empirical ego when the latter is considered as that to which the world and the objects in it appear, including that very special object which is one's animated body. This gives rise to the question: Who is doing the considering? That is, who is it by whose consideration the empirical ego acquires the property of being the dative of disclosure?
It has to be me. But it cannot be me qua object, since qua object I am not the dative, but the accusative of disclosure. I am one of the objects that appears. So it has to be me qua subject, qua dative but not accusative of disclosure. And let us be clear that there cannot be a dative without a nominative. There cannot be an appearing-to that is not an appearing-to something. There could, however, be an appearing that is wholly non-relational: things just appear, are revealed, manifest themselves, but not to a subject.* But if there is an appearing-to, then there must be that to which the appearance appears. No dative without a nominative. Either non-relational appearing or we go 'whole hog' with Husserl: ego-cogito-cogitata qua cogitata.
From this is follows that the duality self as subject-self as object is (a) inexpungeable, and (b) located within the ego. The duality cannot be collapsed into an abstract unity, nor can the subjectivity of the subject be referred to someone or something external to the ego. I am a subject intrinsically, not relationally, not in virtue of being considered to be a subject. That is to say: the transcendentality of the ego cannot accrue to it ab extra by the the empirical ego's consideration of itself as transcendental. Hysteron proteron! This puts the cart before the horse:** it is because I am a transcendental ego that I can apperceive myself as a human being in nature. As a human being, I simply lack the power to function transcendentally, to execute acts including acts of apperception.
Of course, there cannot be two egos. The empirical ego is an ego only by analogy (equivocation?) The true ego is the transcendental ego. I am being faithful to Husserl here.
So I don't see that Sokolowski, or rather Sokolowski as presented by Nemes, contributes anything to the solution of the problem I posed in my long post.
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*This, I take it, is Heidegger's notion of phenomenon which differs markedly from Husserl's.
**Joke: A philosopher took up residence in a bordello, thinking to enlighten the 'sex workers.' He soon left disillusioned after he found that he could not put Descartes before the whores.
Why We Should Read Boethius
Here.
The Devil Woman lures Boethius a posteriori onto the wheel of fortune while the Eternal Feminine leads him upward a priori.
Why Did I Move Away from Phenomenology? Part I
I met with Steven Nemes recently for a productive and intense discussion of people, politics, religion, and in particular the metaphysics of individuality and possibility. I think of Nemes as my 'philosophical grandson.' Although never formally my student, he discovered my A Paradigm Theory of Existence when he was a freshman at Arizona State University, read it, understood it, and initiated a relationship which has proven profitable and enjoyable for both of us. And while I have had some (good) influence on Nemes, he is independently minded and in no way my 'disciple.'
When we last met, he mentioned his move from analytic philosophy to phenomenology and asked why I had gone in the other direction. Herewith, the first in a series of posts in explanation of my move, which was less of a move away from phenomenology and more of a move into analytic philosophy. I will also take the occasion to revisit my life-long fascination with Husserl.
As an undergraduate I was introduced to phenomenology by John Maraldo, a freshly-minted Ph.D. from the University of Munich. John was in his late twenties and just starting his teaching career. (He is now an emeritus at the University of North Florida.) As I recall, in that Winter quarter of 1971 Maraldo assigned difficult readings from Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. It was Husserl who became the cynosure of my interest, although, curiously enough, I have published only one article on Husserl but half-dozen or so on Heidegger. I was particularly fascinated by Husserl's Ideas I (1913) and his project of founding philosophy as strict science (strenge Wissenschaft) by means of a method that was not argumentative or dialectical or aporetic, but descriptive.
I was an electrical engineering major in love with philosophy. I saw it as a high calling worthy of a life's devotion, and I still do, but I was troubled by the notorious fact that philosophers have never been able to agree on anything despite centuries of intense effort by the best and the brightest. My youthful question to my youthful self was: Can philosophy be taken seriously as a vocation by one who takes life seriously? So I turned to Husserl for an answer. He became my hero, his picture on my wall, his Persönliche Aufzeichnungen practically memorized. (His picture is still on my wall, a different picture on a different wall.) For a time, in the '70s, I thought of establishing myself as a Husserl scholar. Husserl's autobiographical Wie kann ich ein ehrlich Philosoph sein? and his Ohne Gewissheit kann ich eben nicht leben! struck a chord in me. They still do. "How can I be an honest philosopher?" "Without certainty, I just can't live!" (See A Meditation on Certainty on Husserl's Birthday.)
