. . . why is it a provocation to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel? Here is how another penetrating article by William Kilpatrick ends:
So on the one hand, Muslim believers are ready to commit mayhem over an academic talk or the moving of an embassy, and on the other hand, Christians remain peaceful even though their brethren are being slaughtered and burned alive. How much longer, one wonders, will Church leaders collaborate in the false assertion that Islam and Christianity are equally peaceful faiths?
Religious and secular leaders are caught in a flagrant contradiction. They tell us that Islam is a religion of peace and justice, yet they warn us not to provoke its followers in any way. Don’t recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Don’t draw cartoons that might offend Muslims. Don’t wear religious symbols that might provoke them. Cover your women and your statutes. Don’t ring church bells in the vicinity of Muslims. Don’t criticize them for persecuting Christians because, as Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University told Pope Francis, such criticism is a “red line” that must not be crossed.
“Just stay quiet and you’ll be okay.” That’s what Mohamed Atta told the passengers on American Airlines flight 11 shortly before it flew into the World Trade Center. It wasn’t good advice then. And it’s not good advice now. As Islam expands its global reach, it’s becoming increasingly evident that the “don’t-do-anything-to-provoke-them” policy isn’t working, and never will.
So, again, the question remains what should conservatives do in the current situation, in the middle of an all-out attempt by powerful elements in the administrative state-cultural leviathan axis to nullify the 2016 Presidential election?
Remain aloof, cultivate one’s own garden of the little platoons in quietist, and often, ironic fashion; talk mostly of civility and temperament; write carefully tailored “moral equivalence” essays faulting both Trump and his critics in equal measure on issues of the day, such as the NFL national anthem or historical statues controversies; work like some center-right commentators with liberals to form a new political alignment, a “New Center”—or go on the offensive against the progressive left and renew the fighting faith of the founders of modern conservatism and their spiritual heirs: Frank Meyer; Willmoore Kendall; Jim Burnham; Bill Buckley in the first decades of National Review; Harry Jaffa and his students; and Publius Decius Mus?
I say go on the offensive.
Minervic flights and the consolations of philosophy cannot be enjoyed when the barbarians are at the gates of one's stoa.
Conservatives, especially those of them given to contemplative pursuits, need to make their peace with activism in order to secure and defend the spaces of their quietism. And this with blood and iron if need be.
The owl of Minerva is a tough old bird, but no phoenix capable of rising from its ashes.
When the world and its hopelessness are too much with us, one can and must beat a retreat into the private life. Body culture, mind culture, hobbies, family life, the various escapes (which are not necessarily escapes from reality) into chess, fiction, religion, meditation, history, pure mathematics and science, one's own biography and the pleasant particulars of one's past, music, gardening, homemaking . . . .
I pity the poor activist for whom the real is exhausted by the political. But I detest these totalitarians as well since they seek to elide the boundary between the private and the public.
So we need to battle the bastards in the very sphere they think exhausts the real. But it is and must be a part-time fight, lest we become like them. Most of life for us conservatives must be given over to the enjoyment and appreciation, in private, of the apolitical: nature, for example, and nature's God.
David Gordon Reviews Thomas Nagel's New Book and Criticizes Brian Leiter's Puerile Fulminations
David Gordon reviews Thomas Nagel's Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays 2002–2008. The following is a particularly interesting portion of the review in which Gordon comments on a certain status-obsessed careerist's puerile fulminations against a real philosopher:
. . . throw something away. That is one of my self-admonitions. A truly radical approach to de-cluttering, however, is Swedish Death Cleaning.
Curiously, I came across the just embedded hyperlink while doing a search on the question whether Swedes have a death wish, given their foolishly warm embrace of Muslim immigrants.
This embrace makes Swedish Death Cleaning all the more advisable for Swedes, especially for Jewish Swedes who are having a hard time of it, especially given the invasion of Muslims who for some strange reason are not instantly accepting the ultra-liberal attitudes of their hosts.
