Philosophy is often understood as a discipline with a distinct subject matter. It refers, negatively, to unempirical matters. More positively. that means philosophy studies concepts that are characteristics of existence itself rather than some aspect of physical, biological and social nature and is therefore non comparative, each of those natural fields various and therefore comparable in that they have more or less of one thing or another, or are comparative in that comedy differs from tragedy or landscapes from portraits. Each of the philosophical fields are sui generis and include such things as concepts found in metaphysics, such as cause and effect, time. and being itself, and also such concepts as beauty, ethics, justice, and the nature of knowledge, all of those unempirical in that the concepts cannot be reduced to the description of a natural process. A critic can find how a play creates its effects and decide it is beautiful but will not be able to define beauty, which is itself a distinct concept, even if David Konstan is so daring as to say that beauty can be reduced to attractiveness, which is part of the natural world, and so people can be said to be more or less attractive and it is possible to describe the dynamics of attractiveness. Moreover, ethical systems are also unempirical in that it is possible to show the consistency of Stoicism or Epicureanism or Pragmatism (which means considering short term consequences, so as to consider a loved one as attractive in form or with a certain tone and rhythm of voice rather than some “deeper” matter) without being able to prove that one of the ethical systems are morally preferable to another, just pointing out their particular advantages, such as a Stoic forearmed that things in life can go bad.
Read MoreActual Reasoning
People have a sense or some indication or belief in what we might call the pulse of history in that they try, inevitably, to outguess the future, whether that means who will win a Presidential election or whether the animals in the wild will come out and harass the cavemen during a dry season. This sense or practical understanding is described in metaphors because the pulse of history is not really a sine curve by which to follow a human heart but is, to use another metaphor, a way history will jump, and it is often described in literary terms, as when Marx said that history comes first as tragedy and then by farce and that we can suggest that Nixon was a tragic figure and that Trump is a farcical one, even if much more dangerous. These perceptions are not quite accurate, the second one only vaguely parallel to the other incident, but giving the idea of a theme and variation. My mother knew nothing of the theory of probability, but advised me that the card I needed would turn up in a rummy deck especially when the deck was getting depleted. Be patient, she warned. She was also a good poker player. But let us not consider the clear comparison between the mathematical rules of probability in contrast to intuition. Think of real life ways in which people try to grasp how things will turn out and see how those insights get formalized into scientific like procedures, the model of natural science overshadowing how it is that people actually do what seems reasonable. Here are three examples.
Read MoreMiracles
All miracles are violations of what ordinarily happens. Here are four conceptions of the idea of what gets violated. Each of them have successively created a more symbolic or metaphorical idea of miracle and so can be thought as markers in the evolution from supernatural religion to a religion which is only moral rather than factual. Looking at the meanings of miracles reveals the ways in which religion can sidestep or excuse its claims without abandoning a sense that miracles are somehow real.
Read MoreThe History of Ideas
For half a century, let us say from 1930 to 1980, there was an intellectual movement, now forgotten, which premised that the queen of the disciplines was tracing how ideas emerged and then, over time, altered or were corrected, and then either ended or were transformed into a different basic idea. What people thought was always framed by where they stood in the development of some key idea and, during that time, history of ideas was more important than, let us say, administrative or political history for explaining how history worked. Many movements came afterwards, such as environmental history or post colonial history, but there it was during its reign. There was Arthur Lovejoy expounding how for many centuries thought was dominated by a great chain of being so that there was an inherent hierarchy whereby every person and every animal had their place in nature. There was Carl Becker’s analysis of how the Enlightenment and the American Revolution ticked. There was Ernst Cassierer’s magisterial view of how the Renaissance and the Enlightenment evolved into Kant. There was F. R. Leavis tracing the moral arc of the English novel from Defoe to Virginia Woolf. There was even the early Herbert Marcuse criticizing, early on, the limitations of the Weberean sense of capitalism before going on to see how Marxism transformed itself into Soviet Marxism before in the Sixties becoming the spokesperson for a leftist ideology in America. That point of view was different from the concurrent interest in intellectual history, which concerned more details, such as what books Rousseau or Darwin had consulted or whether Mendel had faked his counts on whether peas were in proper proportions to what genes would predict should happen. It was about big ideas, how they changed, not how people changed, and I thought of myself as seeing as well that this was the way to unfold history.