But I came to realize that Husserl failed like the great Kant and others before him despite the intensity of his efforts protracted over a lifetime. Like Kant, Husserl failed to set philosophy on "the sure path of science." (CPR Bvii) He wanted to lay the foundations upon which others would cooperatively set brick by brick. Nothing like that came to pass. He was blessed with many brilliant students, among them, Martin Heidegger, Roman Ingarden, and Edith Stein, but each trod his own path. Stein's path led her to Aquinas and onto-theology. She penned a remarkable piece on faith and reason in which she imagines a dialog between her two masters, Husserl and Thomas. Ingarden broke with the master over the question of idealism and the mode of existence of the real world. Heidegger's "hermeneutic of facticity," among other things, involves a rejection of Husserl's quest for a presuppositionless starting point. And now my mind drifts back to a remark Maraldo, glossing Heidegger, made in class one day, something along the lines of: presuppositionlessness (Voraussetzungslosigkeit) is the biggest presupposition of them all. (Maraldo wrote his dissertation on the hermeneutical circle in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Heidegger.)
Few ever practiced Husserlian phenomenology; the creative minds went their own way while the lesser lights occupied themselves with endless exegeses of the master's texts and endless controversies over what he meant or ought to have meant. Husserl himself spent most of his energies on laying the foundations for his would-be strenge Wissenschaft rather than doing phenomenology. (This is not to discount the wealth of concrete analyses to be found in his Nachlass.) There is a nasty little quip to the effect that Husserl spent so much time sharpening his pencil that he never got around to writing anything.
The Question of Idealism
Alles, was ich je als wahrhaft Seiendes einsehen kann, ist gar nichts anderes als ein intentionales Vorkommnis meines eigenen — des Erkenneden — Lebens . . . . (Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Zweiter Teil, Theorie der Phaenomenologischen Reduktion, Husserliana Band VIII, S. 184 f.)
A central issue that grabbed my attention early on was the problem of idealism, and the related problem of the status of transcendental subjectivity. Clearly, the status of the object and the status of the subject 'go together' to put it schematically. Maraldo had assigned Husserl's Ideas I (1913). I recall puzzling over the notorious section 49 wherein we read: "Thus no real thing, none that consciously presents and manifests itself though appearances is necessary for the Being of consciousness . . . ." (Boyce Gibson tr., 137) Husserl goes on to tell us that consciousness, immanent Being, is absolute in the sense that it needs no real thing in order to exist: nulla res indiget ad existendum. "The transcendent res," by contrast, "is unreservedly related to consciousness." Thus the transcendent thing, the tree in the garden, for example, in its perceived "bodily presence" (Leibhaftigkeit) is transcendent, but only in relation to consciousness. Its mode of Being (Seinsweise) is transcendence-in-immanence. The Being of the tree is thus relative to consciousness. The tree does not exist in itself, in the manner of a Kantian thing in itself (Ding an sich) but neither is it a content of consciousness. A content is something contained in something else, and the tree in the garden is not contained in my consciousness of it. Specifically, it is not a real content (ein reeller Inhalt) of any act or intentional experience (Erlebnis) trained upon it. One 'lives through' (er-lebt) the act, but one does not live through the accusative of the act, the tree as presented to the act in just the way it is presented to the act. So in that sense the tree, precisely as presented from this angle, in this lighting, with these and these perceived features etc., is transcendent of the act (intentional Erlebnis, cogitatio) and also transcendent of the subject of the act, the ego of the cogitatio. But again, it is a transcendence-in-immanence. It is not absolutely transcendent, but transcendent in relation to consciousness.
In sum, we have two modes of Being, absolute and relative. Absolute Being is immanent Being; relative Being is transcendent Being. The ego and its cogitationes are on the side of immanent Being and they exist absolutely. They can be brought to adequate and indubitable givenness unlike physical items such as the tree in our example which are given presumptively and inadequately. The cogitata qua cogitata are on the side of transcendent Being and they exist only for consciousness, although not in consciousness.
