Rights and Obligations

Rights and obligations are accurately described as sujbjective choices and not just external ones.

Reconceive two basic terms of moral and political phi;losophy so as to more accurately describe their subject matters and also that they complement one another rather than are in opposition to one another. These two terms are “right” and “obligation”.

A right is usually regarded as a permission to do something, such as engage  in free speech or petition grievances against the government, these rights considered by Jefferson as unalienable, which means inherent in being a human being. A right can be redefined as the opposite: the capacity not to do something even if a person is enabled to do  so. A person does not have to engage in protest or go on demonstrations even if the person has the freedom to do so. Requiring demonstrations reduces free speech to pagents organized in North Korea. A person need not vote if one does not care to, even if in Australia people are required to show up to show they are there to vote but can sign that they do not care to vote even for an independent or a write-in party. The goal is attendance to the event rather than casting a vote. Medical forms allow for people to indicate religion or ethnicity so as, I suppose, to get the proper clergyman assigned or to allow the collection of demographic data, but those checkoffs are regarded as voluntary lest the assignment of one or another is considered a status that places a person with some discriminatory purpose. In general, the idea of right includes the idea of being indifferent to an exercise of the right, a person allowed to be unpolitical even with regard to political matters.

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A redfinition of Genocide

The term “genocide” is an exact description rather than accusatory.

In the last year, the term “genocide” has become a term of advocacy so as to malign two sides, the Israelis slaughtered by Hamas on Oct. 7th, 2023, even though it was an isolated outrage however much its perpetuators claimed they would do it over and over again, and also by Hamas supporters with regard to the wholesale warfare against Hamas by the Israelis that involved considerable collateral damage. Hamas supporters are not particular about distinguishing between holocaust as a metaphor whereby Israeli warfare is or is just like a holocaust while Israelis invoke the German Holocaust against the Jews as the model and spectre of what has happened and what might happen again. I want to restore the term to its description about a real social event so as to clarify what is going on in the present and to more generally maintain language as mainly an attempt to put in  words an accurate account of reality rather than treat words as social transactions that may supplement but hardly crowd out the attempt of language to do the impossible which is to find words to say what  social or physical reality is just as words about music are attempts, rather lame in my view, to use story lines or the names of emotions to describe the experience of music or the apparent effect of painting. A redefinition of genocide can be done by broadening the term  to include all those incidents of genocide that took place in history as well as the particular incident of Holocaust that applies to what Germany did to the Jews.

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Childhood Experience

Even small children have identities and the ability to rationally manipulate social life.

There are deep structures in existence, like consciousness or the reality of the external world, that are thought to be philosophical or metaphysical or even just conceptual that in fact can be reduced to generalizations or inferences that people draw from experience rather than as inevitable or inherent. The evidence comes from consulting the experience of early age children as to establish what they themselves are able to find and what can be found about them even without the advantages supposedly offered about psychoanalysis about how the early child’s mind can be accessed. I am thinking of my commonplace observations of what I remember before I was four about things I now know as having already been discovered in the world. I remember, for one thing, learning to drink from a glass rather than from a bottle. I had been a late learner and my mothers ruse, as I realized it to be many years later, was to say that she could not get down to the village to buy bottles and so I would have to cope by using a glass to drink milk. An accommodating sort, I said I would do that if I drank from a glass in private and she acquiesced and we went into a private space and I drank from a glass and never went back to bottles. Think about that. I already had the ability to feel embarrassed about making what seemed a major transition and I was able to negotiate  the terms of my acquiescence. 

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Three Kinds of Miracle

Three Kinds of Miracle


There is the miracle of change, the miracle of possibility, and the miracle of serenity.


Bert Erdman says that theologians can say whatever they want regardless of facts while a historian of biblical history lille himself are disciplined in that they can only point out to what texts say and compare them to one another so as to arrive at an accurate historical narrative and so can  conclude that Jesus never said He was God. THat point of view is too harsh on theologians. What they offer are explanations that make sense, which means can be expressed in words and internally consistent about supernal things, like the Trinity or the Resurrection. But these exercises in theology can do even more.Theological terms and distinctions addressed to explaining God and religion can be turned into philosophy in that tey apply to distinctions in the nature of existence, which is the realm of metaphysics. 


A good example of the transition from theology to metaphysics are the proofs of the existence of God that are exhibited by St. Thomas. They may fail as proofs but the devices each do catch a feature of what it is to be. Aquinas says that existence is better than non-existence and that means God exists because that is the preferred state and God is whatever is best. Revealing the fallacy of that argument allows considerations of the nature of existence. Not all attributes are scalar and so being existent is not better than being non-existent, just a different stage. Moreover, even things that are scaler need not mean there is a best or most. Yes, there is an absolute zero for temperature but there is no such thing as the hottest or that there is a most perfect and therefore best beauty. There are different kinds of beauty. The idea that grecian urn is the most perfect form is conventional rather than necessary. So Aquinas’s failures advance metaphysics.


Another valuable example of a theological controversy that can be generalized into a description of metaphysics, which is the study of being for itself, is available in the three interpretations that are offered for miracles, which is clearly a feature of religion, the experience of it made meaningful by finding words to describe it. The first and most ordinary description of miracles is that these are events which violate nature. These include the parting of the Red Sea and the Resurrection. (The communion in the  Catholic Mass is not strictly a miracle even though the claim is that bread and wine are transformed into flesh and blood because there is no claim that the transformation is at all visible, as the claim of the named miracles are, but shrouded in words so that the altered states are different in name or in essence rather than in reality.) It is no use to say the Israelites crossed over the Sea of Reeds and so was a natural event because if that were the case it was no longer a miracle in this meaning of “miracle”. 


Such an explanation away from a miracle that violates nature would put it into the second category of miracle which is a term used, which is that a miracle is any event so earth shatteringly significant that it is not divinely inspired or created and so the change just had to be because a person could not imagine a world where that event did not come to be. So people quite appropriately speak of the birth of a baby or finding your true love as a miracle because you can no longer imagine having had a life without them, life before that chaos or a limbo without enlightenment, accidents rather than necessities. Here, in this second case, there is no violation of nature, just the sense that the past was coincidental while the miraculous event was necessary. You are fated to meet your spouse because it is so important that you cannot treat it as coincidental. A miracle is whatever is singularly or collectively important, whether or not the Red Sea was divided and that created flounders. It was just absolutely necessary that it happened.


A third and viable meaning for miracle that is even further removed from a violation of nature is a subjective evaluation about how the processes of nature as well as of the supernatural are so awesome as to make oneself in the presence of a God-like power. Looking at the sunset creates a feeling of beauty even if you learn it is the result of a lot of soot in the sky. It is overwhelming as well in scope.Scientists can be awed at the immensity of the universe or the intricacies of biological evolution, people insignificant next to those immensities, just as people are  awed by the overly large structures of skyscrapers or the plans Hitler had for a newly built Berlin after the war was successfully completed. That is so even if the awesome things are also cringeworthy, as is  the case with a world of pterodactyls many ages ago without the presence of people or even most mammals. Babies and puppies are also awesome, perhaps because they are fragile rather than enormous and so it is very lucky to have them and so think they could not be  lucky, which makes this third kind of miracle into examples of the second type, all three types sharing a familiarity of necessary specialness. 


