Suppose you value an old friend, a neighbor, a family member, a hiking companion, but differ with him or her on one or more points of ideology. As a general rule, one admitting of exceptions, I recommend assiduously avoiding the points of difference and cleaving to the uncontroversial. Do not multiply enemies beyond necessity! It is a sound conservative principle. We conservatives have no illusions about human nature or its improvability. People are what they are, and they do not and will not change. You cannot improve their thinking or their morals, not by much leastways, but you can make things worse by adding unnecessarily to the hostility in the world, hostility that can come back to bite you.
I once had a chess and hiking partner name of 'Bill.' We were two miles into the 9.1 mile Black Mesa Loop in the western Superstitions when he came out with a remark of such incomparable moral and intellectual obtuseness that my Italian blood began to boil. He said that a prenatal human being is "just tissue."
As someone who has thought deeply and rigorously about this topic (see Abortion category), I had at my command a full arsenal of responses. But I knew I would be wasting my time on the fellow. Only a very few are teachable. You can't make a piston out of ice.
So I said, "Bill, we have a long way to go in this unforgiving wilderness. In the interests of a pleasant hike, I suggest we not talk about this topic."
I took a welcome break from the cable shout shows and the gun 'conversation' the other night to watch the 1944 film noir Double Indemnity, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson. The Stanwyck character talks an insurance agent played by MacMurray into murdering her husband in order to collect on a double indemnity policy. The husband is strangled mafia-style, murderer in back seat, victim in front. But the act is not shown. The viewer is shown enough to 'get the picture.' These old films had sex and violence but one's nose wasn't rubbed in them. Sex and violence were part of the story line. If Bogie was shown taking the leading lady into a bedroom, one knew what was about to transpire, but one was spared the raw hydraulics of it.
But thanks to 'progressives' we've made 'progress.' Much of what passes as 'entertainment' today is meant to demean, dehumanize, degrade and undermine whatever moral sense is left in people. I leave it to you to decide whether Tucson, Aurora, Sandy Hook and like atrocities are more appropriately charged to the account of liberal culture rather than to that of gun culture.
A sweet old lady in the pool the other morning asked me this question. Actually, she asked a much stupider question,"Why would anyone need an assault weapon?' I smiled indulgently and refused to engage her. I knew she wasn't baiting me, and I like her, and 'tis the season to be jolly, and so in the interests of comity I let it slide, realizing that no good would come of giving her the dialectical thrashing she so richly deserved.
First a point of history and a bit of terminology.
Fully automatic rifles, ‘machine guns,’ are heavily regulated. The National Firearms Act of 1934 " requires that before a private citizen may take possession of a fully-automatic firearm he must pay a $200 tax to the Internal Revenue Service and be approved by the Treasury Department to own the firearm, which is registered to the owner with the federal government." (reference) A semi-automatic pistol, rifle, or shotgun fires exactly one round with each pull of the trigger until the magazine is exhausted, unlike a fully automatic which does not require a separate trigger pull for each round fired. The distinction is important and is blurred by use of the emotive phrase 'assault weapon.'
Why would anybody need a semi-automatic rifle such as an AR-15? Well, you might be a Korean shopkeeper who needs to defend his life and livelihood from rampaging ghetto blacks in South Central Los Angeles. (Remember the aftermath of the acquittal of the cops who took the 'motorist' Rodney King into custody using perfectly legal and reasonable methods?) Or perhaps you live along the southern border and need to defend yourself and your family against heavily armed drug cartel members from the corrupt narco-state to the South. Your snub-nosed .38 special is a nice walk-around piece, and better than nothing, but insufficient for the defensive task at hand.
(A gun enthusiast acquaintance of mine referred to my Colt .38 Detective Special as a nice 'heirloom,' recommending that I get a 1911 model semi-auto .45, which I did.)
Any conservative can continue with answers like the above ad libitum, but the best strategy for a conservative is to reject the question altogether.
The right question is not: Why does the citizen need to be armed? The right question is: By what right does the government violate the liberty of the law-abiding citizen? Gun-ownership is a liberty issue similarly as taxation is a liberty issue. With respect to taxation, the right question is not: Why should citizens be allowed to keep their wealth? The right question is: What justifies the government in taking their wealth? The onus justificandi is not on the citizen to defend his keeping of his money; the onus justificandi is on the government to justify its taking of his money. The same goes for guns. The burden is on the government to justify its curtailment of individual liberties, not on the citizen to justify his keeping of his liberties. This is because governments exist for the sake of their citizens, and not the other way around.
