Malcolm Pollack has a fine and courageous post, hot off the keyboard, about the allowance by the West of mass immigration from Muslim countries. You should study it. It begins like this:
I have said this before, and I will say it again: allowing mass Muslim immigration is the stupidest and most irreversibly self-destructive thing that any Western nation can do. So in the wake of the Paris attacks, is it reasonable to imagine that Western nations, reeling from yet another inevitable and predictable act of jihad, will do, at last, what they obviously must do: namely, to declare an immediate moratorium on Muslim immigration?
Lefties love 'conversations.' How about a conversation about this, a real conversation?
Could we drag Hillary the Mendacious into it? Not likely. Last night she refused to use the phrase 'radical Islam.'
For a long time I thought we should carefully distinguish between radical Islam and Islam. But I am not so sure any more. It may well be that a moderate Muslim is as impossible as a moderate Nazi.
Of course, not every Muslim is a terrorist. Most are not. But then most members of the NSDAP did not work in the camps.
Mark Steyn is a profile in civil courage unlike the 'safe space' administrative and professorial pussies who now infest the universities. Where have all the John Silbers gone, long time passing? Some delightful excerpts:
When the Allahu Akbar boys opened fire, Paris was talking about the climate-change conference due to start later this month, when the world's leaders will fly in to "solve" a "problem" that doesn't exist rather than to address the one that does. But don't worry: we already have a hashtag (#PrayForParis) and doubtless there'll be another candlelight vigil of weepy tilty-headed wankers. Because as long as we all advertise how sad and sorrowful we are, who needs to do anything?
With his usual killer comedy timing, the "leader of the free world" told George Stephanopoulos on "Good Morning, America" this very morning that he'd "contained" ISIS and that they're not "gaining strength". A few hours later, a cell whose members claim to have been recruited by ISIS slaughtered over 150 people in the heart of Paris and succeeded in getting two suicide bombers and a third bomb to within a few yards of the French president.
Visiting the Bataclan, M Hollande declared that "nous allons mener le combat, il sera impitoyable": We are going to wage a war that will be pitiless.
Does he mean it? Or is he just killing time until Obama and Cameron and Merkel and Justin Trudeau and Malcolm Turnbull fly in and they can all get back to talking about sea levels in the Maldives in the 22nd century? By which time France and Germany and Belgium and Austria and the Netherlands will have been long washed away.
Among his other coy evasions, President Obama described tonight's events as "an attack not just on Paris, it's an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share".
But that's not true, is it? He's right that it's an attack not just on Paris or France. What it is is an attack on the west, on the civilization that built the modern world – an attack on one portion of "humanity" by those who claim to speak for another portion of "humanity". And these are not "universal values" but values that spring from a relatively narrow segment of humanity. They were kinda sorta "universal" when the great powers were willing to enforce them around the world and the colonial subjects of ramshackle backwaters such as Aden, Sudan and the North-West Frontier Province were at least obliged to pay lip service to them. But the European empires retreated from the world, and those "universal values" are utterly alien to large parts of the map today.
This is very good and needs to be said and endlessly repeated for the sake of self-enstupidated liberals, but I think Mr Steyn stumbles on one important point, and in a way that may give aid and comfort to relativism. The values of the West are universal values. They are not Western values or Caucasian values except per accidens. They are universal, not in that they are recognized by all, but in that they are valid for all. If a proposition is true, it is true for all including those who are unwilling or unable to recognize its truth. If a value is valid or binding or normative it is these things for all including those who are unwilling or unable to recognize its validity.
This is very important. There is no such thing as Western physics; there is just physics. There is no such distinction as that between German physics and Jewish physics any more than there is a distinction between Protestant and Catholic mathematics. There are Muslim mathematicians, but no Islamic mathematics. There are Arabic numerals but no Arabic numbers. If a mathematically competent Arab and a mathematically competent Roman do a sum they will get the same result despite the difference in their notations. When a Palestinian terrorist makes a bomb he relies on the same underlying science as does the Israeli surgeon who re-attaches a severed limb. There is no such thing as Soviet philology or Soviet biology. If Judeo-Christian values are valid and life-enhancing then they are Judeo-Christian only per accidens.
There is no contradiction in saying that salvation came from the Jews and that this salvation is salvation for all. "How odd of God to choose the Jews." Odd, but possible.
The fact that the science of nature and the discernment of universal values "sprang from a relatively narrow segment of humanity" does not make them any less universal. In fairness to Steyn, however, he may be using using 'universal values' to mean 'universally recognized values.'
