The Epicurean Cure

Here is Epicurus as quoted by Pierre Hadot in a book I highly recommend, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Blackwell 1995, p. 87): 

We must concern ourselves with the healing of our own lives.

 He proposes a TETRAPHARMAKOS, a four-fold healing formula:

 God presents no fears, death no worries. And while good is readily attainable, evil is readily endurable.

This strikes me as just so much whistling in the dark. How can one be so cocksure that physical death is the annihilation of the self? Shakespeare's Hamlet, in his soliloquy, saw the difficulty:

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Did the U. S. Defeat the S. U. just to Become another S. U.?

Not only are we slouching toward Gomorrah, we are sliding toward something like communism. Trump, I fear, is only a temporary brake. Excerpts from an article by Stella Morabito:

Erasure of collective memory. Another crime of radical education reform is its attack on the study of history, civics, and the classics of literature. Today we can see the bitter fruits of such 1960s radical education reform, which has roots going back to 1920s with John Dewey. If we are no longer able to place ourselves and society into the context of historical events, our vision going forward will be blurred at best.

It gets even worse if we don’t learn how our form of government functions. Today fewer and fewer college students have the capacity to understand that the First Amendment serves as a buffer against totalitarianism, not something to be abolished under the pretext of “hate speech.” And depriving students exposure to literary classics like Shakespeare (based on the charge that such works are “Western” and therefore ethnocentric) prevents them from discussing the universal human condition and our common humanity.

Instead, students are increasingly fed grievance studies and identity politics. As universities go this route, it trickles down to K-12 education. As a result, we are losing the social glue of our common traditions and heritage—not just as a nation, but as human beings. This cultivation of ignorance by the education establishment over the years compounds the isolating effect on people. It makes youth especially vulnerable to becoming fodder for power elites.

[ . . .]

Language manipulation. The whole point of the totalitarian abuse of language is to prevent independent thought, the subject of George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” When people accept the abuse of language, and incorporate it into their own vocabularies without thinking about it, they can be easily ventriloquized by power elites.

Victor Klemperer addressed this phenomenon in his book “Language of the Third Reich.” His thesis was that the Nazi regime’s abuse of language was its primary means of turning all German people into Nazis. He writes, “They found it difficult to think about life and morality in any other way. . . .Words are like tiny doses of arsenic, swallowed unnoticed, and then after a while the toxic reaction sets in.”

His thesis was that the Nazi regime’s abuse of language was its primary means of turning all German people into Nazis.

Consider all the weaponized memes and slogans we swallow today that shape how we think: “woke,” “bend the knee,” and “cisgender” are just a few. All are meant to modify our thoughts and behaviors in everyday life. An especially aggressive abuse of language are new laws that enforce strange pronoun usages that destabilize the structure of our language. By passing laws that punish the “misgendering” of someone as “hate speech,” we veer into kangaroo court territory, as well as force unnatural changes in our language.

If Less Horrifying . . .

. . . would this world and the people in it be as intellectually stimulating?

Men and women of my stripe love to beat their heads against puzzles, problems, mysteries, and every type of conundrum. 

Well, Lord, you have certainly given us fodder for brain-bashing.  And if this world is, as your top reps maintain, a divine fiction, one dependent in its Dasein and Sosein moment-by-moment, then I must say you have done a mighty fine job. It seems so bloody real and self-existent as to exclude you as author and itself as just divine text.

Schopenhauer in Italian on Schadenfreude, La Gioia per il Danno Altrui

Schopenhauer on SchadenfreudeIf to feel envy is to feel bad when another does well, what should we call the emotion of feeling good when another suffers misfortune? There is no word in English for this as far as I know, but in German it is called Schadenfreude. This word is used in English from time to time, and it is one every educated person should know. It means joy (Freude) at another injuries (Schaden). The great Schopenhauer, somewhere in Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit, remarks that while envy (Neid) is human, Schadenfreude is diabolical.

Exactly right. There is something fiendish in feeling positive glee at another’s misery. This is not to imply that envy is not a hateful emotion to be avoided as far as possible. Invidia, after all, is one of the seven deadly sins. From the Latin invidia comes ‘invidious comparison’ which just means an envious comparison.

My translation of the Italian:

To feel envy is human, but to taste joy at the injury of others is diabolical.

Christian Anti-Natalism?

From Karl White, esteemed cybernaut:

I found this topic from an online group interesting:

"I tried sharing and discussing my antinatalist beliefs with a Christian Anarchism group I'm a part of. My antinatalism comes directly and exclusively from my Christian faith, and I believe that any Christian who does not become an antinatalist after Bible study on the topic is an inconsistent, divided person. I wasn't met with any hostility. Most understood my stance, but likened my tone to depression (which might be the case).

Any Christian who brings life into this world while believing in the existence of hell and our need for salvation is a MONSTER."

Without denying that there are anti-natalist tendencies in Christianity that surface in some of its exponents, the late Kierkegaard for  example, it cannot be maintained that orthodox Christianity, on balance, is anti-natalist.