You never seem to allow comments on the posts I want to comment on, so I'm forced to add another email to your overwhelming pile.
BV: Well, my pile is not that bad. This is one of the many benefits of relative obscurity. And I am happy to receive your response.
Because I generally agree with you so much, I don't write too often. I don't even write where I moderately disagree with you. And I try not to write even where we sit on opposite ends of the table, because you are a trained philosopher and I am a dilettante.
For example, I tried to let this anti-natalism stuff pass by, but you posted again on it today with your typical caveat that you are out to seek truth wherever it may be found. I suppose I find that a bit cavalier when you are dealing with far-out ideas like anti-natalism because it seems so intuitively implausible, and not just to myself.
I think that though we both seek truth (and I am making an educated guess here so you'll forgive me the offence if I'm wrong), the reason I don't take anti-natalism seriously is because I am a Christian first and philosopher second, and you do because you are a philosopher first and a Christian (theist) second, which would explain your mantra about seeking truth wherever it is found as justification for taking this idea seriously.
BV: I will first point out that there is a anti-natalist strain in Christianity. See, for example, More on Christian Anti-Natalism and the accompanying comment thread. So it is not clear that Christianity rules out anti-natalism in such a way as to make it impossible for any Christian to take it seriously. The logically prior question, of course, is: What is Christianity? Decide that question and then you will be in a position to decide whether Christianity is anti-natalist.
I will also point out that if you set store by plausibility and reject without examination the implausible, then you ought to reject orthodox (miniscule 'o') Christianity since its central doctrine is an apparent (and many would say real) absurdity or logical contradiction. And so is the doctrine of the Trinity which Chalcedonian incarnationalism requires. See, for example, the work of the Christian philosopher, Dale Tuggy. Both of these constitutive doctrines are apparently absurd for reasons I examine in detail in the Trinity and Incarnation category. However we analyze 'implausible,' it is clear that what is apparently absurd is implausible. So if you reject without examination the implausible, then you should reject without examination Christianity. And if you don't do the latter, then you shouldn't reject anti-natalism without examination.
And then there is the fact that you simply reject Benatar's views without examining his arguments. That's what ideologues do, not philosophers. The arguments raise important questions as should be obvious from my ongoing series. So one can learn from his work even f in the end one doesn't accept his arguments.
A tougher and deeper fourth issue concerns how philosophy and a revelation-based religion such as Christianity are related. There is a tension here and it is the tension between Athens (Greek philosophy) and Jerusalem (the Bible), the two main roots of the West whose fruitful entanglement is the source of the West's vitality. As Leo Strauss sees it, it is a struggle over the unum necessarium, the one thing needful or necessary:
To put it very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is the life of autonomous understanding. The one thing needful as spoken by the Bible is the life of obedient love. The harmonizations and synthesizations are possible because Greek philosophy can use obedient love in a subservient function, and the Bible can use philosophy as a handmaid; but what is so used in each case rebels against such use, and therefore the conflict is really a radical one. ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 246, bolding added.)
Even a philosopher who is open to the claims of Revelation will feel duty-bound qua philosopher by his intellectual conscience to examine the epistemic credentials of Biblical revelation lest he unjustifiably accept what he has no right to accept. This attitude is personified by Edmund Husserl. On his death bed, cared for by Catholic nuns, open to the Catholic faith which some of his star pupils had embraced, he was yet unable to make the leap, remarking that it was too late for him, that he would need for each dogma five years of investigation! That attitude is typical of a real philosopher. If you can't 'relate to it' then you don't understand the demands of the philosophical vocation. The philosopher is called to a certain sort of life, the life of autonomous understanding, as Strauss so well puts it.
