R. R. Reno, Questioning the Shutdown
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Peter Hitchens on the Shutdown in Britain
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Senatorial Scumbaggery in Excelsis
There are decent folk among rank-and-file Democrats, but the leaders of this party are vicious, vile, destructive, obstructionist, and slanderous. "Ongoing war against immigrants." That's slander, besides being stupid.
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Are You an Introvert? Take this Test!
This is a re-post from April 2012 with minor edits and additions.
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The bolded material below is taken verbatim from Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking (Crown 2012), p. 13. I then give my responses. The more affirmative responses, the more of an introvert you are.
1. I prefer one-on-one conversations to group activities. Absolutely! Especially in philosophical discussions. As Roderick Chisholm once said, "In philosophy, three's a crowd."
2. I often prefer to express myself in writing. Yes.
3. I enjoy solitude. Is the Pope Catholic? Beata solitudo, sola beatitudo. Happy solitude, the sole beatitude.
4. I seem to care less than my peers about wealth, fame, and status. Seem? Do!
Money is a mere means. To pursue it as an end in itself is perverse. And once you have enough, you stop acquiring more and turn to higher pursuits.
As for fame, it is a fool's cynosure. Obscurity is delicious. To be able to walk down the street and pass as an ordinary schmuck is wonderful. The value of fame and celebrity is directly proportional to the value of the fools and know-nothings who confer it. And doesn't Aristotle say that to be famous you need other people, which fact renders you dependent on them? He does indeed, in his Nicomachean Ethics.
Similarly with social status. Who confers it? And what is their judgment worth?
5. I dislike small talk, but I enjoy talking in depth about topics that matter to me. More than once in these pages have I ranted about the endless yap, yap, yap, about noth, noth, nothing.
6. People tell me I'm a good listener. Yes. My mind drifts back to a girl I knew when I was fifteen. She called me her 'analyst' when she wasn't calling me 'Dr. Freud.'
7. I'm not a big risk-taker. That's right. I recently took a three-day motorcycle course, passed it, and got my license. I had been eyeing the Harley-Davidson 883 Iron. But then I asked myself how riding a motorcycle would further my life tasks and whether it makes sense, having come this far, to risk my life and physical integrity in pursuit of cheap thrills.
8. I enjoy work that allows me to "dive in" with few interruptions. Right. No instant messaging. Only recently acquired a cell phone. I keep it turned off. Call me the uncalled caller. Still don't have a smart phone. My wife is presently in a faraway land on a Fulbright. That allows me to unplug the land-line. I love e-mail; fast but unintrusive. I'll answer when I feel like it and get around to it. I don't allow myself to be rushed or interrupted.
9. I like to celebrate birthdays on a small scale, with only one or two close friends or family members. I don't see the point of celebrating birthdays at all. What's to celebrate? First, birth is not unequivocally good. Second, it is not something you brought about. It befell you. Better to celebrate some good thing that you made happen.
10. People describe me as "soft-spoken" or "mellow." I'm too intense to be called 'mellow,' but sotto voce applies.
11. I prefer not to show or discuss my work with others until it is finished. Pretty much, with the exception of these blog scribblings.
12. I dislike conflict. Can't stand it. I hate onesidedness. I look at a problem from all angles and try to mediate oppositions when possible. I thoroughly hate, reject, and abjure the blood sport approach to philosophy. Polemic has no place in philosophy. This is not to say that it does not have a place elsewhere, in politics for example. Don't confuse politics with political philosophy.
13. I do my best work on my own. Yes. A former colleague, a superficial extrovert, once described me as 'lone wolf.' 'Superficial extrovert' smacks of pleonasm. An extrovert is like a mirror: nothing in himself, he is only what reflects. Is that fair? Fair enough for a blog post. Or an extrovert is like an onion: peel away the last skin and arrive at — precisely nothing. The extrovert manages to be surface all the way down. Or you could say that he is merely a node in a social network. He is constituted by his social relations, and nothing apart from them; hence no substance that enters into social relations.
14. I tend to think before I speak. Yes.
15. I feel drained after being out and about, even if I've enjoyed myself. Yes. This is a common complaint of introverts. They can take only so much social interaction. It depletes their energy and they need to go off by themselves to 'recharge their batteries.' In my case, it is not just an energy depletion but a draining away of my 'spiritual substance.' It is as if one's interiority has been compromised and one has entered into inauthenticity, Heidegger's Uneigentlichkeit. The best expression of this sense of spiritual depletion is probably Kierkegaard's remark in one of his early journal entries about a party he attended:
I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; witty banter flowed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me — but I came away, indeed that dash should be as along as the radii of the earth's orbit ———————————————————- wanting to shoot myself. (1836)
16. I often let calls go through to e-mail. Yes. See comment to #8 above.
17. If I had to choose, I'd prefer a weekend with absolutely nothing to do to one with too many things scheduled. I love huge blocks of time, days at a stretch, with no commitments whatsoever. Dolce far niente. Sweet to do nothing.