Read MoreOriginal Good
The fundamental tenet and experience of Christianity is that people are all subject to original sin and therefore have to be released from that and the event is accomplished by God sending down His Son Jesus to suffer and therefore atone for all the sins of mankind. St. Paul, who developed that doctrine, may have done so as to explain how it was that a Messiah could have died when in Jewish tradition a Messiah had to live. So Peter found an excuse for Jesus to die: He was destined to redeem mankind from sin. But Jesus is logically secondary to the primary sense that mankind needs redemption from its failings, Christianity having an exquisite sense of misery, that people are unworthy and polluted. Jesus, in a way, is a deus ex machina: He is the one to rescue the settlers from the Indians, and He does that work whether He was a real Son of God, the incarnation of the Deity, as Paul thought, or if He is a symbolic and historical figure who shows the path to enlightenment so that people are no longer overwhelmed by their guilt and shame. Christianity prizes itself on making their people feel very deeply their blame before they are freed from it.
Read MoreTwo Sides Going Past One Another
History is informative when it allows for comparisons but not predictive because it does not tell you how things will work out. It is therefore informative to point out that there are ways in which the era of the Fifties and Sixties is repeating itself in the Twenties by presenting an intensity of events in the public arena that are unsettling and foment change and are perfectly visible. That earlier era saw assassinations and riots and major landmark legislation and Supreme Court decisions, deeply flawed Presidents contending with real statesmen (though today including stateswomen) and simultaneous actions here and abroad: a war then as well as a major domestic upheaval over race, based on regional conflict, while today there is a still minor scale (for American) war alongside an upheaval over the rights of women and attendant other “minorities”, again based on regionalism (the west coast and the east versus the south and the mountain states). There was rioting in a number of cities after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. and a little bit of rioting after the death of George Floyd a few years ago. There was back then a President assassinated and one resigned and today there is a recent President who was twice impeached and leads an insurrection and a President, two incumbent’s before, who qualifies now as the second worst President ever for having gone into war on the basis of a lie, the real reason for it still unclear. History, for the duration of the periods, then and now, seems to be moving at quick speed, not having to absorb one moment before there is another one demanding its attention. What is happening that makes us attend to what will happen next, what will unfold in the news cycle, is the long slumbering answer or backlash against the Fifties and Sixties, an attempt to regain what had been supposedly lost as a result of those reforms some fifty or more years ago and reestablish the social order that existed before those changes. It has been a long time in coming, but it has come, and it is unclear which of the two major factions, those who prefer what existed before the Fifties and what came after it, will prevail.
Read MoreJane's Aphorism
My deceased wife had an aphorism that seems to ring true and to which I regularly return. It says: “If you can’t explain what you mean, then you can’t know what you mean”. She arrived at this aphorism by trial and error by noticing people who got confused when they were asked to explain themselves. This insight had been formalized by Bertrand Russell's Theory of Definite Description which propounded the idea that a wrong statement was not just incorrect but made no sense. If a statement were properly propounded, it had to make sense. Jane applied this criterion to any number of people who got very annoyed at having failed to make themselves as clear as Jane required people to be. It was a standard that also applied in the mid Twentieth Century to what was then considered an age of ideology. I would have arguments with Marxists and Stalinists where each of us would try to pick out the crucial flaw in their logic, reducing one another to basic and irreducible axioms. I would argue that Weber’s idea of status and organization were independent of social class as the ways to create power and that was all that had to be said, and a Stalinist and I also came to agree to essentials, he thinking that something called the Communist Party would govern over the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its wisdom would lead us to the future, in whatever way the Party chose and saw fit, while I thought the evolution of society was subject to the constraints of social structure. I thought him quasi religious in he giving himself over to an ultimate authority, or to put it otherwise, to an almighty, but he was clear and consistent. He knew what he meant even if his basic stated principles did seem to me muddled because any leader could call himself a Communist and lord over everyone if there were no independent standards. That point of view is very different from the present one where people can, in effect, invoke the idea actors or feigning roles that “you know what I mean” as a way of providing a sufficient explanation for their meaning, having a sense of it that it would be rude to suggest needed further explanation, and people back in those days also though rude if Jane would persist and insist on people explaining themselves i f they were not to be thought of as engaging in gibberish. No longer insisting on narrowing down to basic principles but only a general sense of things to be respected.