You might think that liberals would understand all of this. Although liberals are absurdly sensitive about First Amendment rights, nary a peep will you hear from them concerning Second Amendment rights. And yet it is the Second Amendment that backs up the First. Chairman Mao was right about one thing, namely, that power emanates from the barrel of a gun. Power to the people!
There is a curious inconsistency here, is there not? If liberals believe that our civil liberties are under serious assault from Ashcroft & Co., and continue to be as Obama continues Bush-era policies, then why are they so unwilling to ensure that real power remain in the hands of the people?
There is something schizophrenic about contemporary liberals. They have a libertarian streak: they want to be able to spout any kind of nonsense, no matter how offensive and irresponsible, and have it protected as ‘dissent.’ Fair enough. Though I find Michael Moore contemptible, I would defend his right to pollute the air waves with his ideological flatulence. But when it comes to gun rights, liberals become as collectivist as Hitler or Fidel Castro. It’s curious, and a worthy theme of further rumination.
This great version of a great song is back on YouTube. Catch it while you can. The lineup is all-star: Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Buffy St. Marie, Joan Baez imitating Dylan, Ramblin' Jack Elliot.
. . . it is rarely news, and it is never big news, unless the liberal media can put a 'vigilante' spin on it. Remember Bernie Goetz. the NYC subway gunman? As I reported about a year ago:
Bernard Goetz, mild-mannered electronics nerd, looked like an easy mark, a slap job. And so he got slapped around, thrown through plate glass windows, mugged and harrassed. He just wanted to be left alone to tinker in his basement. One day he decided not to take it any more and acquired a .38 'equalizer.' And so the black punks who demanded money of him on the New York subway in December of 1984 paid a high price for their thuggishness to the delight of conservatives and the consternation of liberals. To the former he became a folk hero, to the latter a 'racist.' It was a huge story back then. One of the miscreants, James Ramseur, has been found dead of an apparent drug overdose.
Ramseur was freed from prison last year after serving 25 years for a rape, according to NBC NewYork.com. He was one of four black teens shot by Goetz on a train on Dec. 22, 1984, in a shooting that earned Goetz the nickname of "subway vigilante" by city newspapers.
Meanwhile Goetz, 64, flourishes and runs a store called "Vigilante Electronics." A heart-warming story on this, the eve of Christmas Eve.
Now let us assume that you desire a balanced understanding of the gun issue. It seems to me that you would have to take into consideration the many cases in which guns are used to save lives, protect property and livelihoods, thwart rapes and muggings and massacres, etc. If you care to gain this balanced understanding, if, in other words, you are not a liberal, you can start here, and then go here, in both cases following out the hyperlinks.
In the recent post Mary Neal’s Out of Body Experiences you state: "No experience, no matter how intense or unusual or protracted, conclusively proves the veridicality of its intentional object. Phenomenology alone won't get you to metaphysics."
I have been attempting to reconstruct your reasoning here, and the following is the best I could come up with.
1) No experience, no matter how intense or unusual or protracted, conclusively proves the veridicality of its intentional object.
2) The subject matter of phenomenology is experience.
3) The subject matter of metaphysics is existence, which includes the quest of proving the veridicality of intentional objects. Therefore:
C) Phenomenology alone won't get you to metaphysics.
I have an issue with (1). Surely, the very meaning of ‘veridical experience’ designates a harmonious pattern of interconnected experiences, the paradigm case being perceptual experiences. Correlatively, when one speaks about the intentional object existing, one means nothing other than the reappearance of the self-same object across this harmonious flow.
Non-veridical experiences, e.g. hallucinations, are then just those experiences that promise, but fail, to endure harmoniously. Whenever non-veridical experiences obtain so do veridical experiences. For example, I was mistaken that there was a cat walking outside on the pavement, and hence had a non-veridical experience of the cat, but I had a veridical experience of the pavement itself. Ultimately, the experience of the world is given as the veridical background that serves as a foundation for all non-veridical experiences. To speak ontologically, the existence of non-veridical experiences depends on veridical experiences and likewise non-existence objects demand existent objects. Therefore, non-veridical experience could never exist on their own, which does not prevent us as talking about them as self-sufficient.
In relation to (2), I would argue that the subject matter of phenomenology is not just experience but also the object experienced just as it is experienced. But if existence is just the reappearance of an object through a harmonious flow of experience, then phenomenology does have metaphysical implication.
I do not think that perceptual experience is the only mode of experience through which existence is experienced; the room is left often for experiences that reveal the divine.
