By Diana Hsieh @ 9:00 AM
I'm always amazed that Conrad seems to take an instant liking to some dogs at the dog park, and an instant dislike to others. However, this story of instant love between an oragutan and a dog takes the cake:
Unlike my friend Kelly, I don't think that the video suggests that the orangutan exercises volition. Volition (or free will) is not merely the power to choose between alternatives based on values. It requires reason (in the sense of the faculty of reason); it's the power to focus one's rational mind or not, simply as a matter of will. That's not evident in this video... yet nor can the behavior be explained by vacuous appeals to "instinct." Instead, the orangutan exhibits highly complex behavior, probably largely based on associational learning and imagination. He doesn't seem to have concepts though, and that means no faculty of reason and no power of volition.
I propose that his actions should be described as "voluntary" but not "chosen." As per Aristotle's usage, some action is voluntary if (1) the agent has the power to do or not do the action and (2) he knows what he's doing at the moment of action. To act by choice requires more: it requires acting based on rational deliberation, meaning the exercise of volition.
Aristotle thought that some beasts act voluntarily at least sometimes, and I agree with that. More neurologically advanced animals seem to have the power to act voluntarily on a perceptual level: they can do or not do some action, in part based on their power to direct their own perceptual-level attention. So a dog can voluntarily prevent itself from chasing the cat by directing its attention elsewhere. And animals have the power to know what they're doing, in a perceptual way, as opposed to when they're acting on some kind of mistake. So that dog knows whether he's chasing the cat or playing with his toy. Hence, the dog does act voluntarily but not by volitional choice.
In short, we need to be careful about what we mean by "volition" when attributing that to animals. Also, we must keep in mind that denying volition to animals is not equivalent to claiming that they're deterministic robots. Some more subtlety is needed, I think. And that can be found in Aristotle -- particularly Book 3, Chapters 1-5 of the Nicomachean Ethics.
By Diana Hsieh @ 8:00 AM
NoodleFood reader Paul Marshall posted the following essay in the comments a few days ago. When I read it, I thought it far to good for a mere blog comment. So with his permission, I'm posting it here. Of course, it's also far too good for a mere NoodleFood post, but that's the best I can offer. Without further ado...
A Critical Account of Anthony Daniels By Paul Marshall
I was taken aback by Anthony Daniels's superficial analysis of Ayn Rand in his article "Ayn Rand: Engineer of Souls," which appeared in the February edition of The New Criterion. And this is coming from someone who is enamored of Daniels's excellent writing in Life at the Bottom, where he illustrates his critique of modern British society with superbly wrought first-hand observations.
I am not, however, shocked. In contrast to his encyclopedic dissection of the culture of the British slums, Daniels has long taken a nonintellectual approach to cultural criticism, eschewing the daunting task of identifying the ideas that move the culture--a daunting task Rand excelled at like no one else.
Take his article, "Trash, Violence and Versace: But Is It Art?", which attacks the infamous "Sensation" show at the Royal Academy--a piece in which he never bothers to address the philosophic morass that led to that deplorable exhibition.
To write an article that illuminated the nihilism of the Young British Artists, one would need to do a lot more intellectual legwork. To get to the marrow, one would need to address the arc of art history, which has led us from the brilliance of the Renaissance and the technical mastery of the French Academy in the 19th century to the dismal state that we are in today. Moreover, one would need to analyze the people who conditioned "taste" makers like Charles Saatchi--the art critics of the contemporary scene, from Clement Greenberg to Arthur Danto. Most importantly, one would then need to identify the philosophic ideas that conditioned these conditioners--that is, look at the ideas that shape society. People do not just make and admire sculptures like Dinos and Jake Chapman's deformed, sexualized children without philosophic conditioning.
Daniels, however, demurs from looking too deeply into the matter. But while he steers clear of the ideas in the cultural milieu that caused "Sensation," he does so with grace and eloquence par excellence. He movingly describes the cruelty of artist Marcus Harvey subjecting the mother of one of Myra Hindley's child victims to a portrait of the murderer made with the handprints of a small child. He quotes the vapid justifications of the Royal Academy's chief of exhibitions. And he ends by delightfully turning a quip by Joshua Reynolds--about the desire of youth to find a shorter path to excellence than hard work--into an indictment of a culture that does this through the nihilism of "Sensation." All of these points are excellent, but they do not explain the phenomenon of "Sensation."