The rest of his piece earns the coveted MavPhilsigillum approbationis. (I just now made up that Latin off the top of my head. If it is wrong shoot me an e-mail.)
And then Europe decided to invite millions of Muslims to settle in their countries. Most of those people don't want to participate actively in bringing about the death of diners and concertgoers and soccer fans, but at a certain level most of them either wish or are indifferent to the death of the societies in which they live – modern, pluralist, western societies and those "universal values" of which Barack Obama bleats. So, if you are either an active ISIS recruit or just a guy who's been fired up by social media, you have a very large comfort zone in which to swim, and which the authorities find almost impossible to penetrate.
[. . .]
To repeat what I said a few days ago, I'm Islamed out. I'm tired of Islam 24/7, at Colorado colleges, Marseilles synagogues, Sydney coffee shops, day after day after day. The west cannot win this thing with a schizophrenic strategy of targeting things and people but not targeting the ideology, of intervening ineffectually overseas and not intervening at all when it comes to the remorseless Islamization and self-segregation of large segments of their own countries.
So I say again: What's the happy ending here? Because if M Hollande isn't prepared to end mass Muslim immigration to France and Europe, then his "pitiless war" isn't serious. And, if they're still willing to tolerate Mutti Merkel's mad plan to reverse Germany's demographic death spiral through fast-track Islamization, then Europeans aren't serious. In the end, the decadence of Merkel, Hollande, Cameron and the rest of the fin de civilisation western leadership will cost you your world and everything you love.
But it seems the vicious 'safe space' girly girls (of all sexual persuasions) are now whining that the Paris attacks are diverting attention from their precious selves.
We who value civilization have our work cut out for us. Job One: defeat radical Islam. Job Two: bring down the Left.
. . . so that events like yesterday's massacre in Paris never happen again.
Yes, I am being sarcastic, and doubly so. First, stricter gun laws would have had no effect on yesterday's events. Second, the silly phrase "so that it never happens again," beloved of politicians, insults our intelligence and erodes their credibility even further.
Am I being 'insensitive'? Damn straight I am. And you should be too. 'Sensitivity' is for squishy bien-pensant liberals whose specialty is gushing and emoting rather than thinking. It is something for the 'safe space' girly-girls, whether female, male, or neuter, to demand of the sane.
Liberals love laws, but not the enforcement of laws. Legislating is easy, enforcement is hard. Enforcement leads to incarceration and then to the 'mass incarceration' of certain populations. And we can't have 'mass incarceration' can we?
How about a little common sense? I'd have to check, but I'll guess that France has laws against the smuggling of Kalashnikovs and other 'assault weapons.' Well, how about enforcing those laws?
How about a review of French immigration policy? Radical Islam is the paramount threat to civilization at the present time. Of course, not every Muslim is a terrorist. But the more Muslims you let in, the more terrorists you will have to contend with. And it wouldn't take many to bring a city or a nation to a screeching halt. (See How to Destroy a City in Five Minutes)
Am I blaming the victims? Damn straight I'm blaming the victims. And you should too. While the lion's share of the responsibility obvious lies with the jihadis, politically correct Frenchmen who refuse to face the reality of the Islamist threat must bear some responsibility. Blaming the victim is perfectly legitimate within certain limits. I have made this case in an earlier post
Given that the ubiquity of crosses all across this great land has not yet established Christianity as the state religion, why, as it declines in influence, do the cruciphobic shysters of the ACLU and their ilk agitate still against these harmless and mostly merely historical remnants of a great religion?
There is an old saying which is perhaps now out-of-date. If liberals took the Second Amendment as seriously as they take the First, they would demand that gun ownership be mandatory. The point of the jibe was to highlight the absurd extremes to which liberals take the First Amendment.
But now the First Amendment is under vicious assault, by contemporary liberals no less, while university administrators and professors, in abdication of authority, stand idly by or allow themselves to be driven out of office.
Curiously, this assault on the First is yet another powerful argument for the Second.
The following just over the transom from 'Jacques' with responses in blue from BV:
I read your blog every day. Quite apart from the high level philosophizing, it's a rare bit of political sanity and rationality and decency. Academic philosophy is now thoroughly controlled by the most evil and insane factions of the Left. It's good to know that real philosophy, and real political philosophy in particular, is still alive in the hearts and minds of some individual people, even though the philosophical institutions are dead or hopelessly corrupt. Thank you!