Read MoreThe Social and the Transcendental
When I take my daily constitutional half a mile to a convenience store and back, I am not alone even though I don’t know the names or remember the faces of people I pass. They know who I am: an elderly man with a cane who is getting his exercise, and perhaps returning with a beverage. Nobody is without their roles,some important ones of which are on display. What you see is what I am whether or not I disclose what I think are my deep thoughts. The question here is whether I can ever escape from my roles, is there some relaxation of all those roles, like tinker, would be spy or ex-professor, that cocoon me, everyone exhibiting any number of spikes that, like the coronavirus, allow identities to hang onto our projections and our awards, or ‘beings” as a particular entity. Yes there are, and among them is exhibited in that nearly daily walk, because I get so enmeshed in the walk itself, that it travels in distance, that I forget what my roles are, to the extent that such is possible. Nobody totally leaves hold of their identities, unless in an existentialist fantasy, as in Camus’ “The Stranger” and, in that case, such moments are horrendous rather than liberating.
Read MoreStrong and Weak Moral Words
Although they might not care to agree with this characterization of their work, most philosophers regard moral statements as similar to opinions in that they are statements of belief about behavior preferences. Just as public opinion researchers will ask people if they prefer one presidential candidate to another, or whether abortion is right or wrong, philosophers will abstract moral words as the particular kind of qualifications of behavioral descriptions that turn them into preferences. Saying abortion is wrong is the equivalent of saying “It is my opinion that no one, regardless of their opinion on the matter, should have an abortion. Their preference should be not to have an abortion, and I am certain about that. You can list me as ‘very certain’ rather than merely ‘somewhat certain’.” Philosophers disagree among themselves about whether moral preferences are matters of taste, or instances of universal rules, just as opinions are sometimes statements of personal preferences between brands, but are also sometimes statements of presumably disinterested preferences, as when a respondent opines that affirmative action is good or bad, acting for a moment as if this were not also a matter of self-interest.
Read MoreMorality is Overrated
Even if you think that every “should” is a command, as Kant thinks, and that “should’s” are ubiquitous in everyday life, as when you should mind your mother and grant favors to friends and comply with reasonable requests by employers, and ubiquitous as well in collective or political life, as when Jesus commands that people be kind to one another, or that Martin Luther king, Jr. commands that we look to people’s character rather than their race, that does not mean that the moral life is neither the only life or even a predominant aspect of life, even though religion feels that it has accomplished and made more powerful and attractive the association of religion with morality, something that emerges with Abraham, who criticizes God for not meeting a higher standard of morality by imposing conditions whereby God will forego the destruction of Sodom and Gemorah, and where the charismatic power of Jesus is wedded with a morality of compassion. Rather morality, as a whole, is just one of the affective affinities and has to be properly placed within the passions, however much religion has stated otherwise.
Read MoreHumanist and Scientific Formats
Literary journalists rely on tired tropes to hold together the points they make as the themes of essays about one or another of the subjects they decide to write about . They need to have points because their high school English teachers said so, even though newspaper type reports or encyclopedia entries or recipe books may not have them, nor do memoirs or diaries or clinical records. But literary journalists do make points and those therefore can be obligatory references to a theory or a touchstone that lets the reader know how the writer is placed among the ideologies and interests and pursuits that define the writer, or else just to provide some apparatus to help hold the thing together. I am reminded of this by my catching up with past issues of the New York review of Books and finding that so many of its ideas are unnecessary or simply canned. There is an article that reminds the author that she is a Feminist, or else that imperialism was a bad thing, or that an author was underrated when all that was meant in the claim was that an author was not properly rated rather than was upped higher on a ruler presumed previously ranked.