A fundamental insight of Husserl, already in his Fifth Logical Investigation, is that outer perception, the seeing of a tree for example, cannot be assimilated to image-consciousness (Bildbewusstsein). There is consciousness of things via images, pictures, and the like, as when, looking up now at my framed photograph of Husserl at his writing table, I am put in mind of Husserl himself. But this pictorial 'presentification' (Vergegenwaertigung) presupposes and is impossible without direct perceptual presentation of the photograph. We cannot, therefore, understand outer perception in terms of image-consciousness. Perception (Warhnehmung) is not a species of Bildbewusstsein. Thus there is nothing in the mind or in the brain that mediates the ego's perceptual commerce with the thing. I explain this rather more clearly in Husserl's Critique of the Image Theory of Consciousness. The theme is repeated by Heidegger and other phenomenologists. I recall a passage in Sein und Zeit (1927) wherein Heidegger remarks that we don't hear sensations; we hear the motorcycle roaring through the alley. No epistemic deputies need apply.
It was clear to me then and is clear to me now that Husserl is espousing a form of idealism, as he himself states in passage after passage. What was not clear to me then but is clearer to me now is the nature and (un)tenability of Husserl's idealism. My young self was confronted with two sets of problems with respect to Husserl's idealism. The first concerned the status of the subject and the second the status of the intentional object. In this entry I will discuss only the first set.
The Status of Subjectivity
What is the nature of the ego to which the world is relative? Evidently, this ego cannot be another mundane item. The world whole cannot depend for its appearing/Being on some measly part of the world. But neither can the ego to which the world is relative be extra-mundane: the intentionality of consciousness refers consciousness and its I-pole to the world as to its object, and it does so necessarily. So the ego to which the world is relative must be pre-mundane or transcendental in roughly the Kantian as opposed to the Scholastic sense of the term.
On the other hand, this ego must be accessible to the philosopher seeking an absolute foundation for knowledge in intuitive givenness. (Husserl's overriding, life-long goal was to discover an absolutely indubitable foundation for all knowledge. He viewed the fate of the West as bound up with the attainment of this goal.) If it is to be directly accessible, the knowing I and its acts cannot be the terminus of an inferential process, a transcendental argument as on a Kantian or neo-Kantian approach. The pure ego cannot be an inferred entity or theoretical posit. The ego and its cogitationes (this latter term taken in its broad Cartesian sense to embrace every type of intentional experience) must be immediately accessible in adequate evidence to the meditating philosopher who is not an eidos-ego but a factical ego.
The problem is one of reconciling the transcendentality of the ultimate or pure ego with its facticity. How do they 'fit together' if they do? Once the ego of the natural attitude has been purified of everything mundane, how could there be anything left over that is factical and individual? The transcendental-phenomenological reduction is not eo ipso an eidetic reduction, a reduction to the eidos-ego. The trans-phen reduction is a reduction to the ego that is je meines, in every case my transcendental ego. This ego somehow survives the bracketing of existence as an individual ego. The problem of reconciling transcendentality and facticity arises because Husserl tries to erect transcendental philosophy on a Cartesian-Brentanian foundation. He is motivated to attempt this by his quest for certainty, for an absolute and indubitable epistemic foundation.
I now proceed to formulate more precisely this problem that exercised me and still does. I will assume, with Husserl, the distinctions articulated in the schema: ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum. (This assumption is hardly self-evident and was hotly contest by later phenomenologists such as the early Sartre. One can question both phenomenologically and dialectically whether there is an I or ego as the terminus a quo of mental acts, and also whether there are mental acts. Note the irony here. It may be that Husserl the phenomenologist is coming at the phenomena with conceptuality that is not phenomenologically verifiable. If so, he has not gone all the way with the philosophical epoche that he mentions in section 18 of Ideas I.)
In any case, having made the above schematic assumption, I then asked about the existence and nature of the ultimate thinker of my thoughts, the ultimate ego of my cogitationes. The cogitationes are of the ego (subjective genitive) in that they belong to the latter; the cogitationes are of the cogitata (objective genitive) in that they are directed to the latter. The problem, precisely put, is to explain what the transcendental ego is if it is none of the items mentioned in the following, (a)-(d).