BV: You're very welcome. I am happy to have you as a reader and correspondent. While academic philosophy is not thoroughly controlled by the Left, not yet anyway, you are not far from the truth.
"… As Socrates explains in Plato's Crito, we are what we are because of the laws. Our country and its laws have overseen our nurturance, our education, and the forming of our characters. We owe a debt of gratitude to our country, its laws, those who have worked to maintain and defend it, and especially those who have died in its defense."
This argument (if it's valid) must have a suppressed premise. The premise must be something like the following: "It is good that we are what we are", or "Some of the features of our characters that are due to our country and its laws are features for which we should be grateful".
BV: Right, that tacit assumption is in play, and without it the argument is invalid.
Of course, the inference would only be valid given some further assumptions, e.g., that our country and its laws have not also caused us to have other features that are so bad or regrettable that, all things considered, it would be reasonable to wish that our characters hadn't been shaped by our country and its laws in any way.
BV: I agree.
But in any case, I don't think that these suppressed premises are true. Not if they are meant to support the conclusion that, in general, patriotism is good–let alone that, in general, it is a virtue.
If my character was shaped by my experiences growing up in Maoist China, say, then it seems entirely possible that most or all of the features of myself that I came to have as a result of those experiences are bad. Or they might be features that just have no particular value or disvalue. At any rate there seems to be no reason to expect that, for any arbitrary person whose character was formed by any arbitrary country or legal system, the relevant features will be such that, on balance, this person ought to be grateful for whatever it was that caused him to have these features. To be sure, those who were lucky to have been formed within good countries or good legal institutions should probably be patriotic, for the kind of reason that Socrates gave; but this is not to say that patriotism in general is a duty or a virtue or even a good thing in any respect.
BV: Your critique up to this point is a good one and I accept it. I take you to be saying that I have not given a good argument for the thesis that in general patriotism is a good thing. For whether it is good or not will depend on the particular patria, the particular country, and its laws, institutions, and traditions. Presumably, citizens of North Korea, Cuba, Nazi Germany, and the USSR ought not be or ought not have been patriotic. But much depends on what the object of patriotism is. What exactly is that which one loves and is loyal to when one is patriotic? More on this below.
I would suggest that there is no basis for healthy patriotism beyond the fact that my country is MY country. The reason why I should have some loyalty to my country, or love for it, is just that it is mine. Not that, in being mine, it has shaped my character. Not that its laws are better than others, or that they encode certain 'propositions' which a rational being should believe, or anything like that. But if this is right, the proper object of healthy patriotism is not a country in the sense that you seem to have in mind, i.e., a government or set of political or legal arrangements or traditions. Because that kind of thing is not really mine, in any deep sense, and because that kind of thing is not something I can love or feel loyalty towards. So if this suggestion is right, the proper object is my 'country' in the sense of the concrete land and people, not the state or its laws. (And this distinction seems especially important nowadays. You would not want to confuse the real America that Americans may properly love with the weird, sick, soft-totalitarian state that now occupies America.)
BV: You rightly appreciate that a proper discussion of this topic requires a careful specification of the object of patriotic love/loyalty. You say it is "the concrete land and people, not the state and its laws." Suppose I grant that for the nonce. Why should I love/be loyal to my country just because it is mine? That is not obvious, indeed it strikes me as false. I take you to be making two separate claims. The first is that one should display some patriotism toward one's country. This first claim is a presupposition of "The reason why I should have some loyalty to my country, or love for it, is just that it is mine." The second claim is that that only reason for so doing is that the country is one's own.
But do you really want to endorse the first claim? Even if country = "concrete land and people," there are possible and perhaps also actual countries such that you wouldn't want to endorse the first claim. As for the second, if you endorse it, will you also say that the only reason you should be loyal to your spouse, your parents, your siblings, your children, your friends, your clan, your neighborhood, your gang, and so on is because they are yours? Should you be true to your school only because it is the one you attend?
The above doesn't sound right. That a friend is my friend is not the only possible legitimate reason for my being loyal to him, assuming it is a legitimate reason at all. A second legitimate reason is that when I was in trouble he helped me. (And so on.) That my country (concrete land and people) is my country is not the only possible reason for my loving it and being loyal to it; other legitimate reasons are that the land is beautiful – "purple mountain majesties from sea to shining sea" — and that the people are self-reliant, hard-working, frugal, liberty-loving, etc., although how many of these people does one encounter theses days?