The third kind of miracle can create an ambivalent response. Spinoza was considered God intoxicated because he had what he considered his identification  with the all of everything because that is just the intensification of an experience of all that is, including both the natural and the conceptual realms. But Spinoza can also be considered as an atheist in that he redefined terms so that God is the name for everything and can’t make choices and that ethics is reduced into psychology. So modern day scientists can be in awe of the immensity of space or the intricacies of biology and call that religious and treat science as the how rather than the why or else say, following others, there is no need for the God hypothesis. There is no why, only how.


A theological definition of three kinds of miracles can be generalized so as to describe three kinds of a property of existence, which is the concept of cause, which is about how and what happens when things change. A first definition of cause is parallel to the idea that a miracle intervenes or violates nature. In this case, a cause is whatever it is that can disrupt or give resistance to what already exists. You push a boulder up the mountain; you finagle an  internal combustion engine so you can speed at eighty miles an hour; you insist your colleagues are all wrong in the way the committee should proceed. In that sense, cause is told in the form of a story because stories involve people doing something to change an initial condition, such as the placement of Claudius on the throne when,. Perhaps, Hamlet would be thought the rightful heir since he was son of the king and been superseded because he was away at Wittenberg and has now returned to Denmark. What is to be done with him  or by him? Some plays are said to have n o action that changes things but Ibsenism shows that from Chekov and Shaw, activities in plays can change a mood. Eliza not only has become able to act like an aristocrat; she is able to verbally battle with Higgins as an equal person. If there is nothing to overcome, there is no cause.


That  causation is regarded as a miracle in the ordinary sense that comes about in that it is problematic, events occurring within time to change from one state to another. How is it that one moment is connected to the next, the first transformed into the latter? That is the mystery of time. Malebranche, the underappreciated Seventeenth Century Catholic theologian and philosopher, solved the problem by asserting that every moment was a miracle in that God intervened agt every moment to make the next thing happen. Rather than desacralizing nature, miracles are available if you understand them right. That allows all people to feel serene, because every moment is guided even if free just as any scientist will say that people are free because they are in accord with the laws that in this special sense that they need not be enforced to be real. 


A particular kind of cause of this first type, as change, is the phenomenon of a trial, where people are found responsible for the consequences of their actions in the past and so as to include anticipated actions, such as planning a crime, because that is also an action if a person has planned with confederates to do a bank robbery. This kind of cause is, however, very specialized, in that only people can be ascribed to having been the cause of a crime because criminal justice is out to blame people for not having acted properly rather than the crime being the result of a defective brain or what is called acts of God. So a trial eliminates all  the forces or conditions not relevant for a person's intention . You may have had a weak septum but only the punch in the nose is considered as an impact that caused  the crime. Only people can be blameworthy while biology is a natural process and not a person. That people die is natural, while a mistake in surgery is subject to a suit.


The second kind of miracle, which is a consequence that is momentous, can be generalized into a meaning for cause, which is that some events will be more likely than  others to play a significant role in the future. So a butterfly can cause a catastrophe, but a hurricane is more likely. The idea of probability does not depend on contemporary elaborations of inferential statistics, but has always been with people. They knew the sun  would set but, unlike Bertrand  Russell’s chicken, who did not know it would be sacrificed in  the morning when the sun came up, people do wonder at how regular were natural and celestial cycles and so built Stonehenge and calendars to chart the miraculous ways they repeated rather than were unreliable.and  that they would face the cold of winter without knowing how harsh it might be and appealed to the gods to intervene to make the winter more mild, and that one species was likely to be more dangerous than another if approached by a human. People, one can presume, the likelihood of whether an approaching stranger is a danger and lessens or intensifies distrust on the basis of telling signs, such as one's tattoos or the person’s gestures, it always, nonetheless, that you can’t be certain even if you and he smoke the peace pipe. 


People are still amazed at possible momentous things and so speculate about whether storms are the sign of the Second Coming or that weather variations will lead to climatic catastrophes, and need to heed the warning that view events are really apocalyptic however much there is a chance of being killed on the highway during the drive home, or that you might find your wife has left home when you get home. There is no reason to think that we have all become less superstitious because we calculate better. To the contrary, the danger of momentous but statistical outcomes becomes more present and horrifying as we consider whether your medical testing  means you have a larger chance of getting prostate surgery or whether genetic testing shows your unborn child may  have abnormalities. The era of statistics increases uncertainty and so makes religious solace even more attractive than when intrusions might be made in life by witches and demons.


When possibility is the object of attention, it shows that the universe is not ordained and allows for choice. That is introduced into the inventory of reality and so free will is not a property of persons  but of existence, some mammals better or worse at engaging in it, thinking ahead. A dog knows when called to dinner that the bowl will become full and people  wonder whether they can  anticipate they will succeed at a task and reflect on the task as well as the separation between the anticipation of a task and its accomplishment.


The third definition of cause corresponds to the third definition of miracle, which is to stand back at the amazement of nature rather than resist it to notice its own probabilistic nature. That, in effect, is to negate the ordinary sense that cause means impact by reducing nature to formulas or other descriptions where nature is rule-like but does not intervene in nature but only describes it, magical formulas which provoke interventions now understood as descriptions alone. Invoking “F=MA” doesn’t accomplish anything, however profound the formula may be as the way the universe works. You can use physical or biological  forces but the words are only words, except in comic books, where “Shazam” turned a mere mortal into a superhero, however many superhero movies wish it were so. How a formula seems to guide nature and is said to be akin to the dictates of a lawgiver, a divine legislator, remains a mystery.


The three definitions of miracle can be applied to politics as well as to the idea of cause. The first view is that  not much changes in political life throughout the ages because it is always an uphill fight, overcoming resistance, so that a politician can grasp the brass ring of power. Politics hasn’t changed since David went from being the king’s courtier to becoming a rebel leader and then an overbearing king himself. What seems in retrospect seems inevitable, had to be accomplished through political and, in modern times, electoral mobilization. So people take the Federal Drug Administration to supervise the safety of their pharmaceuticals, but that had to be legislated into existence, and faced a contentious fight, as happened with the Affordable Care Act which was unpopular until it was in place for a few years and is regarded as necessary now by most vogters. What seems like it is stable, like Roe v. Wade, is not when people act against it just as what seems uncertain becomes certain, when people have the National Labor Relations Act in place as has been the case for ninety or so years. Indeed, Max Weber insisted on imaging charismatic or otherwise called singular figures as essential so as to overcome the entropy of custom and beau racracy. There had to be some first cause whereby politics could change and so the necessary job, the logical need for a compensating force to bring about change that would otherwise never happen, was the charismatic, a religious like invocation of a miraculous figure that every once in a while emerges to overcome the applecart, which is what politics, because there never was a time before politics that was not resistance, whether to overcome a Platonic city state imbued with loyalty replaced by a cosmopolitanism described by aristotle in  a generation or two, or an American Republic  so successful that we forget that the idea was at the time revolutionary.