Daniels is quick to place the blame for society's ills not on ideas that people choose to live by, but on something akin to an innate bestial drive in human nature. In his article, "Nick Berg's Executioners All Too Clearly Enjoyed Beheading Him," he writes: "My vision of man has darkened ... since I began to investigate the lives of ordinary British people ... I have come to the conclusion that the default setting of man is to evil and that, if not all, then many or perhaps most men will commit evil if they can get away with it ... Both self-examination and my experience of others tells me that evil lurks within all of us, waiting for its opportunity to spring. Civilisation may be a veneer, but it is the veneer that separates us from barbarism. Never forget Original Sin and its consequences." He tends to leave his explanations there.
What he omits to note here, however, is that Nick Berg's murderers were motivated by their wicked ideology. While they may have "all too clearly enjoyed beheading him"--the thought of which makes me want to vomit in rage--they were also all too clearly willing to sacrifice everything for their faith in Allah, which our Air Force pilots valiantly delivered to them with their laser-guided bombs. Radical Islam is a theology that creates sadists, not one that simply acts as a cover for them.
When Daniels tries to make sense of "Sensation," all he can do is chalk it up to "intellectual snobbery" in a democratic age, in which the intellectual tries to prove "the freedom of his spirit by the amorality of his conceptions. Not surprisingly, in this atmosphere artists feel obliged to dwell only upon the visually revolting: for how else in a world of violence, injustice and squalor, does one prove one's bona fides than by dwelling on the violent, the unjust, and the squalid." To Daniels, the modern artist tries to impress by imitating the brutish squalor of the slums (where, he believes, man's default setting of evil is allowed to go unobstructed).
Daniels, however, does not attempt to identify or explain why the current fad of intellectual snobbery is an obsession with nihilism, and a belief that one's class, culture, race or gender inevitably distorts one's worldview. These philosophic ideas do not originate on the street but in the ivory towers of Oxford and Cambridge. Artists have seized these ideas and run with them, creating malevolent works of art, and turning their field into a proxy war where they break taboos to further the cause of their culture, race or gender. Or, as the throngs who flocked to "Sensation" experienced it, Ron Mueck sculpts his "Dead Dad" and Tracey Emin appliques the names for "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With (1963-1995)" on the inside of a tent.
To understand "Sensation" requires an analysis of how these philosophic ideas became injected into Western culture. Artists didn't make such art five hundred years ago, because these are not the ideas that dominated the culture during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when man's life on Earth was viewed with the benevolent wonder of the Ancient Greeks and reason was venerated as an efficacious instrument. Compare the art of our era and theirs, and note what philosophy can make or destroy.
Daniels's cultural critiques have not improved over the decade. In "The Architect as Totalitarian," he takes on the loathsome architect Le Corbusier. Noting the architect's elitist and cryptic writing style, Daniels finally zeros in on what he believes is his major fault: Le Corbusier's "totalitarian mindset." To defend this claim, Daniels produces a number of quotes from the architect, where Le Corbusier intones the imperative "we must ..." in a ridiculous but alarming manner. But the closest Daniels gets to making his case is quoting the "program of the International Congress for Modern Architecture, of which Le Corbusier was the moving spirit, [which] states: 'Reforms are extended simultaneously to all cities, to all rural areas, across the seas.' No exceptions. 'Oslo, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Algiers, Port Said, Rio or Buenos Aires.'"
Daniels never examines what ideas the "totalitarian mindset" consists of, or what philosophy underlies it. In fact, apart from vague notions of "inhumanity" and "authoritarianism," I don't believe that Daniels knows what a "totalitarian mindset" is, which is why he can be so flippant with the label.
The program dictated by the International Congress for Modern Architecture, as quoted by Daniels, would imply a totalitarian mindset, a desire to override the property rights of citizens and forcing Le Corbusier's whims on them. But, in his article on Rand, Daniels actually seems sympathetic to this mindset when he writes: "I own my house and the land on which it stands outright, but this (in my opinion) does not give me the right, even if the law granted it, to knock my house down and build a brutalist construction of reinforced concrete in its place, however much it might be in my individual financial interest to do so. A single such construction would ruin the whole once and for all; where architecture is concerned, the public or collective interest really does exist."
Of course, Daniels is sure that he is right and Le Corbusier was wrong, so it is just fine that his impeccable aesthetic judgment should dictate how others live. This is first step down the road to totalitarianism.