You write, "The reason why I should have some loyalty to my country, or love for it, is just that it is mine." Do you intend the 'just' to express a biconditional relation? Are you proposing
1. One should have some loyalty for one's country or love for it if and only if it is one's own country
or
2. If one should have some loyalty for one's own country or love for it, then it is one's own country?
Is my country's being mine a necessary and sufficient condition of my legitimate patriotism, or only a necessary condition thereof? On a charitable reading, you are affirming (2).
What is a Country?
If patriotism is love of and loyalty to one's country, then we need to know what a country is. First of all, a country will involve
a. A geographical area, a land mass, with more or less definite boundaries or borders.
But this is not sufficient since presumably a country without people is no country in the sense of 'country' relevant to a definition of 'patriotism.' A backpacker may love the unpopulated backcountry of a wilderness area but such love of a chunk of the earth and its flora and (non-human) fauna is not patriotic love. So we add
b. Having a (human) population.
Are (a) and (b) jointly sufficient? I don't think so. Suppose you have a land mass upon which are dumped all sorts of different people of different races and religions, speaking hundreds of different languages, with wildly different habits and values and mores. That would not be a country in a sense relevant to a definition of 'patriotism.' It seems we must add
c. Sharing a common culture which will involve such elements as a common language, religion, tradition, history, 'national narrative,' heritage, a basic common understanding of what is right and wrong, a codification of this basic common understanding in law, and what all else.
I should think that each of (a), (b), and (c) are necessary to have a country. 'Jacques' apparently disagrees. He seems to be saying above that (a) and (b) are individually necessary and jointly sufficient. I say they are individually necessary but not jointly sufficient. I say further that the three conditions just specified are not jointly sufficient either, or not obviously jointly sufficient. For if the basic common understanding of right and wrong naturally evolves toward a codification and detailed articulation in written laws, then we are well on the way to 'the political.'
And isn't it obvious, or at least plausible, that if a country cannot exist without geographical borders, that these borders cannot be merely geographical in nature, but must also be political as well?
Take the Rio Grande. It is obviously not a social construct. It is a natural feature of the earth. But the southern border of the USA, its border with Mexico, is a social or socio-political construct. It is 'conventional' not 'natural.' The sorthern border might not have been the Rio Grande. But as things are, a river serves as the southern border.
My point is that, while a border must be naturally or physically realized by a river, or a coastline, or the crest of a mountain range, or by a wall or a fence (an electronic 'fence' would do) or whatever, borders are also political entities. Thus the Rio Grande is both a natural feature of the earth but also a political entity. And so what I want to say is that nothing can count as a country in the sense of 'country' relevant to a definition of 'patriotism' if it is not a political entity. Two countries bordering on each other cannot border on each other unless both are political entities.
Can I argue this out rigorously? I don't know. Let me take a stab at it.
A country is a continuant: it remains numerically the same over the period of time, however short, during which it exists. And while a country can gain or lose territory without prejudice to its diachronic numerical identity, it will cease to exist if it loses all its territory, or lets itself be invaded by foreigners to such an extent that its characteristic culture is destroyed (see point (c) above). So a country must defend its border if it wishes to stay in existence. But for the USA to defend its southern border is not for it to defend a river. It is to prevent non-citizens from crossing illegally into a country of which they are not a citizen. Am I begging the question? Perhaps. I'll have to think about it some more.
In any case it seems intuitively obvious to me that we need
d. Under the jurisdiction of a government.
But it is important to distinguish between a government and a particular administration of a government such as the Reagan administration or the Obama administration (regime?). Consider the bumper sticker:
What does 'government' mean here? It means either the current administration or some administrations, but presumably not every administration. It cannot mean the institutional structure, with its enabling documents such as the Constitution, which structure outlasts particular administrations. That is shown by the American flag above. What does it signify? Not the Nixon admin or the Obama admin. It signifies the ideals and values of America and the people who uphold them. Which values? Liberty and justice are named in the Pledge of Allegiance. But not social justice, or material equality (equality of outcome or result).
The person who would display a bumper sticker like the above does not fear the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence or the institutional structure of the USA or the values and ideals it enshrines. Take a gander at this sticker:
Someone who displays this supports the U. S. Constitution and the Second Amendment thereto in particular. What he fears is not the U. S. government in its institutional structure; what he fears are gun-grabbing administrations. What he fears are lawless, hate-America, gun-grabbing, liberty-infringing, race-baiting leftists like Barack Obama and Eric Holder and Hillary Clinton.
In sum, I suggest that an adequate definition of 'country' must involve all of (a)-(d) supra. But this is a very difficult topic and I am no expert in political philosophy.