The second type of miracle that applies to politics presents a very different view than is available as the ever ending struggle of politicians to change things. It is the idea that there are new political structures that come into place that are so formidable that all aspects of social life are overshadowed by them, however murky may be the origins of these structures, however much their designs become part of their national histories and are taught in schools at all levels of education. It seems remarkable and astonishing that the collection of people who made up the Founding Fathers were so perspicacious as to create their perpetual motion machine called the Constitution. It seems like a miracle no matter how much these people can be placed in their lives and circumstances and engaged in proposals and compromises before coming up with the document.  Democracy is another one of these large scale movements which came to dominate Western societies in the early Nineteenth Century and has sustained itself, encompassing Europe and North America and large parts of Asia, despite what might seem the cumbersome apparatus of arranging for reasonably legitimate elections and short terms of office, whereby royal regimes had long tenure and succession was most of the time assured, rueing the day when that secession was not clear. 


The possibility of a successful new alternative political formation that would have great consequence for governments and even the psyches of people was totalitarianism, which arose about a hundred years ago, but was vanquished by 1989, with the fall of the Soviet Union and where Russian government was replaced soon enough by authoritarianism, a very o;ld form of government,,where leaders only kill off their political rivals.Other social structures such as bureaucracy are very old, as old as the pyramids, as are also such social structures like professionalism, but there are also innovations, like cultic religions becoming congregation al at the time of Jesus and the rise of Protestantism, which insisted that miracles were accomplished in spiritual personal transformations rather than miracles, like confession or the Mass, however much the officiant was legitimately designated. So major political upheavals into new forms of social and political structures are uncertain of origin however profound their impact and people who bother can wonder how that could have come about. Just like being amazed at finding a spouse or a child especially in that people cling to the idea that whatever is has to be and so these developments are a rejection of politics as just the usual resistances.


The third way of understanding politics is applying the idea of standing back and experiencing political and social life as in accord with general principles, that is a substitute for it being individually or collectively motivated. There might be cycles which dominate, such as a circulation of elites, or more familiar to American politics, the idea that periods of innovation are replaced by periods of consolidation as when, again, Eisenhower accepted the New Deal, or when Jim Crow replaced Radical Republicanism. Or else there might be a secular trend whereby incrementally there grows up a greater suffrage or the extension of medical insurance so that it began  for the elderly and now is all but universal. Necessary social mechanisms are discovered, like regulated collective bargaining, though the guarantee of reliable and comprehensive voting frights has had a setback in recent years, while the ability to control; the business cycle has not found to be a satisfactory solution  in  that the Federal Reserve has only the crude device of changing interest rates up and down but has added quantitative easing into its repertoire. 


Some sociologists like Parsons rely less on season-like changes to see the patterns of social and political life. Instead, they try to abstract to the level of what are the inevitably necessary aspects of social life so that societies have to meet their perquisites one way or the other or else society will turn into chaos. This is very different from single factor theories which say that avoiding inflation is the main thing so that an economy will collapse and so will  the entire society, forgetting that there are many ways for a society to collapse: if it doesn’t maintain an  educational system or if it allows great ethnic unrest. And, anyway, stability is not the only way to describe a society, in that there is always its march towards inclusiveness and greater personal liberty.


Here is a reverse miracle in politics. While low information voters do not have to be conspiracy theorists, people of the working class and poverty areas mobilized by class and ethnic loyalties, low information voters can find conspiracy theories, whereby some diabolical people secretly plan to control politics, quite attractive. Conspiracy theorists as identifying an easily mastered mechanism with magical properties rather than attending to what os a[p[parently real, which is that people vote their interests and preferences and legislators are concerned to get reelected and that you have to put up with your boss even if he is nasty because you want to keep your job. Getting rid of  miracles means appealing to ordinary situations and motives. Just the opposite of miraculous thinking which is beneficial and instead spreads gloom and doom.

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Freedom and Liberty

These two sentiments divide America. 

“Freedom” and “liberty” are two terms that are used interchangeably since the founding of the Republic, as in “Give me liberty or give me death!”, which might have been said as “Give me freedom or give me death!”, but these two terms should be distinguished so as to be clearer about the architecture of government. Freedom refers to ways in which people are not externally constrained by governments and so point to the process of unleashing people of their shackles. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” refer to becoming  unconstrained by fear and want though it treats the other two as attributes of positive government,  which is the freedom of speech and to engage in religion, but those two had been under attack by contemporary repressive governments and so to be thought of as something to be achieved rather than as the founding fathers thought inherent in human nature. Liberty, on the other hand, refers to what the unconstrained person can do and so are the expressions of individuality rather than a coercive act to be lifted. So people can mean liberty to mean, as many frontiersmen did, to be  far away from their neighbors, or wear holstered pistols so as to create a great equalization, or try unpopular or uncouth thoughts, or to engage in dangerous sports, or to otherwise explore the possibilities of the individuality coming into favor in the late Eighteenth Century.

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Expressionist Consciousness

Expressionism concerns the autonomy of consciousness and that issue runs deep in the German psyche.

Expressionism was a short lived art movement mostly in Germany in the three decades before, during, and after the First World War that included figures like Eric Nolde and Ernst Kirschner and Otto Dix though some art critics stretch the term to include some Picasso (who, after all, tried a bit of everything), El Greco’s “View of Toledo” (which was religiously inspired while Expressionists were not) and Vincent Van Gogh (who used bright colors and so was very different from Expressionists). The idea of Expressionism, critics generally agree, is that it was an attempt to externalize the feelings within people rather than to accurately portray what the external world looked like. That is true as far as it goes, but that does not explain how the actual features of the art convey the apparently other-worldly and cynical view of the scenes represented and what places them in the social context of Germany at that time. Go back to the elements employed in these paintings of Eric Ludwig Kirshner, the movement’s most central figure, to answer the question. 

Here is Kirshner’s “Berlin Street Scene” from 1915, one of his many presentations of fancy ladies, some of them prostitutes, but not in this painting. These are sophisticated people. The look still predates the Flapper Age, with its short skirts and tiny bosoms, but the women are able to look classy, what with their well tailored dresses, both vividly red and blue, and with fancy hats. The women have shadowed eyes and pale faces while a man among them is smoking a cigarette, a sign of liberation from conventionality, as is the straightforward gazes of the women. Aesthetically pleasing and a bit different is that the red dress is to be contrasted with so many men and women dressed in blue, these accented with yellow highlights. What is the significance of this presentation?

Adopting Barrington Moore Jr.’s view that democracy proceeds from West to East and stymied by the remaining presence of a peasant class, industrialization also moved West to East and was more unsettling as it became ever more abrupt. English industrialization was home grown and developed in the Eighteenth Century when the steam engine allowed  for efficient coal mining and common people flocked to the cities to get jobs in the new industries. France did not make that transformation until Louis Philippe, the bourgeois king, and Russia did not industrialize until the Twentieth Century, while the change over in Germany, the marvel of it, was the generation before the First World War. Berlin was a young and adventurous city. The point about these sophisticated Berlin women was that Berlin had emerged rapidly in the last generation as a world class city replete with the most advanced Western culture and the latest trends and fashions accompanied with a subway and an electricity driven montage of lighted ads and internal combustion engine autos.

Look more deeply than to the audacious contemporary of  “Berlin Street Scene” by turning to Kirschner’s “Street, Dresden '' from 1906. Rather than the later sarcastic view of women primping and showing off in their pointed angularity, a comment about fashion and being fashionable, the earlier painting tries to get to the experience of what it is to meet people on the street. The essential quality of those people encountered is that they are fleshy rather than fleshed out. They are people caught in passing for a moment and so no more than dots of eyes on doughty faces, these distinguished by different skin shades even if we would all consider them white, some of them pale and some yellowish and some more red. The oval faces make them all somehow familiar even if they are strangers to others and by implication to themselves, people knowing others see us as strangers on the street.