a) The ego is not an abstraction or mere concept or ideal object or eidos or principle or explanatory posit as in neo-Kantianism. As Husserl says somewhere in Ideas I, it is not something "logically thought up." Husserl has no truck with the neo-Kantian concept of consciousness-in-general. Consciousness is not the form, Bewusst-heit, common to all objects of consciousness. Consciousness is in every case my consciousness. It is in every case something individual, not universal; concrete, not abstract; somehow factical though not mundane. What's more, consciousness has a 'participial' and thus 'verbal' nature: it is a thinking, a constituting, a giving of sense, a unifying, a synthesizing. This is another reason why Bewusstsein for Husserl is not Natorp's Bewusstheit, that is, why it is not a form or property of objects. The transcendental ego is a unifying unity, not a merely unified unity. It is self-unifying, not unified by another. The subjectivity of the ultimate subject is inseparable from this transcendental unifying which is not found on the side of the object. As we will see in a later entry, the tree in the garden is a unity of noematic senses the unity of which derives from the unifying activity of the transcendental ego: it is a unity of sense, a Sinneseinheit. The tree's Sein (Being) is nothing other than its Seinsinn (Being-sense), with the latter derivative from the constitutive activities of transcendental consciousness. (Ideas I, sec. 55)
b) My ego is not my empirical psyche in nature. That which thinks in me when BV thinks is not a psychic part of the natural world. My psyche and its contents are objects of inner perception — Franz Brentano's innere Wahrnehmung — and not the I or subject that performs this inner perceiving. All objects of consciousness succumb to the phenomenological reduction. The ultimate subject is pre-mundane or transcendental. And the same goes for its acts or cogitationes. Husserl's is a transcendental idealism, not a psychological idealism. The latter is absurd: the constitutive source of all objectivity cannot be that measly object that is my psyche (anima, Seele).
c) My ego is not anything physical such as the brain of an organism in nature. That which thinks in me when BV thinks is not BV's (embodied) brain. And of course it is not JM's or SN's brain either. That in me which sees the tree is not my visual cortex. The brain and all its parts (and their parts, axons, dendrites, synapses, etc.) and the brain's physical adjuncts (lungs, heart, CNS, sensory transducers, e.g., eyes and ears, etc.) are objects of natural-scientific study which of course presupposes ultimate or transcendental subjectivity. Gehirnidealismus (brain idealism) is obviously absurd.
d) My ego is not a meta-physical thing, a Cartesian res cogitans (thinking thing) or substantia cogitans, (thinking substance). It is not a spiritual substance inhabiting a realm of positive noumena in Kant's sense. In Cartesian Meditations, sec. 10, Husserl alleges that the Frenchman fails to complete the transcendental turn (die transzendentale Wendung). He stops short at a little tag-end of the world (ein kleines Endchen der Welt), from which he then argues to get back what he had earlier doubted, including the external world of bodies. Despite his radical doubt, Cartesius remains within the world thinking he has found the sole unquestionable part of it. He is not radical enough. He does not realize that a phenomenological reduction applies to the psychic being who is meditating as much as to anything else. The meditator, when reduced to his pure ego is no part of the world of objects, whether these be physical, mental, or ideal, and is therefore pre-mundane. (Cf. The Paris Lectures, p. 8 ff. The two lectures were delivered in February 1929.)
Descartes' mistake, according to Husserl, is to conflate the pure or transcendental ego with substantia cogitans, mens sive animus. This mistake gives rise to what Husserl calls the absurdity of transcendental realism. (Paris Lectures, p. 9) Husserl's thought seems to be that if one fully executes the transcendental turn, thereby regressing to the pure ego, one is left with no entity existing in itself on which one can base inferences such as a cosmological argument to the existence of God from the world or from anything in it. For if the existence of every object is bracketed, then the existence of the psychophysical ego is bracketed as well, it being an object in the world, and what is left over is the pure ego, which as pure does not exist in itself. How then does it exist if it doesn't exist in itself? (Apparently, it exists by constituting itself. The questions that this involves will have to wait.)
Consequently, one cannot argue: if anything exists, then an absolutely necessary being exists; I exist; ergo, an absolutely necessary being exists. (See Kant, CPR A604 B632 ) I exist cannot be used as premise in such an argument since after the reduction, 'I' cannot refer to any physical, psychophysical, psychic, or metaphysical (spiritual) object. The true or ultimate or transcendental I is other than every object, even unembodied/disembodied spirits (if there are any). Everything objective acquires its entire Seinsgeltung (ontic validity) from the transcendental ego, including any thinking substances there are. It follows that if there are thinking substances in Descartes' sense, they are not transcendental. To repeat, the transcendental ego is other than every object. To put it in the flowery way of the Continental philosopher, transcendental subjectivity 'expels' every object.