It is not uncommon to hear people confuse patriotism with jingoism. So let's spend a few moments this Veteran's Day reflecting on the difference.
Jingoism is well described by Robert Hendrickson as "bellicose chauvinism." But given the general level of culture, I am afraid I can't leave it at that, but must go on to explain 'chauvinism' and 'bellicose.' Chauvinism has nothing to do with sex or race. I have no objection to the phrases 'male chauvinism' or 'white chavinism,' the latter a term widely used in the 1950s in Communist Party USA circles; but the qualifiers are essential. Chauvinism, named after Nicholas Chauvin of Rochefort, an officer under Napoleon, is excessive nationalism. 'Bellicose' from the Latin word for war (bellum, belli) means warlike. So we get 'warlike excessive nationalism' as the definiens of 'jingoism.'
According to Henrickson, the term 'jingoism' originated from a refrain from the British music hall song "The Great MacDermott" (1878) urging Great Britain to fight the Russians and prevent them from taking Constantinople:
We don't want to fight, yet by Jingo if we do/ We've got the ships, we've got the men, and the money, too.
'By Jingo,' in turn, is a euphemism for 'by Jesus' that dates back to the later 17th century. (QPB Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, 2nd ed. p. 395) So much for 'jingoism.' I think we are all going to agree that it is not a good thing.
Patriotism, however, is a good thing, a virtue. Like any virtue it is a means between two extremes. In this case, one of the extremes is excessive love of one's country, while the other is a deficiency of love for one's country. The patriot's love of his country is ordinate, within bounds. The patriot is neither a jingoist nor a neutralist. Both are anti-patriots. To confuse a patriot with a jingoist is like confusing a dissenter with a traitor. No doubt sometimes a jingoist or chauvinist will hide beneath the mantle of patriotism, but just as often a traitor will hide beneath the mantle of dissent. The patriot is also not a xenophobe since ordinate love of one's country does not entail hatred or fear of other countries and their inhabitants. Is patriotism, defined as the ordinate love of, and loyalty to, one's country justified?
Although it does not entail xenophobia, patriotism does imply a certain partiality to one's own country precisely because it is one's own. Is this partiality toward one's own country justifiable? If it is, then so is patriotism. As Socrates explains in Plato's Crito, we are what we are because of the laws. Our country and its laws have overseen our nurturance, our education, and the forming of our characters. We owe a debt of gratitude to our country, its laws, those who have worked to maintain and defend it, and especially those who have died in its defense.
Is Obama a patriot? Well, if you want fundamentally to transform your country, are you a patriot? Suppose you profess love of a girl and propose marriage to her, but only on condition that she undergo a fundamental transformation, physical, mental, moral and emotional. Can you be said to love her?
Leftists are consummate linguistic hijackers. I've been making this point since the inception of this weblog back in aught-four. I won't repeat my examples. It just now occurred to me that a useful tactic in the culture war might be the reverse hijacking of liberal-leftist lingo.
I have done this three times in the last few days without conscious subsumption under the italicized rubric.
Thus 'Black Lives Matter' gets twisted into 'Black Lies Matter' to highlight the fact that the distortions, falsehoods, and outright lies of many blacks and their liberal-left enablers get people killed, mostly blacks, and undermine the rule of law.
'Safe space' and 'trigger warning' are easily mocked as I did a few hours ago.
All's fair in love and war, and this is a war, muchachos. Make no mistake about it. The behavior of leftists shows that they see it as a war, as witness their relentless smearing of Dr. Ben Carson. They practice without scruple the politics of personal destruction. They did it to Sarah Palin in an especially vile manner, and to Herman Cain. If they see politics as a war, we can't see it as a gentlemanly debate. Mockery and derision are potent weapons as Saul Alinsky recognized and they must be employed to attack the enemies of the republic and to energize those who, for whatever reason, are impermeable to calm and learned disquisitions.
But you must also have rigorous arguments and calm disquisitions at the ready for those who are capable of processing them.
Loaded with double-aught buckshot, the instrument of home defense depicted below has the power to separate the soul from the body in a manner most definitive. Just showing this bad boy to a would-be home invader is a most effective way to issue a 'trigger warning' in a reality-based sense of that phrase.
But let Uncle Bill give you a piece of friendly advice. You really don't want to have to shoot anyone. No matter how worthless the scumbag, he is some mother's son and a bearer, somewhere deep inside under a load of corruption, of the imago Dei. Taking a human life must always be the last resort, and this for moral, legal, prudential, and psychological reasons. You should aspire to die a virgin in this regard, assuming you are still 'intact.'