As always, I am very grateful for the existence of your blog.
REPLY
Thanks for reading, E. C., for the kind words, and for the above response.
First of all, you did a good job of setting forth my reasoning in support of (C). But I take issue with your taking issue with (1). You are in effect begging the question by just assuming that what makes veridical experience veridical is its internal coherence. That is precisely the question. It may well be that coherence is a criterion of truth without being the nature of truth. By a criterion I mean a way of testing for truth. It could be that coherence is a criterion, or even the criterion, of truth, but that correspondence is the nature of truth. One cannot just assume that truth is constituted by coherence. I am not saying the view is wrong; I am saying that it cannot be assumed to be true without argument or consideration of alternatives. Such arguments and considerations, however, move us beyond phenomenology into dialectics.
To say of an experience that it is veridical is to say that it is of or about an object that exists whether or not the experience exists. If so, then the existence of the object in reality cannot be explicated in terms of its manners and modes of appearing. If you say that it can, then you are opting for a form of idealism which, in Husserlian jargon, reduces Sein to Seinsinn. I would insist, however, that it part of the plain sense of outer perception that it is of or about objects whose existence is independent of the existence of perceivers and their experiences. To borrow a turn of phrase from the neglected German philosopher Wolfgang Cramer, it is built into the very structure of outer perception that it is of or about objects as non-objects. That may sound paradoxical, but it is not contradictory. The idea is that the object is intended in the act or noesis as having an ontological status that surpasses the status of a merely intentional object. Whether it does have that additional really existent status is of course a further question.
For example, my seeing of a tree is an intentional experience: it is of or about something that may or may not exist. (Note that, phenomenologically, 'see' is not a verb of success. If I see x in the phenomenological sense of 'see,' it does not follow that there exists an x such that I see it.) Now if you say that the existence of the tree intended in the act reduces to its ongoing 'verification' in the coherent series of Abschattungen that manifest it, then you are opting for a form of idealism. And this seems incompatible with the point I made, namely, that it is part and parcel of the very nature of outer perception that it be directed to an object as non-object. The tree is intended as being such that its existence is not exhausted by its phenomenological manifestation.
But the point is not to get you to agree with this; the point is to get you to see that there is an issue here, one subject to ongoing controversy, and that one cannot uncritically plump for one side. If you haven't read Roman Ingarden on Husserl, I suggest that you do.
As for premse (2), we will agree that there are acts, intentional experiences (Erlebnisse), and that they are of an object. Throughout the sphere of intentionality there is the act-object, noesis-noema correlation. But this leaves wide open the question whether the being of the thing in reality is exhausted by its noematic being, whether its Sein reduces to its Seinsinn. On that very point Ingarden disagreed strenuously with his master, Husserl.
"But if existence is just the reappearance of an object through a harmonious flow of experience, then phenomenology does have metaphysical implications." That is true. But I deny the consequent of your conditional and so I deny the antecedent as well.
My point, in sum, is that you cannot just assume the truth of the antecedent. For that begs the question against realism. From the fact that an object manifests its existence in the manner you describe, it does not follow that the very existence of the object is its manifestation.
It may be methodologically useful to bracket the existence of the object the better to study its manners and modes of appearing, but this very bracketing presupposes that there is more to the existence of the object than its appearing. One could say that Husserl was right to bracket the existence of the object for purposes of phenomenology, but then, in his later idealistic phase, he forgot to remove the brackets.
It is unfortunate that a philosopher like Heidegger receives a vast amount of attention, and indeed more than he deserves, while a philosopher such as Wolfgang Cramer is scarcely read at all. I have German correspondents who have first heard of Cramer from me, an American. I admit to being part of the problem: I have published half a dozen articles on Heidegger, but not one on Cramer, or on Maurice Blondel, or on Constantin Brunner, or on Brand Blanshard.
Jacques Derrida is another philosopher who has received an excess of attention. (Because he out-Heidegger's Heidegger?) Why read him when you can read Blondel or Blanshard? Just because he has made a big splash and people are talking about him? Are you a philosopher or a fashionista?
Form your own opinion. Try this. Set a volume of Derrida side by side with a volume of Blanshard. Read a few pages back and forth. Then ask who you are more likely to learn something from. But being as perverse as we are, we often prefer the far-out, novel and radical, even when incoherent, to the boringly solid and sensible.