This is of course perplexing. Just what is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all Seinsgeltung? Is it at all? If it is or exists at all, then it is in the world, even if not in the physical world. It is in the world as the totality of entities. But it can't be inasmuch as the transcendental ego as the constitutive source of all ontic validity is pre-mundane, and thus other than every entity.
The puzzle could be put like this. Either the constitutive source of all Seinsgeltung is pre-mundane or it is not. If the former, then it would appear to be nothing at all. If the latter, then it is not the constitutive source of all Seinsgeltung. I will come back to this in connection with some remarks by Hans Wagner.
What bugged me was the question of what the transcendental I could be if it is none of items mentioned in (a)-(d). Husserl never came clean on this, although he was aware of the problem as is clear from sec. 53 of Ideas I.
I pause to note that the problem does not arise for a neo-Kantian such as Hans Wagner. He approves of the reduction to the transcendental:
The reduction leads beyond the entire world to a pure subjectivity which is no longer part of the world. For this also Husserl cannot be sufficiently praised. [. . .] It [the subjectum veritatis, the absolute ground of all truth] can be absolute only if it does not itself belong to the world. ("Husserl's Posthumous Writings," in R. O. Elveton, The Phenomenology of Husserl, Quadrangle 1970, p. 222.)
Wagner goes on to say that subjectivity "is not any kind of being (Seiendes)," and that from the point of view of the world of beings, "it is nothing (and Nothingness)." Shades of Heidegger and Sartre! This makes sense. Once you regress to a subjectivity purified of everything mundane, such a transcendental subjectivity cannot be a being, ein Seiendes, but must be other than every being, in which case it is Sein/Nichts which for Heidegger are "the same" (das Selbe aber nicht das Gleiche) . Wagner continues:
. . . subjectivity, as this indispensable absolute ground, is Being and Idea. Being and Idea "are" not but they are the absolute ground for all "that is," that is, for the beingness of beings and the truth of what is true. (222)
Husserl's problem cannot arise for the neo-Kantians. For Wagner, Husserl's problem of explaining how transcendental subjectivity can be factical, though not empirical or intra-mundane, is a pseudo-problem predicated on a mistake (though Wagner doesn't put the point as bluntly as I have):
What true subjectivity is, is that I am not, and what I am not is what true subjectivity is. Husserl understands that these terms . . . are to be connected in a positive way: in the reduction, I, on my own ground, disclose myself as true, pure subjectivity . . . . (223)
This is is a mistake for Wagner since it implies the identity of the rule and what it regulates, the norm and what it 'normatizes,' and the absolute ground of truth and what it makes true.
The Paradox of Human Subjectivity
What I had stumbled upon was the Paradox of Human Subjectivity discussed by Husserl in his last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, in sections 53 and 54, pp. 178-186 of the Carr translation. It was published in 1936, a couple of years before Husserl's death in 1938. Here is the paradox in Husserl's words:
How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely constitute it as its intentional formation, one which has always already become what it is and continues to develop, formed by the universal interconnection of intentionally accomplishing subjectivity, while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment?
The subjective part of the world swallows up, so to speak, the whole world and thus itself too. What an absurdity! Or is this a paradox which can be sensibly resolved . . . ? (179-180)
We are at once objects in the world and subjects for whom there is a world. This by itself is not paradoxical. For there is nothing paradoxical in the notion that we are physical parts of a physical world that exists and has the nature it has independently of us, and that our knowing ourselves and other things is a physical process. Problematic, to be sure, and in my view false, but not paradoxical. Paradox ensues if (A) the world is a product of our accomplishments (Leistungen) as Husserl would have it, or a product of our formation (via both the categories of the understanding and the a priori forms of sensibility, space and time) of the sensory manifold, as on the Kantian scheme, and (B) we, the subjects for whom there is a world, are parts of the world. For then the entire vast cosmos depends for its existence and/or nature on transient parts thereof. And surely that would be absurd.
Dehumanizing Subjectivity
In order to avoid absurd forms of idealism, such as psychological idealism, Husserl must in a sense 'dehumanize' subjectivity. Here is a another crucial passage from The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, sec. 54, p. 183:
But are the transcendental subjects, i.e., those functioning in the constitution of the world, human beings? After all, the epoche has made them into 'phenomena,' so that the philosopher within the epoche has neither himself nor the others naively and straightforwardly valid as human beings but precisely only as 'phenomena,' as poles for transcendental regressive inquiries. Clearly here, in the radical consistency of the epoche, each 'I' is considered purely as the ego-pole of his acts, habitualities, and capacities . . . .