Ask yourself: what is the central and characteristic Christian idea? It is the Incarnation, the idea that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth. Thus God, or rather the second person of the Trinity, entered into the material world by being born of a woman, entering into it in the most humble manner imaginable, inter faeces et urinam nascimur. 

The mystery of the Nativity of God in a humble manger in a second-rate desert outpost of the Roman empire would seem to put paid to the notion that Christianity is anti-natalist.

Christianity blends motifs that are not obviously compatible. One is Platonic-Plotinian-Gnostic. Nietzsche was on to this when he remarked that Christianity is "Platonism for the people." (Beyond Good and Evil, preface) But if the central theme of Christianity is the Incarnation, then this implies a counter-Platonic valorization of this material world of time and change in which men are born and die. God entered this material world as a man, not as a purely spiritual redeemer. Born as a man among men, he valorized birth into a material world for all men. God is one of us, "a slob like one of us" in the words of a '90s song.

"Any Christian who brings life into this world while believing in the existence of hell and our need for salvation is a MONSTER."

I feel the young man's pain, but this is a sentiment that can be reasonably resisted.The Christian idea as I understand it is that by procreating, man participates in the divine creation of souls that have the capacity to share in the unending bliss of the divine life. Apart from the optional doctrine of predestination, souls are free to avoid hell. 

Admittedly, my somewhat glib answer leaves us with questions. One is this: if God wanted to manifest his super-eminent glory and  goodness, why didn't he create only angels? Why the need for this beautiful but horrifying meat grinder of a world? As Schopenhauer said, "The world is beautiful to behold, but terrible to be (a part of)." And as Kerouac asked, "How can one be clever in a meat grinder?' (Bang on the last link.)

Addendum

I wrote above  that Christianity blends motifs that are not obviously compatible. One is Platonic-Plotinian. The other is Jewish-Aristotelian. Brushing with broad strokes we can say the the first motif is other-worldly while the second is this-worldly.   

Theses motifs are pretty clearly in tension even if, in the end, they are not contradictory.

We find one indication of this tension in the Thomistic synthesis. Thomas adopts and extends Aristotle's hylomorphic constituent ontology according to which form and matter are not (primary) substances in their own right, but 'factors' or 'principles' invoked in the analysis of primary substances. Socrates, then, is a primary substance composed of substantial form and signate or designated  matter (materia signata). But the dude is also alive and conscious. So we have the formula: Anima forma corporis: the soul (life principle) is the form of the body. Soul is to body as form is to matter. This is anti-Platonic.  On the Platonic scheme a person is (identically) his soul, and his body is an accidental adjunct. If so, the death of my body is not the death of me. On the Aristotelian scheme, a person is a composite of two 'principles,' soul and body. If so, the death of my body is the death of me. Aristotelian forms are not substances in their own right. They are thus incapable of independent existence, existence apart from the thing of which they are the form.

Thomas adds a strange anti-Aristotelian twist in the case of humans: their souls, without ceasing to be forms, are capable of independent existence after the death of the human bodies of which they are the forms. For this and other reasons there is truth to the quip that Aquinas is an Aristotelian on earth but a Platonist in heaven.  Thomas makes this move because he must somehow secure the identity and continuance of souls after death as they await the Resurrection of the body. But then, at least for a time, human souls are substances in their own right.  

The Battle of Stalingrad 75 Years Later

Know your history.

Despite the horrors of Soviet Communism, the Allied winners of World War II owed a great deal to the Russian people. Russia's male and female soldiers were most responsible for destroying Hitler's vast ground forces, having killed more than two-thirds of the German soldiers lost in the war.

The Soviet Union lost about 27 million soldiers and civilians — about 60 times more than America lost in the war.

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Planning to Carry?

Keep calmThen read this.

Leftists want to strip you of your Constitutional rights. The arguments they employ are worthless when these emotion-driven dopes argue at all. You may think to resist them by exercising your rights. But grave responsibilities attend their exercise.

Know the law. Leftist shysters will surely try to use it against you should you have to shoot in self defense. Get training. Practice regularly. Proficiency with a handgun is the most difficult type of fire arms proficiency to attain.

Much more on this topic in Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

 

 

The Russian Revolution and Communist Terror

Excerpt:

The Marxists’ biggest targets have always been the family, religion, and civil society—institutional obstacles to the imposition of the omnipotent state. With the Bolsheviks in power, Lenin set out to destroy them.

Sounds like the Democrat Party program.

Obama did his damndest to undermine civil society. Luckily, he's history and his would-be leftist successor, Felonia von Pantsuit (HT: Kurt Schlichter) has been sent packing on her broom.