Daniels needs to ask himself: Could a "totalitarian mindset" have anything to do with the aim of shaping minds in the tradition of Marxist dialectical materialism? What philosophic assumptions gave rise to Marx? Was it Hegel's ideas? Was it Kant's Copernican Revolution? What lies at the base of the politics of totalitarianism? The abrogation of individual rights? Collectivism? Is modernist architecture also a nihilistic attack on the bourgeoisie and their beaux-arts standards? What gives rise to nihilism?
Mr. Daniels does not ask such questions nor offer answers. He does not write about ideas.
Such articles are the equivalent of junk food: high in calories, low in nutrition.
But they are works of intellectual rigor compared with Daniels's "Ayn Rand: Engineer of Souls," a critical account of a subject he seems to know next to nothing about.
Daniels does appear to have read The Fountainhead (alas, apart from skimming The Virtue of Selfishness that seems to be the extent of his reading from Rand), but he is unable to name its theme: individualism as intellectual independence--specifically, the first-handed thinker against the second-handed thinker. In the book, Rand portrays people who are the embodiment of these ideas. Take the main character, Howard Roark, who defies the conventions of Beaux-Arts historical forms (a style of architecture I often find delightful), because he is an originator of ideas. Here, Rand does not mean an original in the cliched sense of one who merely flaunts convention. Rather, Roark fashions his creations from whole cloth relying on his first-hand observations of the building's setting and its requirements. In other words, he is not a classicist; he does not take the architectural forms of others and recycle them (forms which are often at odds with the function of a modern building). This separates Roark from second-handers like Peter Keating who copy styles from Beaux-Arts to modernism--the latter of which she trenchantly critiques as well. Rand repeats the theme--self-guided, rational thought over intellectual parasitism and conformity--in various permutations and with a variety of characters throughout the novel.
What is clear in his analysis of The Fountainhead is that Mr. Daniels can't get past his hang-up on the details of architecture to evaluate the ideas at its core. I too prefer the Queen Anne style to Le Corbusier, but this did not blind me to the intellectual theme of the book.
(And an aside, Howard Roark was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright not Le Corbusier--and both used reinforced concrete, but to entirely different effects.)
More fundamentally, Rand's advocacy of rational certainty seems to irk Daniels. He appears to mistake a certainty born of the Enlightenment (Newton's scientific certainty, not Robespierre's authoritarianism) for dogmatism, writing that she "hardened her ideas into ideology." "In Loose Ends in Liverpool," he writes of his own "preoccupation--anti-ideology" and his "great surprise and pleasure" when the curators at the Walker Art Galley "appeared to make no point at all" in what could have been an ideologically polarizing exhibit. Elsewhere, he attacks Le Corbusier because he "believed there was a 'correct' way to build and that only he knew what it was." And in "Trash, Violence and Versace: But Is It Art?", he writes of a crudity that results from an "ideologically inspired (and therefore insincere) admiration for all that is demotic."
Rand's certainty was based on evidence and logic. If Daniel's had read her works or listened to her lectures, he would have observed that she made her case by laying out the evidence that led her to draw the abstract conclusions that became her philosophy. But why bother thoroughly investigating someone you are going to critique when you believe that ideology as such is just window dressing for dark, bestial impulses?
Daniels has the bad habit of trying to throw around his erudition in the free and easy manner of one who is itching to use it, but just can't quite find the right place to make it work. It is absurd for him to dub Rand as the "Chernyshevsky of individualism" without pointing out even the most cursory ideological similarity between her and the Russian tradition of "angry literary and social critics, pamphleteers and ideologues." Daniels does so based solely on what he takes to be her "vehemence, moral fanaticism and mediocrity as a thinker," and on his evaluation that she "was neither fully a philosopher, nor fully a novelist, but something in between the two" and her "speechifying." And yes, I have quoted the whole of Daniels's case. I suppose then that Newton is the "Stalin of science" for his heavy-handed political maneuvering at the Royal Society. You see the absurdity of not thinking in essentials? (One has the sense that Daniels's editors at The New Criterion are his fan-boys and they are not doing him any favors with their uncritical pens.)