It is also important to look at the color of the dresses in “Street, Dresden”. As with skin tone, the painting is more realistic than an Impressionist point of view might imagine them to be. One woman wears a striking yellow jacket over her blue skirt. The dress is partly continued by the yellow theme in another part of the painting but that does not dissuade the viewer from seeing the color scheme as disjointed and a bit ugly, perhaps because the jacket is not quite pure yellow, the dress admixed to make it a bit off. The dresses of the adjoining women have red dresses that are also not primary and somehow clash with the other dresses. This seems realistic rather than as is usually thought as the imposition by Expressionists by strange and clashing colors because, in fact, people do not wear their clothes to coordinate with the people they will meet. The actual scene is of whatever collection of colors is a happenstance and so a jumble.

The colors used in Kirshner and other Expressionists  is akin to what happens in architecture. Yes, there were planned residences in Berlin at the time just as the design for the apartments in Bath, England had been designed to provide a unified presentation of an oval of similar heighted houses. That provided a very pleasing environment. The same thing happened when the Lincoln Center area in New York was razed so as to build a set of coordinated buildings, much to the chagrin of those who preferred the helter skelter version of Times Square as an entertainment venue. Most of the time, most architectural places are also a jumble of buildings from different periods and contrasting styles, disproportionate in scale and in a variety of styles tight next to one another and buildings in various states of repair. The same is true of people on the street. The actual scene is of whatever collection of colors is a happenstance and so a jumble.

Compare the color schemes of Impressionism against which the Expressionists were answering. Impressionist painters presented a number of distinct and fresh colors into their paletes and were able to combine different colors on the same painting as well as make some of the paintings monochromatic. But the Impressionists maintained a uniform and well integrated set of colors in any particular painting and so it can be said that part of the Impressionist mode was to maintain a pleasing and integrating point of view on color so that the color scheme of a painting was independent of its subject. It is therefore fair to say that Impressionist color was a conventionalized idea of culture that, in fact, is true in most of the history of painting. Expressionism, for its part, is thought to have applied conventionalism to color in its preferences for dark colors and the use of green and red even on faces. But the Expressionists were a breakthrough in that there was no longer a need to make the colors uniform but, to the contrary, discordant with one another, answering to how reality itself was a jumble of colors that did not match in some sense with one another. That revolution in color is one of the things that might make Expressionism unsettling and even temporary as a movement because it was so wedded to its limited and strange color range. But that is to forget that Rembrandt and Turner were themselves, each on their own, also wedded with their own color schemes which are acceptable because they are their signature tones and so the ways they each saw the world.

Here is a Kirchner landscape, “The Red Tower in Halle'', that reveals Kirshner’s ways for doing a landscape. The title is itself curious in that the color of the painting as a whole is blue and the tower, not named as a church though it has the steepled shape of one, and is largely black, although the viewer notes, as an afterthought, that the bottom stories of the central structure is not red either but a kind of orange, that color wandering across the painting through the depiction of an orange train atop an orange embankment, which suggests just how large and majestic the structure is. Otherwise, there are shades of blue to color the area surrounding the tower and also white clouds behind. There is what might be a large plaza around the tower, residential or commercial buildings considerably distant from the tower, but there is no hard evidence for the plaza except its existence as an expanse of space  in that there are no indications of the cafes or the statutes that might be present in a plaza that surrounds a significant structure. There are no people depicted though they are presumed to exist in that there is a trolley tram traversing the area. The tower seems like a force field repelling away any other structures around it so as to expand that undescribed space, and so suggests that the mind observes that a space worthy of the tower has to be pushed away so as to allow the tower its stature. Architects make what minds need. 

What is to be made of a landscape divested of its accouterments? “The Red Tower in Halle” can be understood as getting down to essentials by eliminating detail. It just shows blocks of figures, the buildings behind, the spaces around the tower, and the tower itself, experienced as enormous in its setting, towering over the area. That is what is important about the scene: its relative sizes and clearances and the overall blue and darkened hue as if the eye had squinted to see what was really there. That is what it is like to have a feel for a place as opposed to when you see the cafes on the Champs Elysee. Notice how shocking is the contrast to Monet on Rheims, where the details of the stone are reflected differently in different parts of a day’s sunlight. Rather than charmed by the light, the sight is imposing with its gloomy grandeur because of its raw comparative sizes. It is not a stretch to say that Kirshner is onto a phenomenological perspective: to perceive perception as elemental experiences fundamental to the ways of the mind even if people can only with difficulty are able to become aware of what the way their minds work, in this case through blocks father than things and spaces rather than people. This is a new vision not quite lost once seen, while Impressionism, as I have said, remains faithful to its real world surroundings and its details and its color harmony, an artistic addition to the world rather than what an essential mind would garner.

Expressionist painting, even if partly a portrayal of what was fashionable and an artistic movement only temporarily in style, was primarily concerned with consciousness. Even pre-Flapper dress and faces evoked the emotional tones at the core of these people: daring in dress and manner so as to show their independence.  People are like autos in that they have so many styles and colors, each one is perceived by the pedestrian as each to display a type. Each is a kind of personality, as happens when seeing distinct people on the street, each one a type of itself, somehow assembling its own dress and posture and expression. What they are is what counts. That is also true about the structures of consciousness itself. Places seem to bend as shapes are fitted to be placed into the ways the mind will allow them to be organized. Painting therefore illuminates what is invisible and difficult to appreciate by objectifying the ways the mind works.

The conventional and to my mind correct explanation for the depthlessness, the profundity, of German art, literature and thought is that they are all derived from Luther’s perception that religion is found as mediated through consciousness, in that the consciousness is altered by religion rather than that supernatural events intrude in life and people do rituals so as to alter events, which is the case in Catholicism. Kant is the most significant of the German achievements in reducing into secular terms the idea of duty and free will and logical thinking itself as the way consciousness works. Expressionism is a recent version of the attempt to show that to see something is to unfold the way consciousness works, the world perceived from the building blocks of consciousness. That view seems to me, as I say, very deep, even if I think David Hume and G. E. Moore are more accurate in describing the way emotions, social life and ethics work. 

It is a mistake, however, to think that German thought would inevitably descend into Hitler, which is what Erich Fromm thought in his “Escape From Freedom'' because that is to look only at one aspect of the Luther heritage. Expressionists, like Heidigger and his student Sartre, are concerned with the experiences of being rather than how to enter a cul de sac where freedom comes from paradoxically denying it. Rather, the contours of consciousness are inexhaustible in themselves. Were it not for a few mistakes, such as Breuning thinking he could control Hitler, the whole Hitler episode would never have happened and Expressionism could have lingered for much longer and to rival the Abstract Expressionism that claimed American artistic  taste. Remember that Ernest Lubitch, Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder did well in the United States, maintaining their senses of cosmopolitan cynicism, although bereft of their color, while Thomas Mann “colors” and plumage are vibrant and dark in “Joseph and His Brothers”, even if it was written when he was briefly resident in Los Angeles.

 

Evidence in Politics

Are American politics cynical or honorable?