It is a tough problem and the conflict is really radical as Strauss says. The sense of intellectual honesty and intellectual responsibility in a great philosopher like Husserl is burningly strong. Someone who shares this sense cannot easily accept without careful scrutiny some religion that he happens to have been brought up on. On the other hand, where does philosophy get us? Husserl bent every fiber of his being to establishing philosophy as strict science, strenge Wissenschaft, but he failed to persuade even his best and closest students. I am thinking of Edith Stein who, while recognizing Husserl as her 'master,' in the end turned to Thomas and became a Carmelite nun. And then there is Roman Ingarden, an outstanding but neglected thinker who rejected Husserl's transcendental idealism. Heidegger, the most influential of Husserl's students, was also soon on his own exploring strange and dark Black Forest paths and wood trails. (The allusion is to his Holzwege.)
You have also said elsewhere that there is nary an argument (that is not either self-evident or tautological) that is uncontested by philosophers.
BV: Right. That's the trouble with philosophy. None of its conclusions are conclusive. Nothing gets settled to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners. Dogmatists confidently assert substantive theses, but it is mostly if not always bluster. The problems of philosophy are genuine, and many of them are humanly important; but none of them has ever been solved in a way that makes it clear that it has been solved. The strife of systems continues unabated. But that is hardly a reason simply to plump for some ideology.
The only purpose of seeking truth is to find it (and probably to let others know about it once you have). But if you sought and you have found it (or are convinced you have found it), then what good is it to entertain truths that run contrary to it (or are precluded by it)? This just seems like regress, not progress. It's like considering infanticide when you already reject abortion.
BV: True, we seek in order to find. And it is true that some convince themselves, or become convinced, that they have found the truth. Such a one was Edith Stein:
In the summer of 1921, she spent several weeks in Bergzabern (in the Palatinate) on the country estate of Hedwig Conrad-Martius, another pupil of Husserl's. Hedwig had converted to Protestantism with her husband. One evening Edith picked up an autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila and read this book all night. "When I had finished the book, I said to myself: This is the truth." Later, looking back on her life, she wrote: "My longing for truth was a single prayer."
Now here is the question: If one is convinced that one has the truth, and this truth is logically incompatible with some thesis T (e.g., Benatar's anti-natalism), is one rationally justified in rejecting T and in refusing to examine the arguments in support of it?
I would say No. Note first that the conviction that one has the truth is a mere subjective certainty. No matter how psychologically powerful this certainty is, it does not entail objective certainty. One can be subjectively certain and still be mistaken. Christopher Hitchens, who died on this date six years ago, was subjectively certain that there is no God. Edith Stein was convinced that there is. It follows that subjective certainty does not entail objective certainty. They can't both be right; so one of the subjective certainties was merely subjective.
Given that subjective certainty does not entail objective certainty, the really serious truth-seeker must remain open to the possibility that he is mistaken about that of which he is subjectively certain. If he is really serious about truth, and intellectually honest, he must ongoingly examine his doxastic commitments. He must hold them tentatively. This is not to say that he will easily relinquish them; it is to say that he will remain self-critical. This strikes me as the right attitude here below for we who are in statu viae. Doxastic rest, if it comes at all, comes later. To rest prematurely would seem to indicate a lack of seriousness about the pursuit of truth. It would seem to indicate more of a desire for comfort than a desire for truth.
The witch hunt is on and the Left eats its own. PBS has suspended distribution of Smiley's late-night talk show. I don't think much of Smiley's opinions, you understand, but I fear that we may end up like the Soviet Union or China under the Cultural Revolution. Don't tell me it can't happen here; just look at the outrages that have already happened here. From the L. A. Times:
“I have the utmost respect for women and celebrate the courage of those who have come forth to tell their truth,” Smiley said. “To be clear, I have never groped, coerced, or exposed myself inappropriately to any workplace colleague in my entire broadcast career, covering six networks over 30 years.” [emphasis added]
If Smiley had exposed himself appropriately, then no problem?
By the way, what is it about liberals that makes them use 'inappropriately' inappropriately?