So here's my advice. Secure your home so that the miscreants cannot get in. That's Job One.
And of course never, ever, vote for criminal-coddling, criminal-releasing and gun-grabbing Democrats or liberals and always speak out loudly, proudly, and publicly for your Second Amendment rights. It is the Second that is the real-world back-up of the First and the others.
I'm sure you've heard a lot about the Mizzou [University of Missouri] protests so I'll spare you the details. But one particular debate caught my eye. Some of these student protesters claimed that the press has no right to photograph them because to do such is an intrusion on their privacy (obviously the press has a legal right to do such). Some people respond by saying that since Mizzou is a public space (it's a public university) you have no right to privacy in public spaces. But of course you still have some right to privacy in public areas (the right not to have your person searched without a warrant, the right to use a bathroom without people watching, etc.) So what are the moral grounds (as opposed to the legal grounds) for saying that the press should have unrestricted access to photograph things in plain view in public spaces?
Protests and demonstrations occur in public, and for good reason: the whole point is to make public one's concerns. So there is something deeply paradoxical about protesters who object to being photographed or televised. It is paradoxical to go public with one's protest and then object to reporters and other people who give you publicity. It is incoherent to suppose that a space in which one is noisily protesting and perhaps disrupting normal goings-on can be a 'safe space' into which the public at large cannot intrude, even at a distance, with cameras and such.
Paradox and incoherence aside, the protesters have no moral right not to be photographed given that they have occupied and disturbed the peace of public spaces. Does the press have the unrestricted moral right to photograph things in plain view in public spaces? No, not an unrestricted right. But surely they have the right to photograph what is in plain view in a public place if the ones photographed are protesting or demonstrating whether peacefully or violently.
Suppose a couple are enjoying a tête-à-tête under a tree in the quad. Does a roving photog have the moral right to snap a photo? I say No. He has a moral obligation not to do such a thing without permission. So I would say that is not just a question of good manners, but a question of morality.
This entry supplements the earlier entry on what Wittgenstein in the Tractatus calls the metaphysical subject. (5.633)
Wittgenstein
As I read him, Wittgenstein accepts Hume's famous rejection of the self as an object of experience or as a part of the world. "There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas." (5.631) The reason Wittgenstein gives is that, if he were to write a book called The World as I Found it in which he inventories the objects of experience, he would make mention of his body and its parts, but not of the subject of experience: "for it alone could not be mentioned in that book." The argument is similar to the one we find in Hume: the subject that thinks is not encountered as an object of experience.
But why not? Because it doesn't exist, or because the subject of experience, by its very nature as subject, cannot be an actual or possible object of experience? It has to be the latter for Wittgenstein since he goes on to say at 5.632 that "The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world." So he is not denying that there is a subject; he is telling us what it is, namely, the limit of the world. His thesis is not eliminativist, but identitarian.
From the fact that the metaphysical subject is nowhere in the world, it does not follow that it does not exist. If, however, you think that this is a valid inference, then you would also have to think that from the non-appearance of one's eyes in one's visual field one could validly infer the nonexistence of one's eyes.
As 5.6331 asserts, one's eyes are not in one's visual field. If you say that they can be brought into one's visual field by the use of a mirror, I will point out that seen eyes are not the same as seeing eyes, a point on which I 'dilate' in detail in the earlier entry.
The analogy is clear to me. Just as one's eyes are not in one's visual field, visual consciousness of objects in the world is not itself in the world. Visual consciousness, and consciousness generally, is of the world, not in it, to reverse the New Testament verse in which we are enjoined to be in the world, but not of it. (Needless to say, I am reversing the words, not the sense of the NT saying. And note that the first 'of' is a genitivus objectivus while the second is a genitivus subjectivus.)
Of course, this is not to say that there is a substantial self, a Cartesian res cogitans outside the world. "The world is all that is the case." There is nothing outside it. And of course Wittgenstein is not saying that there are soul substances or substantial selves in the world. Nor is he saying that there is a substantial self at the limit of the world. He is saying that there is a metaphysical (better: transcendental) self and that it is the limit of world. He is stretching the notion of self about as far as it can be stretched, in the direction of a radically externalist, anti-substantialist notion of consciousness, which is later developed by Sartre and Butchvarov.