Wittgenstein says that logic can take care of itself. I take that to mean that you can’t explain why logic is logical, just elaborate that you can’t both assert a statement and its opposite even if people as a matter of course do so all the time as when you say Trump is a mean petulant man and is also your standard bearer. I also take Wittgenstein to mean that logic does not vary from place to place or time to time. There is no Jewish or Chinese logic. There is just logic. So logic is a metaphysical matter or, if you prefer, a transcendental matter, a part of the structure of the universe, and even more so, in that other galaxies may have different biologies but no galaxy would alter logic. Logic has a stature that is unassailable. That is very different from rhetoric, which is about persuasion rather than truth and which Plato castigated as a knack rather than necessarily aligned with truth. But consulting political discourse allows us to appreciate how indeed persuasions can change, and that is particularly important in the present day.

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The Present Begins

In other words, when the past is over.

When does the present begin? For me, it was the B-29, which was larger, carried more payload, and had that distinctive bubble nose at its prow and was replacing the not quite antiquated bombers, the B-17 and the B-24. The present began with women in bunned and highly arranged hairdos and art moderne dress, with bold decorations adorning bold colors, rather than the drab colors and shapeless dresses of the Thirties. The present was Fred Allen and Jack Benny engaging in a mock feud across their radio programs. It was the movie poster saying “Clark is back and Greer has got him” which meant Gable was back from the War and how he would match up with Greer Garson, another superstar, was of interest to moviegoers. The present was moving into Queens and summering in the Catskills. It meant knowing that FDR was dead and the United Nations was the future along with atomic energy and space travel. The past, what was antiquated, were cars with running boards  and a squared black sedan, and people who had not yet seen the War, as well as silent films, which I never saw before I was in college, which I discovered as hidden treasures though preferring the talky and well constructed dramatic arcs of the movies of the Forties. The latest news thing that marked the present, the new, when I was young, a pre-tyeener, was the advent of television, first through the windows in bars, then in the living rooms of families with early television arrivals, who after dinner lined up chairs in theatrical style so that the neighbors could come visit and see the new marvel, and then my family getting its own tv set,, an RCA, that enriched my life by providing, among other things, travelogs of G.I.’s returning to Japan to see the sights of the recently ended war.

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Common Sense

“Common sense” means practicality.

What is “common sense"? The term is often associated with its provenance. Common sense is what anyone can have while people schooled with books and lectures can lack common sense and rely instead on these artificial ways  of learning to learn the things needed to manage life and things while, paradoxically, common sense may also be a rare commodity in that most people may not have insight about people and processes, about appreciating  the motives of people or how to adjust the tv set, while just about everyone can get a rudimentary formal education and remain clueless about how the world works. Common sense emerges as a major concept of epistemology in that assessing it means evaluating a claim that is a way to go on the road to truth. Indeed, John Dewey based his theory of knowledge on common sense. He thought that the practical activity of woodworking or managing farm machinery honed one’s mental abilities so as to appreciate more abstract matters. Practical knowledge led people to be objective and creative in  finding solutions. I want to explore the idea of common sense more fully.

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Conclusive Argument

Adages are more convincing than arguments, but not conclusive.

What is the point of staging an argument? Piers Morgan has tried to moderate a number of debates between Pro-Hamas and Pro-Israeli speakers. No one expects the other to become convinced of the views of the opposing debaters. What is to be gleaned is that one or the other side will have revealed itself as hypocritical or uninformed, at least to  the satisfaction of Morgan or the other side and maybe to some in the audience, but strictly speaking each side can defend their own point of view to their own satisfaction even if the other side thinks the opposition is lame or deceptive. So a Pro-Hamas debater cannot admit to criticizing whatever Hamas says because the basis of the cause is very long lasting, as old as the Nakba, while the advocate of Israel disputes the casualty figures even though the amount is beside the point, just too much, though Natasha Housdorff argues that casually figures for civilians to military casualties are far less than what has happened in Iraq or elsewhere and so the Israelis are relatively humane, though I haven’t heard or read such figures in other media sources. So arguments are of limited usefulness. They do not result in a conclusive argument so as to shift sides though some of the points may rankle.

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Differential Distribution

Conservatives have an easier argument

The default setting in the battle between Liberalism and Conservatism, which is the same thing as the battle between equality and authority, is Conservatism. It always seems to get the better of the fight. The people of Israel in the Old Testament did not have to decide to have a monarchy. The authors of “Deuteronomy” went even further in reducing the idea of freedom inherent in “Exodus” by making the government an institution which drained people of their independent judgments by berating them. Christianity starts out, as Hegel argued, as proclaiming as its primary insight the individuality and equality of all people in the eyes of God, and yet that is replaced in a few centuries or, it might be said, in a few generations, by an hierarchical order for the administration of the sacraments and the supervision of moral life. 

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Filling the Imagination

Only religion and secularism can do that.

The educational magic of diversity was experienced by me long before the term “diversity” became a cliche for describing getting students from different points of view to intersect on a campus. I was early in my freshman year at college when I met up with another freshman and he had prepared for college at a Catholic high school. When I said that I didn’t believe in anything, he said with considerable anger that everyone has to believe in something and so the only question is what people agree to that is based on faith rather than scientific truth. And, yes, it was true that I believed that humankind was engaged in a road to progress and that knowledge would make us free, but what I meant was that I did not subscribe to any supernatural belief, one beyond the tests of factual or conceptual truths where one might make an educated inference. I could believe that ethical life was important without claiming that ethics were a sacrosanct or holy entity the equivalent of religious belief, such claims by definition to be beyond reason, such as the Virgin Birth or God parting the Red Sea. So, there.

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Responsibility in Israel and Gaza

Moral words on war are not illuminating.

Which side, Israel or Gaza, has the onus of the carnage each creates? Tube obvious answer is whomever started first, which is the case with Hamas, which runs the people in Gaza, and so Israelis are free to do whatever they  need to do to rid themselves of the Hamas menace, given that they kill women children, babies, the elderly and other people who are clearly non combatants. Hamas engages in genocide of the Jews, though with very few results but a sufficient warning that all measures can be taken to avoid that. Either one side or the other side can prevail. The media do not clarify the issue of who to blame. They shallow the original outrages against the Israelis, presenting footage of the destruction and then interviewing grieving Israeli survivors, and now present footage of the carnage in Gaza which provides footage of wounded Palestinians and interviews with loved ones back in the United State. Is it that whomever suffers lastly are the victims that are to gain sympathy? That can’t be right. I have also heard said that Isradlis should flatten Gaza, never mind that eliciting a response was certainly part of the plan by Hamas to draw Israelis into the tunnels under Gaza, a plan that the Israelis are reluctant to implement because of the carnage against civilians which will result. Moreover, most wars are not justified by which side loses the most citizens. The Germans lost more people than did the English speaking  but the Germans aren't judged as having morally won the war. There are bigger ideological issues at stake which encapture the actual events of war. The Confederates did not think they were wrong in having maintained slavery because they lost the Civil War. The Southerners just re-established slavery by another name less than a generation later.

The view that the first outrage requires and therefore justifies the response is not the way either the Americans or the Israelis see it. They both claim that, unlike Hamas, they are  subject to the international laws of warfare so as to limit atrocities such as the killing of civilians, even though it has been an established fact since air power arrived that civilian casualties were to be regarded as collateral damage for destroying military targets and thereby morally acceptable. That is no comfort to the Gaza civilians. 