Whipping out your schlong in front of a female colleague is not inappropriate behavior but morally wrong behavior. Why can't you liberal boneheads say that? Too 'judgmental'? But that's what you are doing: you are making moral judgments. Did Bubba behave 'inappropriately' with Juanita Broderick? But if Clinton had shown up at a black-tie event in a swimsuit, then you could say, appropriately, that his behavior was inappropriate.
'Inappropriate' is far too weak a word for rape and sexual intimidation. On the other hand, 'reach out' is too strong a phrase for the uses to which it is put by contemporary language morons. If I hear that your wife has suddenly died, I may 'reach out' to you in sympathy and with an offer of assistance. But if I phone you to inform you that one of your tail lights is out, I haven't 'reached out' to you.
Finally, Smiley's 'tell their truth' is quite the howler. For his accusers are (at least) telling their truth. Truth is truth. There is no such thing as his or hers or their truth.
Everyone who screwed the pooch on this one better realize fast: All that matters is immigration. It's all that matters to the country, and it's all that matters for winning elections.
What caught my eye, however, was the expression 'screw the pooch.' I now send you to Slate for an explanation of its meaning, thereby proving that that site is good for something.
The irrepressible Coulter also avails herself of the expression, 'milk a he-goat':
We'll have to watch helplessly as "establishment Republicans" fight "anti-establishment Republicans" over the right to milk a he-goat. Both sides will lose, and Democrats will sweep Congress and destroy our country.
Now that's a very old expression; I first encountered it in Kant in a particularly delightful form at A 58 = B 83 of his Critique of Pure Reason:
To know what questions may reasonably be asked is already a great and necessary proof of sagacity and insight. For if the question is absurd in itself and demands unnecessary answers, then, besides the embarrassment of the one who proposes it, it also has the disadvantage of misleading the incautious listener into absurd answers, and presenting the ridiculous sight (as the ancients said) of one man milking a he-goat while the other holds a sieve underneath.
The true Kant aficionado will of course know that Kant invoked this simile already in his pre-Critical period in his 1770 Latin Inaugural Dissertation, De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis. See, for the Latin, Daniel S. Robinson, "Kant and Demonax–A Footnote to the History of Philosophy," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. 10, No. 3 (Mar., 1950), pp. 374-379.
Below, Professor Robinson misspells Norman Kemp Smith's name. In an age of literary irresponsibility we need more pedants like me. Or maybe not.
Some suffer from an iron deficiency; the cure is straightforward. Others from an irony deficiency; I know of no cure. I wrote the other day:
Long-time reader E. C. sends us to rapper Joyner Lucas, I'm Not Racist. It warms my heart this holiday season to see how wonderfully race relations have improved since the '60s in this country.
The second sentence displays irony. The meaning I intend, and succeed in conveying to those not suffering from irony deficiency, is the opposite of what the sentence itself expresses when considered in itself, apart from context, simply as a sentence of English.
Irony thus exploits the fact that speaker's meaning and sentence meaning can come apart. What a speaker or writer of a sentence means by the utterance or inscription of a sentence sometimes differs from what the sentence itself means considered apart from a context of use.
This puzzle, similar to Peter Geach's Tibbles the Cat in content, is unlike it in vintage. Its origin is attributed by Philo of Alexandria (30 B.C. – 45 A. D.) to Chrysippus the Stoic (c. 280 B.C. – c. 206 B. C.) What follows is my take on the puzzle. I draw heavily upon Michael B. Burke, "Dion and Theon: An Essentialist Solution to an Ancient Puzzle," The Journal of Philosophy, 1994, pp. 129-139.
Yesterday, Dion was a whole man, but today he had his left foot successfully amputated. Yesterday, 'Theon' was introduced as a name for that proper part of Dion that consisted of the whole of Dion except his left foot. (To keep the formulation of the puzzle simple, let us assume that dualism is false and that Dion is just a living human organism.) It is clear that yesterday Dion and Theon were numerically distinct individuals, the reason being that yesterday Theon was a proper part of Dion. (By definition of 'proper part,' if x is a proper part of y, then x is not identical to y. And if x and y are not identical, then x and y are distinct. Two items can be distinct without being wholly distinct.) Now the question is which of the following is true today, after the amputation:
A. Both Dion and Theon exist. B. Neither Dion nor Theon exist. C. Dion exists but Theon does not. D. Theon exists but Dion does not.