What Daniels takes to be the tone of Rand's writing, that it "bores you like a drill," the fact that she held that her ideas were unprecedented (they were), her striking a dedication from Atlas Shrugged, and her "admiration bordering on worship of industrialization and the size of human construction" is enough evidence for him to repeatedly link her to Stalin--even though philosophically, were he diligent enough to investigate the matter, he would find them to be diametrically opposed: reason vs. dialectical materialism, individualism vs. collectivism, individual rights vs. class warfare. Again, this is the whole of his case. And again Daniels does not write about ideas, but superficial non-similarities--Stalin also spoke Russian and had a respiratory system, don't you know. Such a baseless comparison is chillingly unjust and it is reprehensible given that Daniels must know that Rand's parents died in the prison that was Stalin's Russia.
Such "downright cruelty," to use the doctor's own words, along with his bizarre psychologizing of Rand (based on a single distorted biographical detail and a misreading of a once mentioned character in The Fountainhead) is emblematic of a nasty streak in Daniels's writing, one illustrated in his reflections on the Walker Art Gallery, "Loose Ends in Liverpool," where he gratuitously pokes the corpse of the earnest but mediocre artist Benjamin Haydon, who took his own life in a fit of despair.
Daniels passes over some of the finest art in the world (the Walker collection includes J.W. Waterhouse's "Echo and Narcissus," Paul Delaroche's "Napoleon Crossing the Alps" and Hamo Thornycroft's "The Mower") to mock Haydon whom he coldly dubs a "tragicomic character." Here Daniels displays a shocking lack of regard for the extremely sad, but all too common phenomenon of earnest over-reachers. A soul who earnestly struggles to be good, but lacks the ability to do so is tragic. To exhume Haydon as an object of ridicule when it has nothing to do with the theme of one's piece--other than to pretentiously display your grasp of a minor player in the history of art--is shameful, even if the person is long dead. (And this from the same man who writes so tenderly and beautifully about those sensitive souls who have to live amongst the brutes in the British slums.)
If I were to tear a page from Daniels's playbook, I would wonder whether such callousness showed a psychopath lurking beneath his eloquent prose (and I get the inkling that he may even agree). But that would be just as unfounded and supercilious as when he implies the same about Rand.
Such superficial and baseless evaluations are the closest Daniels gets to Rand's ideas. He spends the rest of the article attacking a straw man. He declares that Rand divides "mankind into two categories," that she rejects compassion, that her philosophy "would seem to justify the reign of philosopher-kings," that she "suggest that people are to be judged mainly by reference to their brain power," that she holds that the marketplace is the proper judge of value, that "she never expresses any sympathy or understanding for the weak or ill" and treats it as a "sign of their moral and human worthlessness," that "Romantic Realism is virtuously indistinguishable from Socialist Realism." All of this is not just mind-bogglingly false, but absurd. Daniels should be ashamed of reviewing someone whom he doesn't have the foggiest grasp of, and someone whom he has not read more than a smattering from. This is a schoolboy's paper of confusions spun around the flimsiest of out of context quotes. That's when he supplies any quotes by Rand at all, which is a grand total of six times (and two of which he is admiring). You cannot quote what you do not read.
Daniels is not even familiar enough with Rand's oeuvre to make a pretense of addressing what she wrote. I think he would be astonished to realize the true depth of her thought from her metaphysics and epistemology to her ethics, politics and aesthetics--something one doesn't get from reading Anne C. Heller's embarrassingly trite book. (She is a "fair-minded biographer?" Listen to the bitter, mocking tone and pot shots she takes at Rand when she is interviewed by The New York Times or NPR. Contrary to her meek protestations, she is not "something of an admirer of her subject." She hates her subject.)
But Daniels will never spend the time to actually read Rand and that's just fine with The New Criterion.
Anthony Daniels's writing can sparkle. He can entertain with erudite and obscure trivia. But he seems unwilling to think deeply about ideas. Consequently, his intellect is as wide as an ocean, but as shallow as a puddle.
First Aristotle appeared, and the philosopher said to him, "Could you give me a fifteen-minute capsule sketch of your entire philosophy?" To the philosopher's surprise, Aristotle gave him an excellent exposition in which he compressed an enormous amount of material into a mere fifteen minutes. But then the philosopher raised a certain objection which Aristotle couldn't answer. Confounded, Aristotle disappeared.
Then Plato appeared. The same thing happened again, and the philosophers' objection to Plato was the same as his objection to Aristotle. Plato also couldn't answer it and disappeared.
Then all the famous philosophers of history appeared one-by-one and our philosopher refuted every one with the same objection.