A way out of the moral quandary is to invoke the idea of responsibility, which means a decision, whether individual or collective, which leads to subsequent results. I have heard it said that Gazans are responsible for what happens to them because they voted in Hamas twenty or so years ago, even though there have been no further elections, and the Gazans have not revolted against Hamas and then negotiated for what are their own interests rather than let Hamas remain in place and treat  Gaza as only a launching ground against Israel. But that is to treat “responsibility” very narrowly. The term  means, after all, the ability to respond, which means doing only what it is actually capable of doing. A person is not responsible because they cannot fly on their own arms, but they are responsible, in a democratic nation like the United States, for the electorate to pick officials who will or will not allow abortion or raise or lower taxes. But if you look at the Arab world, few if any of those nations do engage in democratic politics. Rather, they regard themselves as passive observers of politics, victims, if you prefer, of politics. Social scientists think it takes a long time for a  people to evolve so that they own and are agents of politics. So while there might be some dissenters among them, it is unreasonable to think that Gazans will revolt against Hamas.

This redefined definition of responsibility as meaning all the circumstances that constrain decision making means consulting any number of the causes of the present war and not rely just on, as pro Gazans argue, only to the fact that the Israelis control the exits and entrances of food, fuel and people and are therefore to be regarded as an occupied territory. That is not the way the Israelis set Gaza up when they vacated Gaza. They bombed their own synagogues so as not to blame the onus of that on the Gazans. They left their hydroponic tanks which provided produce to  sell; to Europe. Offered as well was a two billion dollar development fund that was rejected because controls would be in place to prevent corruption and the accumulation of arms. There were architectural plans for a high speed rail transit system up and down the Gaza Strip. That would lead to Gaza as an economic and social entity and, eventually, to be integrated with the West Bank as a separate state solution, which was turned down  by Arafat as well as Hamas. So responsibility has to be attached to Palestinian people and bodies and not just to the Israelis unless everything follows from the responsibility for the creation of Israel itself, that being the central and significant injustice. Do the pro-Palestinian advocates really believe the slogan “Palestine from the River to the Sea”? Because that would mean no compromise is possible and so the war should continue indefinitely rather than ever cease. Do those who carry those banners take responsibility for unending war? The only peace possible is a two state solution whereby both sides have to give up something dear. The Israelis have to accept that Judea and Samaria, parts of biblical Israel, will be accepted as a Palestinian state in what is now called the West Bank. And what Palestinians have to accept is that a separate state, even including tunnels and roads that6 make Gaza continuous with the West Bank, once Gaza is rid of Hamas and absorbed by the Palestine Authority, is that it would have no army and no airport, but a lot of autonomy and economic development.

Another moral term that is used today so as to provide a way to grasp the situation, such as “responsibility”, because moral terms are supposed to be objective and so cover both sides to a conflict, is the standard of humanitarianism, which goes beyond and is inclusive of the rules of war. Both sides are responsible for being humane and so Israel should supply Gaza with food, water, electricity and the like to spare Gaza civilians and the latest reports are that water will be supplied. The question is whether it is humane for the Israelis to tell Gazans to leave Gaza’s northern region as difficult as that may be. On the one hand, you can’t tell a civilian population to evacuate according to the rules of war but it seems sensible advice given the battle that is about to begin.  And so one can despair about using any moral terms to confront the situation and make sense of it, moral terms just weapons mobilized by the sides of the parties to use as part of their own ammunition, Israelis pointing to the original atrocities and Gazans to the present one, both sides sure of their moral standing, rather than looking at the long time and complex causes and consequences, such as whether Israel should exist at all, which is the root question. George Marshall back in 1948 said it should not be recognized because it would lead to endless warfare, and that has come to pass, however it may be that Israelis think that a breakthrough with Saudi Arabia would make Israel a normal nation in the Middle East rather than a Western enclave inserted in an Arab area. Maybe this war will be the last one. People always say that about many wars.

How to Evaluate Trump?

People reach for precedents to show the enormity of the insult by Donald Trump to the American political system evidenced by his latest two indictments. Aaron Burr had tried in the first decade of the nineteenth century to start a rebellion in the west that might have balkanized the North American continent but he was acquitted and he was only a vice president. Charles I was convicted by Parliament of treason and executed, he having trafficked with foreign powers to reestablish his power, but he had been a legitimate monarch otherwise and so a change from one political order to another rather than the enforcement of the constitutional order, which is what the indictments of Trump proclaim. The question is why is there need to find past analogies to give the present indictments as so serious, so historic, rather than plainly being so on  their face? I am reminded when Eichman was tried in Jerusalem, the prosecutor, gideon hauser, went out of his way to portray Eichman as a miltonic satan, an epitome of evil intent, so as to grasp the magnitude of his crimes, rather than viewing Eichman, as Arendt thought, a man of minor attributes who could endeavor horrible levels of evil just by getting the trains run on time. A petty person whose evil was enormous. Why the exaggeration to make it supremely significant? While Hauser was taken with ultimate moral forces, the answer, I think, we exaggerate other great cataclysms is because historical events  become shrouded with their enormity while the present seems inevitably plebeian, and I want to demonstrate that. 

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The Significence of Walking

Walking is not much of a sport. There was a time of competitive walk races. Participants had to exaggerate their hip movements so that they could manage to lock their knees with each step, that the definition of a walk rather than a run, and it looked awkward and ridiculous and overly constrained, very different from running, which seems graceful and streamlined and natural, as if people had taken wing. Running races is as old as the Iliad, even if none of the Hebrews in the Bible did sports unless David and his fellow shepherds competed with slingshots, but there is no citation of that.

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Authority and Equality

Max Weber defined authority as the complement of power. Power means the ability to get people to do the things they don’t want to do; authority is the ability to influence people so that they will come to want to do the things you want them to do. Power is an objective feature of a situation. A judge can sentence a criminal according to guidelines set out in the law. A parent can discipline a child although the law limits a parent’s discretion in doing so. Authority, on the other hand, is in the eye of those upon whom authority is exercised. The Catholic Church holds its authority because its believers accept its view of itself even if there were times when the Church could turn heretics over to the secular arm for punishment. A professor exercises the authority he or she has been given by the university to act as someone who knows what he or she is talking about even though that provisional authorization has to be supported by convincing students that he or she is indeed knowledgeable or at least has the charm that makes students not care whether he or she is knowledgeable. That is apart from the power of the professor to award grades. 

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Reality as Experience

Trust what you can remember.

There are deep structures in existence, like consciousness or the reality of the external world, that are thought to be philosophical or metaphysical or even just conceptual that in fact can be reduced to generalizations or inferences that people draw from experience rather than as inevitable or inherent. The evidence comes from consulting the experience of early age children as to establish what they themselves are able to find and what can be found about them even without the advantages supposedly offered by psychoanalysis about how the early child’s mind can be accessed. I am thinking of my commonplace observations of what Im remember before I was four about things I now know as having already been discovered in the world. I remember, for one thing, learning to drink from a glass rather than from a bottle. I had been a late learner and my mothers ruse, as I realized it to be many years later, was to say that she could not get down to the village to buy bottles and so I would have to cope by using a glass to drink milk. An accommodating sort, I said I would do that if I drank from a glass in private and she acquiesced and we went into a private space and I drank from a glass and never went back to bottles. Think about that. I already had the ability to feel embarrassed about making what seemed a major transition and I was able to negotiate  the terms of my acquiescence. 