18. I don't enjoy multitasking. Right. One thing at a time.
19. I can concentrate easily. Obviously, and for long stretches of time.
20. In classroom situations, I prefer lecture to seminars. Especially if I'm doing the lecturing.
Here is a description of the Myers-Briggs INTP. And here is another.
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The Introvert Advantage
We introverts make up about a quarter of the population. No surprise, then, that we are poorly understood. We are not shy or anti-social. Extroverts abuse us, but there is no need to reply in kind since the present turn of events will do the job for us. They will suffer. We will have no trouble maintaining our social distance. We have rich inner lives and welcome the opportunity to have an excuse to withdraw from the idle talkers, the unserious, the spiritless, and the superficial. Call it the Introvert Advantage.
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‘Journalists’ of the Garbage Cult Media
Here:
These people are all part of a garbage cult, a garbage cult where not a single one of them has the moral courage to come out and tell the truth… And here is the truth…
On Friday, after Trump expressed his own personal optimism and sense of hope about chloroquine, a malaria drug that may or may not (and the president was clear it may not work) mitigate the coronavirus, Alexander decided to debate and argue with the president:
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Gambler He Broke Even
As you know, Kenny Rogers has died at the age of 81.
A few days ago, on my way back from a traipse in the local hills, I encountered a couple the female half of which suffers from Parkinson's. Being the over-clever fellow that I am, I asked her what condition her condition was in, thereby alluding to a curious '60s number. Her husband caught the allusion and hipped me to a fact hitherto unknown to me, namely, that the band in question, The First Edition, was headed by Kenny Rogers before he went country. He was quite the genre-hopper. Before the acid-rock tune. he sang with the New Christy Minstrels, a 'sanitized' and 'wholesome' collegiate folk outfit. Here is "Green Green" with upbeat Barry Maguire in the lead. This was before Maguire got all topical and protesty and dark with Eve of Destruction in the summer of '65.
I never listened to much Kenny Rogers, but of course I know and like his signature number, now a permanent bit of Americana that taps into the myths that move the red-blooded among us. I mean The Gambler:
And when he finished speakin'
He turned back toward the window
Crushed out his cigaretteAnd faded off to sleepAnd somewhere in the darkness
The gambler he broke even
But in his final words
I found an ace that I could keepYou've got to know when to hold 'em
Know when to fold 'em
Know when to walk away
And know when to runYou never count your money
When you're sittin' at the table
There'll be time enough for countin'
When the dealin's done.Bonus cuts:Clancy Bros., Ramblin' Gamblin' WillieByrds, Eight Miles High. Referenced in the 'condition' tune.
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Is the World Inconceivable Apart from Consciousness?
That depends. It depends on what 'world' means.
Steven Nemes quotes Dermot Moran on the former's Facebook page:
[1] In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. [2] Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. [3] For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. [4] The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. [5] Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role. ( Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, p. 144
This strikes me as confused. I will go through it line by line. I have added numbers in brackets for ease of reference.
Ad [1]. I basically agree. I'm an old Husserl man. But while conscious acts cannot be properly understood from within die natürliche Einstellung, it doesn't follow that they cannot be understood "at all" from within the natural attitude or outlook. So I would strike the "at all." I will return to this issue at the end.
Ad [2]. Here the trouble begins. I grant that conscious acts cannot be properly understood in wholly materialistic or naturalistic terms. They cannot be understood merely as events in the natural world. For example, my thinking about Boston cannot be reduced to anything going in my brain or body when I am thinking about Boston. Intentionality resists naturalistic reduction. And I grant that there is a sense in which there would not be a world for us in the first place if there were no consciousness.
But note the equivocation on 'world.' It is first used to refer to nature itself, and then used to refer to the openness or apparentness of nature, nature as it appears to us and has meaning for us. Obviously, without consciousness, nature would not appear, but this is not to say that consciousness is the reason why there is a natural world in the first place. To say that would be to embrace an intolerable form of idealism.
Ad [3] We are now told that this is not idealism. Very good! But note that the world that is disclosed and made meaningful is not the world that is inconceivable without consciousness. The equivocation on 'world' persists. There is world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense as the 'space' within which things are disclosed and become manifest, and there is world as the things disclosed. These are plainly different even if there is no epistemic access to the latter except via the former.
Ad [4] To be precise, the world as the 'space of disclosure' is inconceivable without consciousness. But this is not the same as the natural world, which is not inconceivable without consciousness. If you say that it is, then you are adopting a form of idealism, which is what Husserl in the end does.