After the last philosopher vanished, our philosopher said to himself, "I know I'm asleep and dreaming all this. Yet I've found a universal refutation for all philosophical systems! Tomorrow when I wake up, I will probably have forgotten it, and the world will really miss something!" With an iron effort, the philosopher forced himself to wake up, rush over to his desk, and write down his universal refutation. Then he jumped back into bed with a sigh of relief.
The next morning when he awoke, he went over to the desk to see what he had written. It was, "That's what you say."
[From Raymond Smullyan, 5000 B.C. and Other Philosophical Fantasies. St. Martin's Press, 1983]
Yes, some people really think that's a legitimate method of refutation!
By Paul Hsieh @ 8:00 AM
Can you spot the similarities? And can you come up with your own examples?
Three views of building a shelter:
A) God will provide for our needs, just like God provides for the lilies, "who neither toil nor spin". Don't worry about how.
B) Buildings collapse all the time; it's not possible for humans to build stable shelters.
C) Man can build shelters. But this won't happen automatically. "Nature to be commanded must be obeyed". To build a proper shelter, we have to know the properties of building materials, know our shelter requirements, and build according to reality-based principles.
Three views of choosing what food to eat:
A) Just eat what tastes good. Your body automatically knows what's good for it.
B) "Food" is a social construct. What one culture regards as a delicacy, another regards as taboo. There's no possible basis for deciding what's right to eat.
C) Proper diet is possible, but not automatic. Our food choices should be guided by the biological and nutritional requirements of our physical bodies. Hence, we must understand the nature of food, the nature of our bodies, and select our foods accordingly.
Three views of knowledge:
A) We can know the truth -- we just have to rely on the infallible "inner vision" provided to us by God.
B) Knowledge is impossible. Our imperfect senses and flawed minds inherently prevent us from ever knowing the truth.
C) Knowledge is possible, but not automatic. But to gain knowledge, we must consciously seek to adhere to reality, using a specific method proper to our conscious minds -- namely reason.
Three views of happiness:
A) Don't worry, be happy! We live in the best of all possible worlds, so success and happiness are inevitable!
B) We're doomed from the start. Life is a vale of tears, where happiness and success are impossible. Tragedy, defeat, and failure are the norm -- we just have to accept that.
C) Achievement and happiness are possible, but not automatic. To be happy, we have to seek our own good by means of rationally formed principles.
Here are a few related concepts from the Ayn Rand Lexicon:
Question: Which is greener; being obese and out of shape or slim and healthy?
Answer: Although obese people do consume slightly more energy than slim people, they will not live as long and therefore, will consume less of the earth's resources.
Most people would likely think that's some kind of horrible mistake: "Surely, they can't mean that!" Yet in fact, the card perfectly represents the ideological core of the environmentalist movement, often referred to as "deep ecology."
As I've argued before, most self-described environmentalists are motivated by fundamentally human concerns: they want clean air and clean water; they want "open space" for hiking, camping, and other sports; they want to preserve species for future study and enjoyment. Such people often wrongly suppose that government controls are required to achieve these ends. They are often mistaken about the benefits and dangers of certain products or practices. They err in thinking in terms of intrinsic value of nature. Yet fundamentally, their aims are anthropocentric: they wish to protect and improve human life.
Undoubtedly, the creators of that game are environmentalists of a different sort: they are "deep ecologists." Here's the description of deep ecology from Wikipedia (with my emphasis added):
Deep ecology's core principle is the claim that, like humanity, the living environment as a whole has the same right to live and flourish. Deep ecology describes itself as "deep" because it persists in asking deeper questions concerning "why" and "how" and thus is concerned with the fundamental philosophical questions about the impacts of human life as one part of the ecosphere, rather than with a narrow view of ecology as a branch of biological science, and aims to avoid merely anthropocentric environmentalism, which is concerned with conservation of the environment only for exploitation by and for humans purposes, which excludes the fundamental philosophy of deep ecology. Deep ecology seeks a more holistic view of the world we live in and seeks to apply to life the understanding that separate parts of the ecosystem (including humans) function as a whole.
Notice that, in addition to its metaphysical collectivism, deep ecology specifically rejects anthropocentrism, i.e. man-centered environmentalism. Ultimately, that's why it promotes human suffering and death as a positive good. To understand the why and the how, we need to draw some parallels to altruism -- particularly to utilitarianism and impartialism.