I now hand off to myself. If you study the following posts you will get some idea of what civil society is and why it is important:

Subsidiarity and the Left's Assault on Civil Society

Epistle to Malcolm: State, Civil Society, Individual

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The Greatest Temptation

I am repeatedly visited by the thought that the greatest temptation is the temptation to see the world as nothing but a system of finitudes and relativities with nothing beyond it or behind it.  It is just a play of phenomena of no ultimate significance. There is the temptation to sink into a placid nihilism: nothing finite finally matters; there is nothing that is not finite; and that this is so does not matter.  And since nothing finite finally matters, there is nothing to get hung up about:

Let me take you down
'Cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry Fields forever.

This is not an angry nihilism, but something closer to the nihilism of Nietzsche's Last Man.

How does this greatest temptation connect to ordinary temptation?

It is spring, a time of enhanced sexual temptation. One's resistance to temptation is resistance without yesteryear's assurance of the evil of acquiescence. Is there really a soul about whose care one ought to be concerned? Perhaps we die utterly and it just does not matter, finally or ultimately, whether we resist or indulge these paltry temptations.  Pleasure is here and now. It is concretely and undeniably real even if fleeting, unlike speculations and scruples about God and the soul and the moral law which are endlessly debatable.

You're able and she's willing. It's consensual.  In a while you will both be dead and it won't matter to anyone that you found an hour's pleasure in this way in violation of a monastic vow, or a marital vow, or a philosopher's vow to eschew the blandishments of the flesh the better to secure insight into the really real by keeping undimmed the eyes of the soul.

So you indulge, but not with the settled knowledge or firm belief that the act is wrong, but in a state of doubt whether it is wrong, or more radically, like a Pyrrhonist, in a state of aporia as to whether or not the whole moral question matters or even makes sense.

The greatest temptation, I said, is the temptation to think that nothing finite finally matters; that there is nothing that is not finite; and that this is so does not itself matter.  My suggestion is that acquiescence in this greatest of all temptations mightily aids and abets acquiescence in ordinary temptation.

It is a temptation so deep that I am 'tempted' to say that, compared to it, the temptation to which Adam and Eve succumbed is an ordinary temptation, a temptation that presupposes but does not question Ultimate Mattering and the nonrelative opposition of good and evil. 

Of Death and Detachment

St. Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death, p. 11:

My Lord, since Thou hast given me light to know that what the world esteems is all mere vapour and folly, give me strength to detach myself from it before death detaches me.

I find it very interesting that 'detach' is being used in two very different senses in this passage. The one sense is spiritual while the other is physical. 

The saint is praying that he be given the strength to detach himself spiritually from the transient objects of worldly desire before  death physically detaches him or his soul from his body.  The saint is not assuming that physical detachment will occasion spiritual detachment. To expect such a thing would be naive. It would be as if a man who spent his entire life 'on the make,' in hot pursuit of property and pelf, pleasure and power, were suddenly at death to renounce the earthly lures and to have a burning desire to meet his Maker.

The saint is assuming, though, that spiritual detachment can be achieved only while one is in the body, and that after one quits it one will be stuck with the spiritual attachments one has at the hour of death. 

Physical death does not have the power to detach me spiritually from worldliness with its vapours and follies. For this is possible: my body dies but my soul lives on fully attached to the objects of worldly desire. We may speculate that Hugh Hefner is presently still lusting after nubile females. It is just that he presently lacks the physical apparatus with which to realize his lusts.

This too is possible: I remain physically attached to my body while living spiritually detached from the bagatelles of this life.

This is a fertile field for further thought.  What exactly is spiritual attachment? How is it put in place, and how is it mitigated? One mode of mitigation is by meditation: one distances mentally from one's thoughts; one observes them as from a distance, refusing to live in or lose oneself in them.

And how can the soul be physically attached to the body if only one of them is physical?  Is perhaps the soul's physical attachment to the body reducible to a special sort of spiritual attachment whereby I become embodied by spiritually attaching myself to a chunk of the physical world, a particular animal organism? By taking a particular animal organism to be me?

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Race and America’s Soul

Myron Magnet – -Is he an attractive man? – - gets it right, or rather the author he is reviewing does:

What gives Gene Dattel’s Reckoning with Race: America’s Failure its special power is that, even after its bracingly original and thoroughly researched account of the racism of the abolitionist North from the late eighteenth century until long after the Civil War, the book nevertheless does not shrink from laying the ills of today’s black American underclass not at the door of a painful history, with ample blame for northern as well as southern whites, but squarely at the feet of black Americans themselves. Yes, shameful, deeply shameful, were slavery, Jim Crow, and northern racism, and who can doubt that they left grievous scars? Still, America fought a war to end the evil institution, had a civil rights movement to try to erase its malign remnants, and spent decades on affirmative action and other nostrums to expunge even the faintest remaining traces. Whatever white Americans could do to atone for and repair the damage they caused, they have done, as much as imperfect humans in an imperfect world can do. Now, Dattel argues, it’s up to black Americans to save themselves.

Exactly right. It is time for blacks to take responsibility for their lives and get off the plantation.  Will the Left let them?

Related: The Importance of Self-Control