If the United States, itself awash with weapons, wishes to benefit from Israel’s experience, it must make sure it learns the right lessons. The first and most universal one is that ever more stringent gun control is bad policy: As is the case with drugs, as was the case with liquor during Prohibition, the strict banning of anything does little but push the market underground into the hands of criminals and thugs. Rather than spend fortunes and ruin lives in a futile attempt to eradicate every last trigger in America, we would do well to follow Israel’s example and educate gun owners about their rights and responsibilities, so as to foster a culture of sensible and mindful gun ownership.
I am at the moment listening to Dennis Prager interview Dr. Eben Alexander. Prager asked him whether he now maintains, after his paranormal experiences, that consciousness is independent of the brain. Alexander made a striking reply: "We are conscious in spite of our brains." And then he made some remarks to the effect that the brain is a "reducing filter" or something like that.
That is to say much more than that consciousness can exist independently of the brain. For the latter would be true if consciousness existed in an attenuated form after the dissolution of the body and brain. Alexander is saying that embodiment severely limits our awareness.
Well, why couldn't that be true? Why is it less plausible than a form of materialism that views consciousness as somehow dependent on brain functioning and impossible without it?
Let us assume you are not a dogmatist: you don't uncritically adhere to the unprovable materialist framework assumption according to which consciousness just has to be brain-based. And let us assume that you don't have a quasi-religious faith that future science has wonderful revelations in store that will vindicate materialism/physicalism once and for all. By the way, I have always found it passing strange that people would "pin their hopes on future science." You mean to tell me that you hope you can be shown to be nothing more than a complex physical system slated for utter extinction!? That's what you hope for? It may in the end be true, but I for one cannot relate to the mentality of someone who would hope for such a thing. "I hope I am just a bag of chemicals to be punctured in a few years. Wouldn't it be awful if I had an higher destiny and that life actually had a meaning?"
But I digress. Let's assume you are not a dogmatist and not a quasi-religious believer in future science. Let's assume you are an open-minded inquirer like me. You are skeptical in the best sense: inquisitive but critical. Then I put the question to you: Can you show that the Alexander claim is less plausible that the materialist one?
I don't believe that there can be talk of proof either way, assuming you use 'proof' strictly. You have to decide what you will believe and how you will live. In the shadowlands of this life there is light enough and darkness enough to lend support to either answer, that of the mortalist and that of his opposite number.
So I advance to the consideration that for me clinches the matter. Bring the theoretical question back down to your Existenz. How will you live, starting right now and for the rest of your days? Will you live as if you will be utterly extinguished in a few years or will you live as if what you do and leave undone right now matters, really matters? Will you live as if life is serious, or will you live as if it is some sort of cosmic joke? Will you live as if something is at stake in this life, however dimly descried, or will you live as if nothing is ultimately at stake? It is your life. You decide.
Now suppose that when Drs. Mary Neal and Eben Alexander die the body's death, they become nothing. Suppose that their phenomenologically vivid paranormal experiences were revelatory of nothing real, that their experiences were just the imaginings of malfunctioning brains at the outer limits of biological life. What will they have lost by believing as they did?
Nothing! Nothing at all. You could of course say that they were wrong and were living in illusion. But no one will ever know one way or the other. And if the body's death is the last word then nothing ultimately matters, and so it can't matter that they were wrong if turns out that they were.
If they were right, however, then the moral transformation that their taking seriously of their experiences has wrought in them can be expected to redound to their benefit when they pass from this sphere.
Liberals often call for 'a conversation' or a 'dialogue' about this or that. Didn't Eric Holder a while back call for a 'conversation' on race? What have we been talking about for 150 years? Same with guns. Our liberal pals must know that the gun debate has been raging for decades. So what does a liberal mean when he calls for a 'conversation' about guns?
He means: You conservatives and libertarians shut up and acquiesce in our position. Kurt Schlichter gets it right:
. . . we’re not supposed to have what people might commonly describe as a “conversation” at all. We’re supposed to shut-up and listen as liberals, barely masking their unseemly delight at the opportunity, try to pin the murder rampage of one degenerate creep on millions of law-abiding Americans who did nothing wrong. The conversation is then supposed to end with us waiving our fundamental right to self-defense.
Because that is what the goal is – a total ban on the private ownership of firearms. There’s always another “common sense” gun law which fails because it is targeted at law-abiding citizens and not criminals, thereby inviting another round of onerous new restrictions until finally no citizen is keeping or bearing anything more than a dull butter knife.
Well, almost no citizens. “Gun control” means all guns under the control of the government and available only to it and, of course, to politically connected cronies. Gun-grabbing poser Michael Bloomberg is going to be surrounded by enough fire power to remake the movie Heat. He’s always going to be protected. The purpose of gun control is to ensure that we aren’t.