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Experiences Without Meaning

Snapple, storefronts and silences

The Existentialists from the Forties and the Fifties were out to explore the exotic so as to establish bedrock reality, what was really the human condition. So they looked at the stranger, that man without familial feeling, to show that people were truly alienated. And Sartre saw people who saw gnarled, hideous and frightening trees as looking at the world bare and maybe mad for having looked at nature without its Kantian categories. Twenty years later, Erving Goffman envisioned people as always only performing, their roles used to provide the impression that people managed their lives well, and so neglecting motives of love or loyalty, people just pulling their own marionette strings and so life reflected the Absurdist theater of the previous decade after all. I want to try a different approach. It is the most ordinary and familiar aspects of life that reveal or amount to the human condition, it is just difficult to objectify the obvious even if it is the substance of life, not the abstracted things like justice and God. Politics is just organized suasion, full of bombast and anger. Life is feeling yourself as breathing because without its familiarity you are dead and what could it possibly mean for a person to be alive if they do not experience breathing however much you try to think of metaphors that concern angels walking amid the clouds, in which case they would be breathing, wouldn’t they?

This approach is different from the usual oner whereby profound things are appreciated and explained by consulting the most complex and crafted form of art and literature, going deep into how Goya and Van Gogh and Balzac and Melville reshape our lives by creating objects skewed from what life is thought to be and thence trying to make sense of the discrepancies. In that cased, people engage life with self-consciousness so as to hone a sense of reality. The other path, as it is based on the wisdom of sociology, is that most of life is not filled with self consciousness but with ordinary perceptions and feelings and so free of these higher things, life crowded with the ordinary and so free of the burdens of being enlightened however enlightenment is the necessary task that allows life to be ordinary. And so we shall precede.

 

Here is an easy example of how an experience has little meaning but is just familiar and therefore part of the human condition even though it is superficial and artificial. Snapple is a soft drink which has a distinctive flavor that combines tea and peach and water and is chilled. The experience is taste and a feeling of cold liquid going into your innards and it satisfies thirst, none of these providing meaning but satisfying pleasure. The ingestion of cold liquids nowadays is quite general,and  habitual. For a hundred and fifty years soft drinks depend on refrigeration and the invention of Coca Cola as a particularly tasteful drink. Preceding that there were stimulants, like tea and coffee and chocolate, often because of the use of sugar, and is dated because it was possible earlier to heat rather than to cool and goes back a thousand years. Previous even to that are alcoholic and other potentially addictive liquids. It is curious that the more powerful liquids are by and large given in smaller portions, a cup of coffee smaller than a bottle of Snapple and a bottle of scotch having many portions that would lead to inebriation. Even smaller doses are used for narcotic addiction, so small as to be administered with injection or pills.The exception is that beer is a bigger dose than snapple. It is measured in a pint or a stein, perhaps because beer is such an ancient invention that more efficient doses had not been developed. The fact of the matter is that these ingestive habits are familiar and universal and so allow people to think of these as natural, their way to be, even if they do not convey anything of significance. The same is true with chocolate chip cookies and ketchup.What would life be like without these pleasures? 


Stacks of cartons and cans and bottles of soft drinks are stocked in supermarkets. They are so abundant in their variety that a consumer has to be aware of a choice whether to get sugared or nocal or iced teas or lightly flavored waters or just plain water. The consumer can think that consumer choice is a kind of democracy because the consumer is sovereign, each product advertised for its wares and successful only if the consumer prefers which product to buy. But that is misleading in that the decision to buy is merely a preference, of no significance other than to one’s own taste and the company’s bottom line unless there is, let us say, there is a boycott on South African wine during apartheid or because there is a movement to restrict sugar as a bad health thing. That is different from voting, where there is always a moral dimension so that choosing a candidate who will cut your taxes is a choice to think only of economic self interest and whether abortion is an issue worth thinking about and choosing what is a moral decision. Voting is never morally neutral while prteferring Snapple to Coke always is unless, letg us say, the prtoprietgor of some product is morally egregious and one refuses to buy from Hobby Lobby or a baker who won’t buy from gays who are about to marry. Legal issues about the neutrality of consumership arise.


Now here it gets tricky. Is there a difference with regard to consciousness between a preference and a moral dilemma, each considered on their own, or when the two are compared? Both of those analyses, the separate and the compared, are generalizations of facts, and so can be considered what we might call “raw empiricism”, people noticing the choices they make as moral or not and also whether to prefer moral to preferential or not, while the other view is that it is quite different to consider comparing preference versus morality rather than Snapple rather than Coke. Persons just engaged with a preference are aware of what they  are doing. To think otherwise is to be a robot or a lower form of animal. But comparing or deciding whether morality plays a role or not requires self consciousness rather than just awareness because perhaps it posits referring to concepts outside the empirical world, people enshrouded with invisible categories, as in the case of Kant, which make these decisions meaningful rather than just experiences of which one is aware. We have to, as the expression goes, “step back” in order to consider such categories, not only ordinary preferences, however much it may be to be rational in choosing one soft drink because of its taste or advertising slogan. So that is a way to say that a soft drink beverage choice is an experience but does not have meaning because it has no reverberations with a high level concept.


Here is another ordinary feature of life which can elaborate the idea that much of lifer is rational in that it is fully aware without being self-aware, which means inverted with meaning. I am thinking of storefronts, which are retail businesses which may not be as old as the cavemen, but are available for millenia, even if one stall is separated from one another by a cloth or nothing at all so as to buy or sell goods, like flour or rice, or services, like barbers and hairstylists, to a consumership in enough number that people will cross their thresholds to buy out of pickle barrels or stacks of dry goods. There are storefronts in Near Eastern bazaars way back and a small town on the American Western frontier had a general store and Jim Bridger had a fort back in the wilderness where he bought furs and sold general supplies to the indians and the other mountaineers that passed his way in Oregon. The storekeeper is invented but ubiquitous, opening up as soon as a battle ens so as to provide staples and disposables as soon as a supply customer to arrive in the slow midday hours, his shelves stocked with bottles, separating wines from liquors and scotches from gins and brandies,  chain is established, even among the rabble. Storefronts survived in London during the Blitz, so resilient is that form of enterprise.


I notice how similar to one another are storefronts to one another of a similar type. I remember in my youth a liquor store proprietor who had trained to be a lawyer who had fallen into this business waiting for a customer to come across the threshold during the slow midmorning hours, the bottles all lined up on the shelves, wines separated from liquors and gins and brandies separated from brandies. A liquor store was considered a clean business in that all you had to do was unpack boxes of shipments, while there was a lot of cleaning up that had ro be done in produced and dairy stores, so much to be trimmed or refreshed or made waste, so long as a liquor store needed a considerable initial capital to stock its wares. After that, it was easy sailing, except how to judge who to give credit to and how to turn away drunks or potential thieves out to get the register’s abundant cash. Liquor stores don’t look very different: filled with open boxes of bottles and special sale items, whether the liquor store is a sole proprietor or a state liquor authority. Consumables of small quantities are also ubiquitous and subject to state regulation.