The moral perspective of deep ecology is similar to that of utilitarianism -- or, more broadly, impartialism. Utilitarianism demands that we always act so as to promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Utilitarianism is hedonistic: happiness is understood to be nothing more than pleasure, whether physical or emotional. Today, the widely-accepted variant of utilitarianism is the non-hedonistic doctrine of impartialism.
Impartialism abstracts away from the hedonism of utilitarianism: it is neutral about the nature of the good. Impartialism speaks in terms of "interests," yet that can mean just about anything: pleasure, wealth, happiness, health -- or even obedience to duty or submission to God's will. However, impartialism is still decidedly collectivistic: the good is neutral between persons. So whatever the standard for the good is, we must promote that good for everyone, not merely ourselves. We must be impartial in our decisions: we ought not concern ourselves with whether something is good for me or my loved ones -- or good for a stranger and his loved ones. All that matters is that something is good. (Kant's ethics of duty shares the same detached view of the good: that's why I think of impartialism as the distilled essence of both utilitarianism and deontology.)
Technically, impartialism permits each person to consider his own interests when acting. Yet the desires, goals, and welfare of one person must always be deemed inconsequential in comparison to the interests of the other billions of people in the world.
For example, you might think that your choice to buy a latte is your own private business, perhaps just concerning you and the owner of the coffee shop. You aren't harming anyone by buying the coffee. In fact, you and the coffee shop owner are better off after the transaction. Sounds good, right? No! That's far too narrow a perspective for impartialism: you must consider the impact of that transaction on everyone else, including the billions of total strangers in the world. Impartialism demands that you consider everything else that you might have done with those few dollars. Clearly, you could be feeding the poor, rather than indulging your desire for luxury. You have no moral right to a cup of coffee while someone in the world lacks bread. (For that argument, see Peter Singer's classic essay, Famine, Affluence, and Morality.)
The fact that the needs of the one are always swamped by the needs of the many is why impartialism is properly regarded as a form of altruism. In practice, you must always do for others, never for yourself. Unless you are the worst-off person in the world, you have no moral right to your own life or happiness.
That sounds awful, but it gets even worse.
(I'll speak of altruism from here on, as the rest of my analysis is not specific to impartialism.)
Impartialism and other forms of altruism cannot rejoice in the fact that people's interests are often in harmony. That only creates epistemic problems when attempting to judge people morally. How so?
Sometimes, a person might act for the sake of his own interests, yet by so doing, he happens to benefit others. In such cases, the person deserves no moral praise or credit -- even when the benefits provided to others are tremendous, like when neurosurgeon saves the live of a beloved child. Such a person is motivated by his own selfish concerns -- perhaps by the expected payment for the surgery or even his enjoyment of the work -- not purely by selfless concern for others.
Thus, when a person benefits from his actions in some way, we must wonder about his motives. He might be a secret egoist! As Kant observes in the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, even the person himself might be deluded, thinking that he was motivated by duty when instead he was motivated by self-love. The result? A person can only be safely praised by altruistic standards when he receives no benefit whatsoever from his actions -- and better yet, when he suffers deeply for them. Only in such cases -- when the person clearly and deliberately inflicts harm on himself for the benefit of others -- can he be judged moral by altruistic standards.
Moreover, the person praiseworthy by altruistic standards need not really benefit other people much, if at all. A person's noble plans might go awry for all kinds of reasons beyond his control. Or perhaps a person lacks the resources or power to accomplish much. The critical question is whether the person decided on his course of action using the proper impartial or altruistic principle -- or "maxim," to use Kant's term. That's all that this morality demands.
So what does that mean? Altruism demands that people help others, yet shrinks from measuring moral worth by that standard. Instead, a person's moral worth is determined by his private motives or maxims: he must act for the sake of others, not for his own sake. He clearly demonstrates that only by his choice to suffer for others. Thus, self-inflicted suffering is the measure of a person's moral worth according to altruism.
Sadly, that's not some far-fetched, stretched interpretation of the meaning of altruism. It's exactly what the most consistent altruists have preached as the good throughout history -- Kant most explicitly.
Recall that the highest moral ideal of Christianity is that of Jesus, a god who willingly allowed himself to be brutally murdered for the sake of sinners. Jesus didn't die in a fight against injustice -- as might the leader of a slave rebellion. He didn't die in defense of anything of personal value to him -- like a friend, lover, or child. He died for the sake of all humanity, wicked and sinful as we are. He died for the sake of the very people who rejected him.