The problem is to justify one of these answers. If none of the answers can be rationally justified, then we have a tetralemma which might be taken to suggest that there is something deeply problematic about our ordinary talk and thought about material particulars and their persistence. Given my conception of philosophy as at once both aporetic and revisionist, this would be a welcome result if I could support it.
Ad (A). Because Dion and Theon both existed yesterday, you might think they both exist today. There is, however, a reason to think that it cannot be true that both Dion and Theon exist today after the amputation. The reason is that it is impossible both that (i) Dion and Theon be numerically distinct and that (ii) Dion and Theon occupy exactly the same place and be composed of exactly the same matter arranged in exactly the same way, as is the case today after the amputation.
Could we say that Dion and Theon both survived the operation but are now one and the same? This is impossible given the Indiscernibility of Identicals. For today, after the operation, something is true of Dion which is not true of Theon, namely, that he, Dion, once had two feet. So Dion and Theon cannot be or have become identical.
Ad (B). This option is so counterintuitive that no one has maintained it.
Ad (C). It seem obvious that Dion survives the amputation. But what about Theon? Can we say that Theon ceases to exist after the amputation? Michael Burke (p. 134 ff.) thinks we can. He gives something like the following argument:
1. The concept of a person is maximal: the proper parts of persons are not themselves persons. Therefore 2. Theon before the amputation was not a person. 3. Persons are essentially persons, and hence nonpersons are essentially nonpersons. Therefore 4. Theon before the amputation was essentially a nonperson. Therefore 5. Theon could not have survived a change that would have made it, if it survived, a person. 6. The amputation of Dion's left foot is a change that would have made Theon, if it survived, a person. Therefore 7. Theon did not survive the amputation of Dion's left foot, and so does not exist after the amputation.
Ad (D). If one adopts mereological essentialism, then one can say that Theon survives but Dion does not. Mereological essentialism is the doctrine that wholes have their parts essentially. Accordingly, for any whole W and part x of W, if x is a part of W, then necessarily x is a part of W. This implies that no whole can survive the gain or loss of a part. If so, then Dion ceases to exist when he loses his left foot. But Theon continues to exist. Unfortunately, mereological essentialism applied to ordinary continuants such as cats and cabbages and cars is highly counterintuitive. My car does not cease to exist when the antenna is snapped off.
None of the solutions is satisfying as far as I can see. One might conclude that reason in us is weak and dialectical in Kant's sense.
The inability to follow an argument and respond reasonably and civilly to what an author actually maintains is a mark of the present miserable state of public discourse. Even prominent conservative commentators display this inability. A recent example is the Never-Trumper and NRO contributor David French's febrile flailing at Tully Borland. Professor Borland ignited a firestorm of controversy when he presented an argument why Alabamans ought to vote for Roy Moore. Chad McIntosh, in a fine defense of Borland, accurately restates Borland's main argument:
Comparing Moore to opponent Doug Jones, Borland argues that a Moore victory would be the lesser of the two evils in a binary election in which these are the only two viable options. Why? Well, even if Moore is guilty of sexual assault and seeking sexual relationships with girls as young as 14 some 40 years ago, as accused, that is very unlikely to have policy ramifications today, whereas Jones supports a policy of unrestricted abortion today.
Don’t be misled here: Jones supports killing a fetus up to the moment of crowning, the moment a baby exits his mother during birth. That isn’t your typical pro-choice position. That’s almost as extreme as they come. So, as Borland sees it, “either Jones knows exactly what he’s doing in supporting killing babies in utero but doesn’t care, in which case he’s a moral monster, or his moral compass is in such need of calibration that one should never trust his judgment in moral matters.” Borland therefore concludes that one is morally justified in voting for Moore, whose win would result in lesser evil.