[. . .]
But in the epoche and in the pure focus upon the functioning ego-pole . . . it follows eo ipso that nothing human is to be found, neither soul nor psychic life nor real psychophysical human beings; all this belongs to the 'phenomenon,' to the world as constituted pole.
Aporetic Conclusion
Husserl is a great philosopher and one cannot do him justice in one blog post or a hundred; but I don't see how his position is tenable. On the one hand, each transcendental ego functioning as such cannot be a human being in nature. For nature and everything in it including all animal organisms is an intentional formation constituted by the transcendental ego. But not only can the world-constituting ego not be a physical thing, it cannot be a meta-physical spiritual thing either. It cannot be a res cogitans or substantia cogitans. As Husserl sees it, Descartes' identification of his supposedly indubitable ego with a thinking thing shows a failure fully to execute the transcendental turn (transzendentale Wendung). As already noted, the Frenchman stops short at a little tag-end of the world (ein kleines Endchen der Welt) from which, by means of shaky inferences, he tries to get back what his hyperbolic doubt had called into question.
For Husserl, everything objective succumbs to the epoche. No absolute transcendence is reachable: every transcendence is at best a transcendence-in-immanence, a constituted transcendence. Everything in the world is a constitutum, and the same holds for the world itself. If Descartes had gone all the way he would have seen that not only his animal body could be doubted, but also his psyche, the psychophysical complex, and indeed any spiritual substance 'behind' the psyche. He would have seen that the cogito does not disclose something ontically absolute and indubitable. For Husserl, everything objective, whether physical or mental, ". . . derives its whole sense and its ontic validity (Seinsgeltung), which it has for me, from me myself, from me as the transcendental ego, the ego who comes to the fore only with the transcendental-phenomenological epoche." (CM, p. 26. I have translated Seinsgeltung as ontic validity which I consider more accurate than Cairns' "existential status.") In Formal and Transcendental Logic, sec. 94, along the same lines, we read: "nothing exists for me otherwise than by virtue of the actual and potential performance of my own consciousness."
One problem: just what is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all ontic validity, Seinsgeltung? Does it exist? And in what sense of 'exist'? It cannot exist as a constituted object for it is the subjective source of all constitutive performances (Leistungen). But if it is not an indubitable piece of the world, then it cannot exist at all.
Descartes thought that he had reached something whose existence cannot be bracketed, eingeklammert, to use Husserl's term, and that that thing was himself as thinking thing. He thought he had hit bedrock, the bedrock of Ansichsein. Husserl objects: No, the ego's existence must be bracketed as well. But then nothing is left over. We are left with no clue as to what the transcendental ego is once it is distinguished from the psychological or psychophysical ego who is doing the meditating. To appreciate the difficulty one must realize that it is a factical transcendental ego that does the constituting, not an eidos-ego. The transcendental-phenomenological reduction is not an eidetic reduction. It would be a serious mistake to think that the re-duction (the leading back, the path of regress) from the psychological ego to the transcendental ego is a reduction to an eidos-ego, an ideal ego abstractly common to all factical egos.
Here is another approach to the problem. The transcendental-phenomenological reduction regresses from everything objective, everything naively posited as existing in itself, to the subjective sources of the ontic validity (Seinsgeltung) and Being-sense (Seinssinn) of everything objective. This radical regression, however, must leave behind everything psychological since the psychological co-posits the objective world of nature. But how can Husserl execute this radical regression and yet hold onto words like 'ego' and 'cogitatio' and 'cogitatum'? How does he know that it is an I or an ego that is the transcendental-phenomenological residuum? In simpler terms, how does he know that what he gets to by the transcendental-phenomenological reduction is something that can be referred to by 'I'? How does he know that it is anything like a person?
Another related but distinct problem could be put like this. The transcendental subject is OF (genitivus objectivus) the world but not IN the world. It is OF the world in virtue of its intentionality. The animal wearing my clothes, however, is IN the world but not OF the world. ('World' here refers to the totality of constituted entities.) My body is a thing in nature, a tiny bit of its fauna. It is not aware OF anything; I am aware of things, some but not all of them via my body and its organs. For example, my visual perception of the tree in the garden is via my eyes which are constituted bits of the natural world. I see the tree; my eyes no more see the tree that my eyeglasses do.