Moreover, that mythology of Jesus' death was based on the same altruistic principles he preached during his life, most clearly exemplified by the story of the Widow's Mite.
[Jesus] sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them, "Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on."
Notice that the widow is not morally superior to those who donated large sums because she provided a greater benefit to the poor. She didn't. Instead, she's morally superior because she sacrificed more. She will suffer greatly for her donation, as now she has nothing to live on. That's what makes her virtuous: her deliberate suffering.
So what does all of that have to do with deep ecology? What does it have to do with the suggestion that we die sooner for the sake of the environment?
Deep ecology is deep impartialism: the interests of everything in the natural world must be considered on a par with human interests. After all, why should mankind be so selfish as to only consider its own interests? Shouldn't we consider the interests of cows, moles, robins, turtles, worms, maples, lichen, and amoebas too? And more: even rivers and rocks have interests that we ought to consider, as well as the planet as a whole! For deep ecology, any form of anthropocentrism -- including traditional utilitarianism -- is really just another form of selfish egoism.
In practice, just as the interests of one person are totally swamped by the interests of billions of other people in human-focused impartialism, so human interests are totally swamped by the interests of living organisms, ecosystems, and natural objects in deep ecology. Consequently, humans will always be obliged to sacrifice themselves for nature. Just by sheer numbers, we're always going to lose.
As with altruism, the test of moral virtue for deep ecology is not any benefit done to the natural world but rather the depth of human sacrifices. Otherwise, we might just be pretending concern for nature, while actually secretly pursuing our own selfish ends. We can only prove our morality by eschewing anything that might benefit ourselves. That's why the morality of deep ecology demands human destruction.
These various moral theories -- utilitarianism, impartialism, altruism, and deep ecology -- are similar for a reason. The morality of egoism is the morality of life and happiness. To reject egoism as immoral requires adopting suffering and death as the moral standard -- whether for a single individual or all of humanity. The form of that ideal differs, as does its window dressing. Yet if you dig a bit, you'll find suffering and death at its core.
Sometimes, as with the card from "The Green Game," that's just a bit more apparent than usual.
By Paul Hsieh @ 8:00 AM
One of the big stories to hit the science blogosphere last week was about Rom Houben, a man who reportedly was (erroneously) believed by his physicians to be in a coma for 23 years after an accident whereas in reality he was conscious all along but paralyzed and unable to communicate this fact to the outside world.
As reported, the fact of his consciousness was only recently discovered with advanced brain scanning techniques not available to physicians at the time of his accident in 1983.
Some follow-up stories have raised the question about the accuracy of the details of his account, especially because it uses "facilitated communication". James Randi raises similar concerns.
But leaving aside the debate over that particular question, I'd like to pose a broader mixed question about scientific testing for consciousness.
From a scientific and medical standpoint, it would clearly be valuable to know if there were a specific test that could determine if a person was truly comatose vs. "conscious but unable to communicate". In other words, it would be extremely valuable to be able to test a seemingly comatose patient and determine whether there was "anybody home", or there were only the bodily shell of what used to be a person.
It's certainly plausible that some sort of scientific test might currently (or some day in the future) answer that question. But I'm not asking whether or not some particular current brain scanning technology actually answers this question.
Instead, suppose that some day a neuroscientist claims, "I've invented a machine that will reliably predict the presence or absence of consciousness. If such-and-such pattern of brain activity is present, then the patient is conscious. If that pattern is not present, then the patient is not conscious."
My questions are as follows:
1) Would it be possible for a scientist to ever prove such a claim?
After all, consciousness is a subjective phenomenon that one experiences "from the inside". In contrast, scientists can detect and measure brain activities which may be correlated with consciousness (such as a certain pattern of firing of neurons or a certain pattern of metabolic activity within the brain), but that's that the same as detecting consciousness.
There are some schools of modern philosophical thought which claim that consciousness is equivalent to (and nothing more than) a specific type of brain activity. If one believes that, then the answer would presumably be "yes", and the question would become purely an issue of science.
But in contrast, if one believes that consciousness is not equivalent to a specific pattern of brain activity (although related to the actions of the human brain in a still-not-fully-understood fashion), then the issue becomes murkier, leading to my next two questions:
2) Would a rational philosophy have anything to say about what would or would not be possible for scientists to claim? And would philosophers be able to give guidance as to what would constitute a proper standard of proof?