What we have here is the hyper-attenuation of the Kantian transcendental ego, which is itself an attenuation of substantialist notions of the ego. The Tractarian Wittgenstein is a transcendental philosopher. He may not have read much or any Kant, but he knew the works of the Kantian, Schopenhauer, and was much influenced by them. According to P. M. S. Hacker,
Of the five main philosophical influences on Wittgenstein, Hertz, Frege, Russell, Schopenhauer, and perhaps Brouwer, at least three were deeply indebted to Kant. It is therefore not surprising that Wittgenstein's philosophy bears deepest affinities to Kant's, despite the fact he never studied Kant . . . ." (Insight and Illusion, 139)
Spot on.
Butchvarov
Now to Butchvarov. He writes that his picture and Wittgenstein's share "the rejection of the metaphysical self and thus of subjectivism in all its forms." (Anthropocentrism in Philosophy, Walter de Gruyter, 2015, p. 235) A few pages earlier we read, "Hume in effect denied that there is what Wittgenstein was to call 'the philosophical self' or 'the metaphysical subject'." (226)
Here is where I disagree. While it is certainly true that both Hume and Wittgenstein reject the substantial self of Descartes and of the pre-Critical rational psychologists, Wittgenstein does not reject the metaphysical/transcendental subject. Nor should he, even if he accepts Hume's argument from the non-appearance of the self. For the metaphysical self, as the limit of the world, is not an object in the world and so cannot be expected to appear in the world. Its non-appearance is no argument against it.
That Wittgenstein does not reject the metaphysical/transcendental subject is also clear from Wittgenstein's claim at 5.641 that "there is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way" without, I may add, lapsing into a physiological or naturalistic way of talking about it. He goes on to reiterate that the "philosophical self" is not the human body or the human soul, and therefore no part of the world. It is the "metaphysical subject," the limit of the world.
What I am maintaining, then, in apparent contradiction to Butchvarov, is that, while Wittgenstein rejects the substantial ego of Descartes, he does not reject "the metaphysical subject" or "the philosophical self."
A Dilemma?
There is a serious substantive issue here, however, one that may tell against Butchvarov's solution to the Paradox of Antirealism. (See article referenced below.)
Why call this philosophical self or metaphysical subject a self if it only a limit? Can a limit be conscious of anything? Why should the self be a philosophical as opposed to a psychological or neurophysiological topic? How does the self get into philosophy? Must the self get into philosophy for antirealism to get off the ground? "What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that 'the world is my world'." (5.641) This harks back to the opening antirealist sentence of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation: "The world is my representation." Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung. The world is my world because, tautologically, the only world for me is my world. The only world for me as subject is the world as object. As Butchvarov puts it, though without reference to Schopenhauer, "The tautology is that the only world we perceive, understand, and describe is the world perceived, understood, and described by us." (231) This is the gist of what the great pessimist says on the first page of WWR. (Whether it is indeed a tautology needs to be carefully thought through. Or rather, whether it can be both a tautology and a statement of antirealism needs to be thought through. I don't think it can be both as I will argue in a moment.)
Now the possessive pronoun 'my' is parasitic upon the the first-person pronoun 'I' which refers to the self. So my world is the the world thinkable and cognizable by me, by the I which is no more in the 'consciousness field,' the world of objects, than the seeing eye is in the visual field. How can my world be mine without this transcendental I? And if you send the transcendental I packing, what is left of antirealism?
Are we headed for a dilemma? It seems we are.
1. Either (a) antirealism boils down to the tautological thesis that "the only world we perceive, understand, and describe is the world perceived, understood, and described by us" (231) or (b) it does not. Please note that the quoted thesis is indeed a tautology. But it is a further question whether it can be identified with a nonvacuous thesis of antirealism. (And surely antirealism must be nonvacuous to be worthy of discussion.) While it is a tautology that the only cats I see are the cats I see, this is consistent with both the realist thesis that cats exist independently of anyone's seeing and the antirealist thesis that their existence is just the indefinite identifiability of cat-noemata by a perceiver.
2. If (a), then antirealism 'says nothing' and does not exclude realism. It is a vacuous thesis. For example, it does not exclude a representational realism according to which there is a world that exists in itself, a world that includes beings like us who represent the world in various ways more or less adequately and whose representations are representations of what, in itself, is not a representation.