Read MoreConservatives, Liberals, Radicals
Soon after the Second World War, in the early Fifties, Hannah Arendt and others formulated a three part typology to describe political regimes. There was the totalitarian type, something new under the sun in the past twenty years, where the individual citizen, all of them, were subject to such intimidation and terrorism that the very psyche of an individual was shattered, everyone subject to a leadership out to restructure humanity into a new kind of person in keeping with its new ideology and disregarding usual constitutional procedures of law and order. That happened in countries controlled by Nazi Germany and countries controlled by the Soviet Union and inappropriately applied to militant Japan because it was part of the Azis and because the Army and Navy were independant of political institutions even though free speech, for exaample, continued in the press and radio until the last few years of the war. The second type were authoritarian regimes where only political opponents were terrorized and tortured while the rest of the population was allowed to move apace, quickly or slowly to modernize. Authoritarian regimes included Fascist Spain and Portugal and Italy and most of the underdeveloped countries in Latin America and Africa. The third type were the democracies in Western Europe and North America and influenced by British colonialism, including Australia, New Zealand, Chile and India. These countries had free speech, the rule of law, and the other parts of a liberal democracy even if India had gained its independence only recently. A key idea of this three part theory was that there was not much difference between Left and Right totalitarian societies. Ideologies might differ but the structures of terrorism as a cause and a consequence of such regimes was the same. No need to quibble about whether Hitler was more or less worse than Stalin. In both cases, projected utopias had become dystopias.
Read MoreKant and Marx: Should We Hate Jessica?
Here Is a radically different approach to describe morality, which is usually thought of as adding something to the descriptions of the world so as to provide a fuller picture of life. Kant put that usual view clearly and succinctly. It was inevitable, he thought, that people came up with the word “should” to describe the fact that people chose to do one thing rather than another out of obligation rather than just custom or taste or else people would not have real choices and that was clearly part of the nature of the world. I am saying otherwise. People use moral categories for a particular reason, which is to blame people, and they do so by noticing the aggregation of individuals into types or roles that are in opposition to one another and find that satisfying, which means that morality is in most cases unnecessary even if blaming people, including oneself, is an easy thing to do to explain people, as when one says that all people are subject to original sin or that some part of people can be clumped together as deficient morally because of their poverty or race. Aggregation is a useful device for illuminating the social world but it is a dangerous one because it breeds unnecessary anger and allegations and, like a good medicine, should be attributed only advisedly. The significance of this proposition is that morality is an attribute for manipulating language to different purposes rather than a discovery about morality as an inevitable feature of the universe that is.
Read MoreComfort and Irony
Consider the related emotions of pleasure and satisfaction to begin a way to summarily dismiss the Utilitarian and the Kantian theories of morality. In short, the idea of comfort replaces the idea of pleasure and the idea of irony replaces the idea of obligation. Moral philosophy, after all, is a partial and recondite way of dealing with what can be described as the way emotions work. A description observes what just is, and is thereby shorn of moral values about what should be done, and so can be dealt with by what is either called the sociology of everyday life or the sociology of emotions. Reducing morality into descriptions rather than proscriptions was the point of Spinoza’s “Ethics”, nothing left of ethics except descriptions.
Read MoreThe Human Condition Persists
How do you evaluate the human condition? Are the basic and inevitable characteristics of human life such that it is great or lousy or so-so? It might be more like Hobbes’ brutish and nasty, red in tooth and claw, a dog eat dog existence only barely mitigated by civil order or, on the other hand, the human condition might be like a weekend family barbeque where the only anxiety amidst the enjoyment of gazing at your wife and children is making sure to turn on the tv to see the football game. Is the human condition closer to heaven or to hell? This question is very difficult to answer because there is only one human condition to contemplate, all the comparisons merely thought experiments. Moreover, it is difficult to assess what is to be included within the human condition. It could include that people are not able to directly enter the consciousness of another person, as if there were a mind meld, or there were just a shared experience for a brief period of time with someone else’s thoughts and feelings about their own discreditable habits or cravings (horrible) or only their more attractive features, such as a will to do the decent thing (heavenly or still just awful to experience in someone else’s skin). Another thing to think about that it is possible to imagine but not realize is that people cannot travel in time so as to alter or even just contemplate when Washington crossed the Delaware or when Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment or when the west was anything over the Appalachians. Did our sense of ourselves very different when traveling in those circumstances? We experiment at that all the time by reading history, our imaginations conveyed to us through books, but would we be very different if we could in fact transport ourselves in that way? I wonder how awful it would have been to confront a world where Hiitler was alive and well in 1940. Would I always be terrified or just continuing on the usual things of getting through school and work and courtship or, more likely, having to do all of those things all at once, aware of both world politics and the quotidian, as one does every day during this or any other time.