Ad [5] In the final sentence, 'world' clearly refers to the physical realm, nature. I agree that it would be a mistake to reify consciousness, to identify it with any physical thing or process. Consciousness plays a disclosive role. As OF the world — genitivus objectivus — consciousness is not IN the world. But the world in this sense IS conceivable apart from consciousness.
And so the confusion remains. The world in the specifically pheomenological sense, the world as the 'space' within which things are disclosed — compare Heidegger's Lichtung or clearing — is inconceivable without consciousness. But the world as that which is disclosed, opened up, gelichtet, made manifest and meaningful, is NOT inconceivable apart from consciousness. If you maintain otherwise, then you are embracing a form of idealism.
So I'd say that Moran and plenty of others are doing the 'Continental Shuffle' as I call it: they are sliding back and forth between two senses of 'world.' Equivalently, they are conflating the ontic and the broadly epistemic. I appreciate their brave attempt at undercutting the subject-object dichotomy and the idealism-realism problematic. But the brave attempt does not succeed. A mental act of outer perception, say, is intrinsically intentional or object-directed: by its very sense it purports to be of or about something that exists apart from any and all mental acts to which it appears. To speak like a Continental, the purport is 'inscribed in the very essence of the act." But there remains the question whether the intentional object really does exist independently of the act. There remains the question whether the intentional object really exists or is merely intentional. Does it enjoy esse reale, or only esse intentionale?
I recommend to my friend Nemes that he read Roman Ingarden's critique of Husserl's idealism. I also recommend that he read Husserl himself (in German if possible) rather than the secondary sources he has been citing, sources some of which are not only secondary, but second-rate.
To return to what I said at the outset: Conscious acts cannot be properly understood naturalistically. But surely a full understanding of them must explain how they relate to the goings-on in the physical organisms in nature that support them. A sartisfactory philosophy cannot ignore this. And so, to end on an autobiographical note, this was one of the motives that lead me beyond phenomenology.
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Equality is a Norm, not a Fact. Does it Have a Ground or is it Groundless?
As a matter of empirical fact, we are not equal, not physically, mentally, morally, spiritually, socially, politically, or economically. By no empirical measure are people equal. We are naturally unequal. And yet we are supposedly equal as persons. This equality of persons as persons we take as requiring equality of treatment. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), for example, insists that every human being, and indeed very rational being human or not, exists as an end in himself and therefore must never be treated as a means to an end. A person is not a thing in nature to be used as we see fit. For this reason, slavery is a grave moral evil. A person is a rational being and must be accorded respect just in virtue of being a person. And this regardless of inevitable empirical differences among persons. Thus in his third formulation of the Categorical Imperative in his 1785 Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant writes:
Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only. (Grundlegung 429)
In connection with this supreme practical injunction, Kant distinguishes between price and dignity. (435) "Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has dignity." Dignity is intrinsic moral worth. Each rational being, each person, is thus irreplaceably and intrinsically valuable with a value that is both infinite — in that no price can be placed upon it — and the same for all. The irreplaceability of persons is a very rich theme, one I explore, with the help of the great Pascal, in Do I Love the Person or Only Her Qualities?
These are beautiful and lofty thoughts, no doubt, and most of us in the West (and not just in the West) accept them in some more or less confused form. But what do these pieties have to do with reality? Especially if reality is exhausted by space-time-matter?
Again, we are not equal by any empirical measure. We are not equal as animals or even as rational animals. We are supposedly equal as persons, as subjects of experience, as free agents. But what could a person be if not just a living human animal (or a living 'Martian' animal). And given how many of these human animals there are, why should they be regarded as infinitely precious? Are they not just highly complex physical systems? Surely you won't say that complexity as such confers value, let alone infinite value. Why should the more complex be more valuable than the less complex? And surely you are not a species-chauvinist who believes that h. sapiens is the crown of 'creation' just because we happen to be these critters.
If we are unequal as animals and equal as persons, then a person is not an animal. What then is a person? And what makes them equal in dignity and equal in rights and infinite in worth?
Now theism can answer these questions. We are persons and not mere animals because we are created in the image and likeness of the Supreme Person. We are equal as persons because we are, to put it metaphorically, sons and daughters of one and the same Father. Since the Source we depend on for our being, intelligibility, and value is one and the same, we are equal as derivatives of that Source. We are infinite in worth because we have a higher destiny, a higher vocation, which extends beyond our animal existence: we are created to participate eternally in the Divine Life.
Most of the educated cannot credit the idea of a Supreme Person.
But if you reject theism, how will you uphold the Kantian values adumbrated above? If there is no God and no soul and no eternal destiny, what reasons, other than merely prudential ones, could I have for not enslaving you should I desire to do so and have the power to do so?