This is a very strong argument. You will not appreciate its strength, however, unless you appreciate the grave moral evil of unrestricted abortion, abortion at any stage of fetal development, for any reason. Unless you are morally obtuse you will understand that the intentional killing of innocent human beings is morally wrong and that the pre- and almost-natal human beings in question are human individuals in their own right, not globs of tissue or parts of their mothers.
McIntosh again:
The closest French comes to a substantive response to Borland is in the following:
"Of course we’re always choosing between imperfect men, but there are profound differences between conventional politicians and a man who tried to rape a teenager when he was a D.A. Believe it or not, the American political ranks are chock-full of politicians who possess better character than Moore, whose pasts are far less checkered. I don’t even have to get to the difficult process of line-drawing to have confidence in declaring that Christians should not vote to put a credibly-accused child abuser in the Senate."
But this is misdirection. That the American political ranks are chock-full of politicians who possess better character than Moore is beside the point, since they aren’t running against Moore. It’s Jones running against Moore, so that is the only comparison that matters.
That's right. It's Jones against Moore, and exactly one of these two will be elected. Not both and not neither.
It is also important to note that while character matters, policies, programs, and ideas matter even more. People of the 'Never X' mentality seem not to understand this. French apparently thinks two terms of Hillary and all her damage to conservatism would be a fair price to pay for keeping Trump out of the White House with all the good he has already done in less than one year in office.
But suppose you are not convinced by the Borland-McIntosh argument. Then you should at least have the decency to admit that it is a reasonable argument. But that is not what French does. He heaps abuse on Borland. See McIntosh piece for documentation.
One point that needs to be made over and over in the teeth of retromingent leftist incomprehension is that immigration is justified only if it benefits the host country. Donald Trump understands this; Hillary and her ilk do not.
This is another reason why his defeat of Hillary is cause for jubilation among those who can think straight. It is also a large part of the explanation why Trump won the 2016 election and why it is an excellent bet that he will win again in 2020, assuming that the Wirtschaftswunder he has ignited continues.
No doubt it is good for Muslims that they be allowed to flood into Germany; but what the Germans need to ask is whether there is any net benefit to them of this in-flooding. And the same for every country.
The guiding idea here is Country First. America First is just a special case. A good government looks first to the welfare of its own citizens, just as good parents look first to the welfare of their own children.*
Good governors also understand that one cannot force the integration of worldviews in collision. Sharia and the West do not mix.
This is not 'racist' and for two reasons. First, Islam is a religion and its adherents, Muslims, do not constitute a race. Second, even if Muslims did constitute a race, there is nothing 'racist' in any plausible sense of the term about recognizing that comity presupposes commonality.
Far from being 'racist,' what I am urging is just common sense, a commodity in short supply among lefties whom I call retromingents because of their tendency to micturate on the past and its wisdom.
These 'progressives' are transgressive of tradition, and to that extent regressive.
To say it again: there is no right to immigrate. Correlatively, there is no obligation on the part of any country to accept immigrants.
On the growth of Europe's Muslim population, see here.
_________________
*To ward off any misunderstanding of the analogy: I am not suggesting that government stands to citizens as parents to children.
One of the tough tasks we introverts face during a holiday season is to find plausible excuses for nonattendance at all the endless and pointless parties that extroverts cannot help but organize.
Why the careful and respectful attention to the anti-natalist writings of David Benatar and others when the West, Europe especially, is under dire existential threat from hordes of non-Western immigrants who have no intention of assimilating but aim at cultural conquest? Anti-natalism is an expression of exhaustion and decadence. By taking it seriously, you lend it credibility and aid and abet the decline of the West!
To answer directly: the aim of the philosopher is truth, whatever it is, whether it serves his form of life or not, whether it serves any form of life or not.