3. If (b), and antirealism is to have any non-tautological 'bite,' it must imply that the world is in some respect dependent on a self or selves other than it. But then the "philosophical self" or "metaphysical subject" cannot be either a mere limit of the world as Wittgenstein says or nonexistent as Butchvarov implies. It must be a part of the world. But this leaves us with the Paradox of Antirealism. For it conflicts with what Butchvarov considers "self-evident," namely, that in the context of the realism-antirealism debate, "we cannot coherently regard ourselves as a part, mental (an ego, a colony of egos) or material (a brain, a collection of brains), of that world." (231)
Therefore
4. Antirealism is either vacuous or incoherent. It is vacuous if a tautology. For then it cannot exclude realism. It is incoherent if not a tautology. For then it succumbs to the Paradox of Antirealism.
What Butchvarov wants is a "metaphysics that is antirealist but not anthropocentric." (231) It is not clear to me that he can have both antirealism and non-anthropocentrism. Antirealism cannot get off the ground as a substantive, non-tautological thesis in metaphysics without a self or selves on which the world depends (in some respects, not necessarily all). But the price for that is anthropocentrism in Butchvarov's broad use of that term. He opposes (rightly!) making the world dependent on physical proper parts thereof, but also making it dependent on purely mental/spiritual proper parts and presumably also a divine proper part
One can of course attenuate the subject, retreating from brain to psyche, to transcendental ego, to limit of the world, to a self that shrinks to a point without extension (5.64), to a Sartrean wind blowing towards objects which is, as Sartre says, nothing — but at the limit of this attenuation one arrives at something so thin and next-to-nothing as to be incapable of supporting a robust antirealism.
Questions for Professor Butchvarov
1. Do you agree with me that, while Wittgenstein rejects the Cartesian-type ego that Hume rejects, he does not reject what he calls "the metaphysical subject" and "the philosophical self"?
2. Do you agree with me that, for Wittgenstein, the metaphysical subject construed as limit of the world, exists, is not nothing?
3. Do you agree with me that, while "the only world we perceive, understand, and describe is the world perceived, understood, and described by us" (231) is plainly a tautology, it is a further question whether this tautology is the thesis of antirealism that is debated by philosophers? (As opposed to a thesis of antirealism that you have arbitrarily stipulated.)
4. Do you agree with me that the above quoted tautology is logically consistent with both realism and antirealism?
5. Do you agree that rather than solving the Paradox of Antirealism, you dissolve it by eliminating the subject of consciousness entirely?
6. Suppose I grant you that there are no egos, no acts, and that consciousness-of is non-relational along the lines of Sartre's radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness. Will you grant me that the distinction — the 'Transcendental Difference' if you will — between subjectless consciousness-of and objects is ineliminable and undeniable?
7. If you grant me that, will you grant me that the non-relational appearing of objects does not itself appear?
8. If you grant what I want you to grant in (7) will you grant that something can be real without appearing, without 'showing up' phenomenologically?
9. If you grant me what I want you to grant in (8) will you grant that, if something can be real without appearing, that the transcendental ego and acts can also be real without appearing?
To put it another way, if you hold that there are no egos and acts on the ground that they do not appear, must you not also maintain that there is no nonrelational consciousness-of on the ground that it does not appear?
It began in the universities in the '60s. And now it is in full 'flower.' I recall Dennis Prager putting it this way: "There is no coward like a university administrator." Now hear David French:
Fortunately for the radicals, our universities are populated by the craven and the cowardly. Push a professor, even slightly, and it’s likely he’ll fold. Demand faculty support for your protest, and dozens will rush to join, self-righteously advancing their own false oppression narratives even as they enjoy lives billions of others would covet. There is nothing brave about these people. They are not “elite.” They don’t deserve a single dime of taxpayer money or one cent of student tuition. They dishonor their schools and their country.
Closeted campus conservatives are worse than useless. Indeed, their very timidity contributes to the narrative that there is something shameful about their beliefs. To read anonymous letters from professors who are afraid to “out” themselves in a hostile campus culture is to read the sad dispatches of people too pitiful for their profession. Do something else, anything else, than merely sit and watch while the revolutionaries shred the Constitution, reject our culture, and assert their own will to power.
The true shame is that it doesn’t even require actual courage to defeat the university Left, just a tiny bit of will — a small measure of staying power. No one is shooting at trustees. No one is beheading professors. There’s no guillotine in the quad. Instead, campus “leaders” tremble before hashtags and weep at the notion of losing a football team so inept that it couldn’t score a touchdown through most of the month of October. Let them strike. With an offense that inept, the SEC won’t even notice.
These are the times that try men’s souls? No. These are the times of men without chests. The Left has the will to power. University leaders have no will at all. They have earned nothing but contempt.