Read MorePresent, Past, and Future
Here is an easy situation in which people can appreciate the experience of past, present and future rather than use time as something that is measured, as happens in a clock, where time is just something, whatever it is, that “moves” past. Think of a game of rummy. The cardplayer anticipates what card will come up to complete your rummy or to have a few enough cards so you can “knock”. Every time you are about to pick a card is an anticipation that is needed. Those successive picks until the one card you pick are the future. There are multiple possibilities and keep the cardplayer anxious about what the next card will be. People live in or for the future and it is not easy to describe which proposition “in” or “for” is to apply. When the card you need turns up is in the present. It is an event for the instant satisfaction that it lasts as a card player appreciates that a card has changed the situation advantageously. The memory of all of those times when an unsatisfactory card did not turn up is the past, the collection of failed opportunities, that lets a calculating cardplayer increase the chances of getting the card you want because of the failed opportunities of the cards that have been discarded. What applies to card playing as a way to emphasize the appreciation of past, present and future is the aesthetic or metaphysical pleasure of playing cards.
Read MoreWhy Heaven and Hell
Bart Erdman is a Biblical scholar who is prolific and clear. He says that his job is not to say whether religious beliefs are true or not but to examine how the ideas and emotions associated with them develop. He does, however, offer hypotheses or explanations for why they develop, and so I can wander in as a mere sociologist of religion to offer alternative explanations. Erdman claims that the reason people venture into ideas of Heaven and Hell is because people are just about universally afraid of death, the afterlife portrayed, at best, as a dismal thing. Erdman thinks that people elaborate on Heaven and Hell so as to posit an afterlife. There has to be a just reward for the pains of life while one is living and so there has to be a way to mete out that justice by having both options. A lifetime is long enough by which a person can establish whether one is worthy of the better of the two alternatives-- or provide for a third possibility, which is to work off one’s liabilities after death through Purgatory.
I don’t think Erdman is correct because, among other things, it is necessary to contemplate why so much pain is involved in Hell and why people for most of Christian history have had relish of how awful are the conditions that prevail in Hell. Why does God require so much suffering? A modern Christian might say that there are no occupants in Hell, but certainly most of Christian history thought otherwise. Why the gore along with the glory? I want to offer two standard explanations for the punishment of the dead and then offer two fresh ones, one psychological and one sociological.
Read MorePolitics Akilter
There is a widespread perception afoot, so announced by a number of pundits, that American politics and American society are out of whack. The evidence that suggests that the regular institutions and the usual arrangements and interests of the various demographic populations are not doing what they are supposed to be doing include the fact, central to me, that half of the Republican congresspeople have not admitted that Biden was legitimately elected, that Congress does not want to investigate an insurrection at the Capital, and that poor people are supporting Republicans and that farmers are also supporting Republicans even if trade wars against China have not been to their economic advantage. What is going on? The usual explanations have come up empty.
Read MoreFolk Metaphysics
There are a set of adages that people offer to explain and organize their lives that go beyond whatever are their doctrines or experiences of their religions or their philosophies. These adages, which are foisted by relatively uneducated people as an alternative to religion and philosophy, nevertheless have a persistence which crosses generations. The point of these adages is to provide a natural justice whereby people, in the nature of things, get their just deserts as well as their opportunities to act freely in life. These adages are often harsh and crude and yet satisfying. I want to point out some of them to give a flavor of this subterranean world of understanding that surfaces whenever any of them are needed to articulate what has to be and whatever has always been.These can be considered as the folk metaphysics which is currently present but which we suspect is of very long duration in that people need a metaphysics even if and in addition to more overt and formalized systems that do exist. These constitute what we might call the implicit beliefs to which people adhere and have adhered, and so make up the social glue that sociologists search to find in community or primitive religion rather than these rational if possibly mistaken views of how the social world works.
Read MoreHistorical Mysteries
An historical mystery arises when historians consider why events happened and, after considering all the forces that are at work, there is no satisfactory explanation for why the event or events took place. A good example of an historical mystery is the outbreak of World War I, a topic rigorously investigated from the overly ample materials of the circumstances and events of what is called The July Crisis that occurred after Prince Ferdinand (and his wife) had been assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914 and had for some reason precipitated a World War from which we might say we did not all recover until the Soviet Union collapsed and Germany was reunited in the late 1980’s. How had this apocalypse, none of its member states believing it would happen (Germany mistakenly thinking it would be a short war), had nevertheless occurred?
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