So let’s have that conversation, and let’s lay the cards on the table. Modern firearms (which really aren’t that modern) are highly effective weapons in the hands of an evil little freak who gets off shooting children. They are also highly effective weapons in my hands when defending my children from evil little freaks.
Liberals ask why I need these weapons. The answer is simple. I’m going to be as well-armed or better armed than the threat. Period.
Another old post that makes points that need regular repeating. Enjoy!
………………….
There is temporary insanity as when a middle-aged man buys a Harley on which to ride though his midlife crisis, wisely selling the bike after the crisis subsides. But my theme is topical insanity, that species of temporary insanity that can occur when certain topics are brought to one’s attention. Someone so afflicted loses the ability to think clearly about the topic in question for the period of time that the topic is before his mind.
Try this. The next time you are at a liberal gathering, a faculty party, say, calmly state that you agree with the National Rifle Association’s position on gun control. Now observe the idiocies to flow freely from liberal mouths. Enjoy as they splutter and fulminate unto apoplexy.
Some will say that the NRA is opposed to gun control. False, everyone is for gun control, i.e., gun control legislation; the only question being its nature and scope. Nobody worth mentioning wants no laws relating to the acquisition and use of firearms. Everyone worth mentioning wants reasonable laws that are enforceable and enforced.
Others will say that guns have only one purpose, to kill people. A liberal favorite, but spectacularly false for all that, and quickly counterexampled: (i) Guns can be used to save lives both by police and by ordinary citizens; (ii) Guns can be used to hunt and defend against nonhuman critters; (iii) Guns can be used for sporting purposes to shoot at nonsentient targets; (iv) Guns can be collected without ever being fired; (v) Guns can be used to deter crime without being fired; merely ‘showing steel’ is a marvellous deterrent. Indeed, display of a weapon is not even necessary: a miscreant who merely suspects that his target is armed, or that others in the vicinity are, may be deterred. Despite liberal mythology, criminals are not for the most part irrational and their crimes are not for the most part senseless. In terms of short-term means-ends rationality, it is quite reasonable and sensible to rob places where money is to be found — Willy Sutton recommends banks — and kill witnesses to the crime.
Still others will maintain that gun ownership has no effect on crime rates. False, see the work of John Lott.
Here then we have an example of topical insanity, an example of a topic that completely unhinges otherwise sane people. There are plenty of other examples. Capital punishment is one, religion is another. A. C. "Gasbag" Grayling, for example, sometimes comes across as extremely intelligent and judicious. But when it comes to religion he degenerates into the worst form of barroom bullshitter. See my earlier post.
This is the kind of e-mail I like, brief and pointed:
Recently I've encountered an argument that runs like this:
1. All knowledge comes from experience 2. All experiences are subjective 3. Ergo, all knowledge is subjective.
I think I can argue somewhat against this argument, but I need a nice snappy response to it.
The snappiest response to this invalid argument is that it falls victim to a fallacy of equivocation: 'experience' is being used in two different senses. Hence the syllogism lacks a middle term and commits the four-term fallacy (quaternio terminorum).
To experience is to experience something. So we need to distinguish between the act of experiencing and the object experienced. The act is subjective: it is a mental occurrence. The object is typically not subjective. For example, how do I know that there is a cat on my lap now? I experience the cat via my outer senses: I see the cat, feel its weight, hear it purr. The experiencing is subjective; the cat is not. I have objective knowledge of the existence and properties of the cat despite the fact that my experiencing is a subjective process.
Now I don't grant that all knowledge comes from experience; I grant only that all knowledge arises on the occasion of experience. But suppose I grant premise (1) arguendo. What (1) says is that all knowledge is knowledge of the objects of the senses. (There is no a priori knowledge.) So we can rewrite the argument as follows:
1*. All knowledge is knowledge of sensory objects (either directly or via instruments such as microsopes).
2*. All acts of experiencing are subjective
Ergo
3*. All knowledge is subjective.
This syllogism is clearly a non sequitur since there is no middle term.
The subjectivity of experiencing is logically consistent with the objectivity of knowledge via the senses. There is no knowledge apart from minds. And yet minds have the power of transcending their internal states and grasping what is real and true independently of minds. How this is possible is a further question, and perhaps the central question of epistemology.
One way to embarrass an empiricist is to ask him how he knows propostions like (1*). Does he know it by experience? No. Then, by his own principles, he doesn't know it. Why then does he think it is true?