On the other hand, some storefronts come and go.  There was a rage for ten or twenty years for storefronts that rented tapes of movies that could be played on home VCRs. It took little capital to start them up, only rent and inventory where people went in because, as I gathered, they hadn’t made much of something else. There were also larger stores in the Blackbuster franchise which also sold popcorn and movie candy but did not have any more variety of movies to offer than the smaller ones which carried recent releases rather than “classics'', which meant black and white movies from the Forties. All bit the dust when movies become available on cable and then by streaming, just as late night network movies had given way to talk shows. I remember “The Late Show” and “The Late Late Show” that made Patsy Kelly, the one with her distinctive nasal voice, a star to me.


The thing about storefronts is how much they come and go, much more frequently than the buildings where the storefronts were placed on their street entrances, at least on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where I lived for many years. I would know which pizza parlor shut down and which barber shop,m a breed that seemed to me ever to diminish. For a while, every block had another bank branch, maybe because people like branches close by because the services available are all pretty much the same. It was difficult, however, to create big supermarkets for a while because it was too expensive to get a large enough space until places like specialty shops, gourmet places like Citerella, were sufficiently capitalized. I would measure out the changing storefronts over the course of my years there. Remember when a particular chinese restaurant to which I took my kids closed down? Kids in Manhattan all learn chopsticks early.


And so to the theme. Store fronts are an ordinary occurrence and people can appreciate the different types. You know not to buy meat at a haberdashery store (also now extinct or very rare, included in sports goods clothing stores. That is a reasonable inference, a raw empirical observation , an experience of everyday life. But there is also an outside and abstract concept which turns storefronts into being a matter of self awareness and possibly deep contemplation. That, as I have already suggested, is the idea of time, a category so abstracted by Kant so as to rid it of its everyday experience as a change in the material settings whose alterations show change in time. Who and when was Ebbets Field demolished so as to be replaced by a housing project? This event or the memory of it displaces a person from a time to being “above” or “beyond” time and that makes you like God, however fragile might be your earthly existence. Think of emptied storefronts or even those in reconstruction, new fixtures put in  place as old ones are carried out even if ones that had elaborate plumbing was retained or altered so that a restaurant would probably be retained as a restaurant, a video store becoming anything, like a shoemaker because all you have to do is bring in the equipment, even if shoemakers are dying out because cloth sneakers replace leather and people prefer to replace rather than repair. We savor time in changing storefronts.


A perfectly ordinary experience that can give people comfort is listening to, as the phrase has it, “the sound of silence”, which is an oxymoronic if accurate observation, though you can make it odd and even eerie by giving it an Existentialist edge, making it strange that the absence of something is there. You lie in bed and your breathing slows down to barely if anything is being heard, not even a heartbeat. There are no cicadas or wind or fire engines rushing down West End Avenue or a soft rain that can lull you to sleep. It's so quiet that you sense silence as a wave of it, one after the other assaulting us because it insults us not to be otherwise, to be like music and so having rhythm and tone. And you edge into self consciousness as you contemplate the profundity of the thing, associated with sleep, another ordinary experience, erven as sleep is hardly silent, filled with dreams screaming to have their sexual and other dreams announcing their insights with startling invention and clarity, as when I dreamed how old my young wife would look forty years late and she did. Self-consciousness arrives, develops, out of making comparisons, just as in “Sesame Street”, one thing like  or different from another, though the decisive event is even earlier when a terrible two year old recognizes the power of “no!”, negation particularly a way to process thought by both Marxists and Existentialists. 


The thing about silence is that you don’t really hear them unless you are deaf. Otherwise, silence is an “ideal” almost always violated so that listening to silence is not literally true and such an assertion is a “no!” to silence and so makes it a metaphysical assertion or, more modestly, a concept that denies what overwhelmingly is and that mediates the experience of silence so that it helps self-consciousness to arise in that it generates the idea of possible events rather than just things that have happened, which is the bugaboo of positivists who only examine what has happened, as if there could not be representative democracies before any had been constructed, where people said it only happened in small nations until the United States invented itself and so made itself possible. That is worthy of the heavy burden of being self-conscious even if it is very difficult to define what the term means in that a director looking through  a camera lens is self aware of what he or she is seeing but the looking through the lens isn’t what does it but the mind of the director does and so the best that can be said is that Snapple, storefronts and silence leverage minds to become self conscious rather than constitute that.


The program in this and many of my essays is the Pragmatist one of eliminating philosophical words as either meaningless or to be reduced to simple empirical facts. That is different from regarding philosophy as a set of universal invisible terms that are inherent in existence and cannot be done without like justice or cause and effect, the first of which can be done without to explain social life and the second can be substituted with “context”, which means the conditions under which things happen. Pragmatism is also different from the idea that most people are expert enough to clarify these essential terms but rely on  custom and expertise to do the work for them when in fact people can provide a perfectly adequate explanation of their situation and the Entire Situation by referring ton facts, including experience. People are more enlightened, become freer, by getting rid of their philosophical baggage.


That is the case in the examples provided. People can do much to avoid moral terms if you treat much of it as preferences to kinds of soft drinks. Time, such a formidable concept, is reduced to changing storefronts and negation, that deeply profound matter, is reduced to noticing that silence is not absolute. All these are matters of everyday lifer and only because there is philosophy, which arises out of self-consciousness, is it possible to retain self-consciousness because of being rid of philosophy.

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Responsibility

A person would, could and should sort out these words so that what is said is clear and indubitable.

There are a number of concepts in moral philosophy that can be reduced to descriptions of fact and that is a worthwhile program because moral terms are leftovers from a religious insistence that morality is as real even if invisible as is the idea of God, trying to keep hold of spiritual things but without seeing gods in every tree or mountain. A good example of this is the idea of responsibility, which refers to the onus or burden of morality that is placed on an individual to do something that improves yourself or the lot of a set of people because of your circumstances, such as becoming a police officer who has to interfere with criminal events or a mentor who has to give sensible advice to students, or is even generalized to mean that all human beings are somehow responsible for the welfare of all other human beings, which can be taken to be the message of Jesus. Much of life involves our responsibilities rather than our pleasures or preferences and moral philosophy concerns what and how to comply with these matters, whether it means whether one is obligated to intrude when a friend makes a racist remark or to be a whistleblower or who to vote for if one candidate is harsh on the poor rather than a choice of whom to vote for because of a balance of interests.

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Human Warmth

I want to use literal human warmth, which is what happens when a person sits near a fire or wears a quilted coat, as a way to understand metaphorical human warmth, which is associated with friendship and community, so as to be more precise about the metaphorical and other meanings.

Everyone knows what it is like to get warm or feel deprived of warmth even if you have not  experienced the lack of warmth in a bombed out building in winter in  Ukraine or the shambles of earthquake damage in Turkey and Syria in wintertime. You know what it is to get under the covers and warm up, quickly enough and deliciously, mostly by capturing your own heat.There is something delicious in that experiencing the warmth overcoming the cold until you reach a point when you feel fully warm and languorous as a result of it, what seem to be the waves of warmth invigorating the person within that enclosure, knowing that intellectually just inches away the temperature is still cold, a person reassuring himself that there are no gaps in the cocoon whereby warmth might lek out. This is an experience as old as the cavemen or older, to primates who shivered and knew they shivered before fire had been controlled and so became a metaphor for wellbeing.

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