Aristotle thought it natural that some men should be slaves. We find this notion morally abhorrent. But why should we if we reject the Judeo-Christian God? "We just do find it abhorrent." But that's only because we are running on the fumes of the Judeo-Christian tradition. What happens when the fumes run out?
It is easy to see that it makes no sense, using terms strictly, to speak of anything or anybody as a creature if there is no creator. It is less easy to see, but equally true, that it makes no sense to try to hold on to notions such as that of the equality and dignity of persons after their metaphysical foundations in Christian theism have been undermined.
So here you have a Nietzschean challenge to the New Atheists. No God, then no justification for your classically liberal values! Pay attention, Sam Harris. Make a clean sweep! Just as religion is for the weak who won't face reality, so is liberalism. The world belongs to the strong, to those who have the power to impose their will upon it. The world belongs to those hard as diamonds, not to those soft as coal and weak and womanish. Nietzsche:
Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation – but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped?
Beyond Good and Evil, Chapter 9, What is Noble?, Friedrich Nietzsche Go to Quote
More quotations on strength and weakness here.
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Self-Defense Shootings in Times of Turbulence
Governments that favor criminals over the law-abiding cause the latter to look to their own defense, often with tragic results. Massad Ayoob offers sage advice for citizens who plan to arm themselves. On matters of personal defense and the use of firearms, Ayoob is a reliable and recognized authority.
Ayoob has made a number of useful videos. Here is one: Don't Answer the Door!
More videos and articles here.
Don't forget: when you vote Democrat you are voting to
- Open the borders (to illegal aliens, drugs, human trafficking, guns, and diseases)
- Empty the prisons, hamstring the police, and undermine the rule of law
- Violate the rights of citizens, especially First, Second, and Fourth Amendment rights.
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Cold and Hard
We become cold and hard to survive in a world cold and hard, one not of our making, thereby contributing to the coldness and hardness from which we set out to protect ourselves. And so, paradoxically, the world is of our making.
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Knee-Jerk Phrases for Knee-Jerk Writers
Journalists, for example.
'Litmus test.' 'Laundry list.' 'Sticker shock.' And their ilk.
You know what my rant will be.
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Self-Admonition
Aspire to think justly of yourself whether or not that results in your thinking highly of yourself.
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From McTaggart to Rome
Peter Geach, Truth and Hope, University of Notre Dame Press, 2001, p. 9:
Soaking myself in McTaggart, I imbibed a desire for Heaven and eternal life, which of course I had not to abandon on becoming Catholic; and meanwhile I was preserved from giving my heart with total devotion to some less worthy end, as I saw many contemporaries doing. Even as regards the relation of time and eternity I had no need to find McTaggart wholly mistaken. God's life, the life of the Blessed Trinity, really is the sort of Boethian eternity that McTaggart ascribed to all persons; and we have the great and precious promise that, in a way we cannot now begin to understand, we shall transcend all the delusion and misery and wickedness of this life and become sharers in that eternal life.
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The End of Moderation
Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (Pantheon, 1950, tr. Dru), p. 29:
Many a man thinks to satisfy the great virtue of moderation by using all his shrewdness and bringing all his experience to bear upon limiting his pleasure to his capacity for pleasure. But simply by the fact of setting enjoyment as the end, he has radically violated the virtue.
A penetrating observation. What is the end or goal of moderation? Haecker is rejecting the notion that the purpose of moderation, conceived as a virtue, is to maximize the intensity and duration of pleasure. Of course, moderation can be used for that end — but then it ceases to be a virtue. For example, if I am immoderate in my use of alcohol and drugs, I will destroy my body, and with it my capacity for pleasure. So I must limit my pleasure to my capacity for pleasure. And the same holds for immoderation in eating and sexual indulgence. The sex monkey can kill you if you let him run loose. And even if one's immoderation does not lead to an early death, it can eventuate in a jadedness at odds with enjoyment. So moderation can be recommended merely on hedonistic grounds. The true hedonist must of necessity be a man of moderation. If so, then the ill-starred John Belushi, who took the 'speedball' (heroin + cocaine) express to Kingdom Come, did not even succeed at being a very good hedonist.
But if enjoyment is the end of moderation, then moderation as a virtue is at an end. Haecker, however, does not tell us what the end of moderation as a virtue is. He would presumably not disagree with the claim that the goal of moderation as a virtue is a freedom from pleasure and pain that allows one to pursue higher goods. He who is enslaved to his lusts is simply not free to pursue a truer and higher life.
Bill, Gravity’s Rainbow was fascinating. I read it at a time when I was preeminently fascinated by works that had…