I am not (identical to) my body, and yet I am in some sense 'incarnated' in it. (My body is not my body's body; it is my body. This mineness — compare Heidegger's Jemeinigkeit in Sein und Zeit — is not a objective property of an object in nature.) The relation of me and my body is exceedingly intimate, but it is not identity. My body is the mundane vehicle of my subjectivity, but quite unlike my car or bicycle. The problem, briefly, is to make sense of the relation of my factical transcendental ego and the body it constitutes.
Guest Post: Vito Caiati on David Brooks
I asked long-time reader Dr. Vito Caiati, historian, to comment on David Brook's Atlantic article, America is Having a Moral Convulsion. Vito responded with alacrity and acerbity, and I have thrown in my two cents. Comments enabled.
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1. The essay is entirely descriptive rather than analytical in that it presents various economic and sociological findings and trends, but nowhere does it offer an explanation for them. Like [Rod] Dreher, Brooks is content to offer merely the symptoms of a deep crisis rather than to explore its causes, which to me seemed inexorably bound up with the nature and motions of contemporary American capitalism. Thus, he rattles on about the decline in social trust, linking this phenomenon to the upsurge in financial, emotional, identity, and social insecurity among broad sectors of the American population, especially the young and the lower middle class and working class poor; however, all these trends, destructive of social unity and trust, float on thin air, their emergence requiring [Brooks thinks] no elucidation.
To analyze them would require him to delve into the corrosive force that contemporary capitalism, which by its very nature is deleterious to the survival of traditional forms of the family, community, and polity in America. One has merely, for example, to reflect on the acceleration of social time (technological and social, including rapid social change and the dizzying pace of life), the contraction and distortion of social space (the former expressed in the gutting of small and medium commerce and the export of entire industrial sectors, with the accompanying hollowing out of established modes of life and the latter expressed in the hyper development in privileged geographical enclaves and underdevelopment elsewhere), and the hyper-commodification of sexuality (disastrous for traditional familial and conjugal relations and Judaeo-Christian moral precepts) that are generated by the process of capitalist accumulation today.
In other words, one cannot shy away from a critical examination of what American capital, global in its reach and interests, has done and is doing to our national civic and political institutions. I have to do a lot more reading in this area, but I am convinced that it is crucial that conservatives abandon their nostalgic romance with capitalism, since the object of their affection, an earlier moment in the history of capital, competitive or at least largely national, has long since passed and has been replaced with something far different in kind and inimical to their interests and values.
BV: This is a very important point: global, 'woke' capitalism is a very different animal from the capitalism celebrated by old-time economic conservatives and libertarians.
I follow your lead and read everything; if some Western Marxists, such as David Harvey or Hartmut Rosa, have something to say on this question that is of value, I take what is valuable and discard the rest. I admit a critical examination of capitalism today involves all sorts of philosophical and ideological conundrums for us on the Right, but if we wish to defend certain modes of life and thought, I do not see how we can avoid it. The big global corporations and the Leftist elites that own and control them are not our friends, nor are the host of apologists that cover for them.
2. Brooks implicitly denies the conscious role of human agency in the acute crisis of the last half year, that is, he covers up for the Left, which has purposely pursued the assault on the Constitution, our history, and our basic rights. All his spleen is saved for the usual target of these bien pensant types, Trump, while he nowhere denounces the lies, plots, and violence of the Left, which exploited the health emergency and the isolated death of one man to destabilize the nation. I cannot take seriously a man who writes,
Donald Trump is in the process of shredding every norm of decent behavior and wrecking every institution he touches. Unable to behave responsibly, unable to protect himself from COVID-19, unable to even tell the country the truth about his own medical condition, he undermines the basic credibility of the government and arouses the suspicion that every word and act that surrounds him is a lie and a fraud. Finally, he threatens to undermine the legitimacy of our democracy in November and incite a vicious national conflagration that would leave us a charred and shattered nation.
I sure that you noticed that here Brooks takes all the evident nefarious intentions and acts of the Left and projects them onto the President. Here, we see him happily paying the price to remain among those with respectable opinions.
BV: I too cannot take Brooks and his political projection seriously. He seems to have degenerated badly. But he always was a pseudo-conservative, a member of the yap-and-scribble bow-tie brigade, along with Bill Kristol, George Will, Mona Charen, Max Boot, and the rest. These types love to write and talk, but when it comes time to act and support a man who has already done so much in the face of vicious opposition to implement conservative policies, they clutch their pearls, straighten their ties, and chicken out. Like Vito, I get the distinct impression that their main political goal is to remain among the respectable so as to preserve their privileges, perquisites, and invitations to the high-toned soirees of the bien pensant. They seem to fear nothing more than becoming a persona non grata in the manner of Alan Dershowitz. Accepting something like political dhimmitude, Brooks and the cruise-ship conservative cohort are content to play the role assigned to them by the Left, talk quietly about taxes and such, and allow the Left's culturally Marxist juggernaut to roll on.
Brooks goes on about norms. But he will give either his direct or indirect support to a party that is hell-bent on destroying the norms and institutions of the Republic. The Left has become brazen about what they stand for: packing the Supreme Court, ending the filibuster, eliminating the Electoral College, removing the Second Amendment to the Constitution, tolerating and expanding 'sanctuary' jurisdictions, eliding the distinction between citizen and non-citizen — and I am just warming up.
Like Rod Dreher, Brooks apparently believes that civility and good manners trump every other consideration: better that race-delusional Marxist thugs destroy our cities than that an alpha male punch back against the chaos and defend the American Way. Trump is boorish, but there is nothing radical about him unlike the Orwellian 'moderate' Joe Biden who is a driverless vehicle or rudderless vessel soon to be piloted by Kamala Harris and the squadristi to hard-Left destinations.
Anyway those are my thoughts on the essay, whatever they are worth. These are really bad times; we must win in November, if only to buy some time, but I am not at all optimistic that we will be able to control either the “soft” or the more and more evident “hard” (for example, the framing of General Flynn and Cardinal Pell and the indictment of the McCloskeys) totalitarianism of the Left.
BV: The indictment of the McCloskey's is particularly troubling. Can you believe that this is happening in the USA? Violent Marxist thugs, who pay no taxes, break down a gate and threaten the life, liberty, and property of productive, tax-paying citizens. The political authorities, supported by these taxes, take the side of the thugs, bringing no charges against them, but indict the McCloskeys. Don't forget: some of the BLMers were armed, and the McCloskeys were within the law and the Constitution. And don't fool yourselves: BLM is an avowed Marxist outfit dedicated to the destruction of America as she was founded to be. The BLMers 'peaceful' protests are nothing but race-baiting means to their nefarious ends.
These are dangerous times. The upcoming election will be a battle for the soul of America. Curiously, both Trump and Biden say this, and both are right. The Coalition of the Sane must win in November. Do your bit — and prepare for the aftermath. Ignore the polls. Remember 2016?
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia
Marlene Dietrich, Die Fesche Lola. 'Fesche' means something like smart, snazzy.
Ich bin die fesche Lola, der Liebling der Saison!
Ich hab' ein Pianola zu Haus' in mein' Salon
Ich bin die fesche Lola, mich liebt ein jeder Mann
doch an mein Pianola, da laß ich keinen ran!
Kinks, Lola. From the days when 'tranny' meant transmission.
Marlene Dietrich, Muss I Denn
Elvis Presley, Wooden Heart
Lotte Lenya, Moon of Alabama
Doors, Roadhouse Blues
Tom Petty, Lost Highway. The old Hank Williams tune. "And now I am lost, too late to pray. Lord, I've paid the cost on the lost highway." This goes out to all you 'deplorables' out there.
Bette Midler, Mambo Italiano. Video of Sophia Loren.
A Mistake Many Make
They think that what is not immediately intelligible to them is unintelligible, period, or perhaps even a product of willful obfuscation.
The Australian positivist, David Stove, somewhere takes umbrage at a passage from Heidegger and pronounces it gibberish, when the passage is not gibberish at all. The miserable Stove, unwilling to to do his homework, and with no understanding of Heidegger's intellectual antecedents, dismisses as gibberish what is not immediately intelligible to his shallow positivist pate. He is a trenchant polemicist in some of his writing, so I am simply responding in kind.
I need to find that passage.
But let me say something good about old Stove: he was one formidable opponent of the scourge of political correctness.
There are some interesting materials for and against the curmudgeon in my Stove category.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum? De mortuis bonum et malum.