3) Or would no such claim by the neuroscientist possible? In other words, would a scientist only be able to claim that he is measuring an objective process that is highly probable to be correlated with a subjective sensation of consciousness -- and that's all anyone can ever do?
Or more colloquially:
1) Can you know if someone is home? 2) Can you know that you know it? 3) Or can you never really know it?
I freely admit that I don't know the answers to these questions. But I'd be interested in hearing from others who might be able to shed some light -- either scientific or philosophical.
By Greg Perkins @ 8:00 AM The Objectivism Seminar is working through Dr. Leonard Peikoff's all-too-topical book, The Ominous Parallels. In it, he explores what gave rise to to the fascist, totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany -- and analyzes whether and how a fascist, totalitarian regime could emerge here in America.
Our focus this week was Chapter 10, "The Culture of Hatred" -- a reference to the rise of Nihilism in the German culture. Topics we discussed included:
We explored how "the first truly modern culture" in the world emerged, more accepting of contemporary-everything: the "Weimar culture," shaped by the "free spirits" of the German Republic, the the avant garde in the humanities, sciences, commentary, journalism, and so on. A key question to answeris: what is "modernity" is in this sense? What principle unites Kaiser, Kandinsky, Schoenberg, Mann, Barth, Freud, Heisenberg?
Touring the culture, Peikoff started with literature ("art is the barometer of a culture, and literature is the barometer of art"). The prominent philosophical novel by Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain) was characterized by a contemporary as the "saga of the Weimar Republic." "To a country and in a decade swept by hysteria, perishing from uncertainty, torn by political crisis, financial collapse, violence in the streets, and terror of the future -- to that country, in that decade, its leading philosophical novelist offered as his contribution to sanity and freedom the smiling assurance that there are no answers, no absolutes, no values, no hope." It was a hit that resonated with the culture.
Turning to poetry like that of Rainer Maria Rilke, a Christian mystic admired across the board, as well as Kafka, Peikoff finds them offering "nightmare projections of nameless ciphers paralyzed by a sinister, unknowable reality."
Turning to the philosophy of Existentialism and Martin Heidegger, it underscores existence being unintelligible, reason invalid, man a helpless "Dasein" -- a creature engulfed by "das Nichts" (nothingness), in terror of the supreme fact of his life: death and doomed by nature to "angst," estrangement, futility. Heidegger's works rejected any systematic defense of his ideas and were praised as the "intellectual counterpart of modern painting."
In contrast to Heidegger's rejection of religion and God, the avant-garde theologians tried to reconceive these in modern terms -- "Avant-garde religion, in short, consists in ditching one's mind, prostrating oneself in the muck, and screaming for mercy."
Next was the new psychology with the psychoanalysis of Freud. In the name of science it leaves us "Caught in the middle between these forces -- between a psychopathic hippie screaming: satisfaction now! and a jungle chieftain intoning: tribal obedience! -- sentenced by nature to ineradicable conflict, guilt, anxiety, and neurosis is man, i.e., man's mind, his reason or "ego," the faculty which is able to grasp reality, and which exists primarily to mediate between the clashing demands of the psyche's two irrational masters." More generally, the "new science -- like the new philosophy, the new theology, the new art -- becomes instead a vehicle of the willful, the arbitrary, the subjective."
Finally, touching on sociology, political science, education, art historians, social commentators, philosophers… and even physics and math, we find everywhere that "The notion of 'reason enthroned' disappears into myth, and the rational man collapses…"
In sum, we find that what is new and distinctive across the board is Nihilism: hatred of values and of their root, reason -- this, Peikoff contends, is the essential that underlies, generates, and defines "Weimar culture."
How Peikoff traces Nihilism as a cultural force back to Kant's philosophy.
How this new culture compares and contrasts with other eras of mysticism -- and how Peikoff's framing of it in this book relates to the way he is framing similar phenomena in his new DIM Hypothesis work (forthcoming).
Peikoff summarized the results, social and political:
In the orgy which was the cultural atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, the Germans could not work to resolve their differences. Disintegrated by factionalism, traumatized by crisis, and pumped full of the defiant rejection of reason, in every form and from all sides, the Germans felt not calm, but hysteria; not confidence in regard to others, but the inability to communicate with them; not hope, but despair; not the desire for solutions to their problems, but the need for scapegoats; and, as a result, not goodwill, but fury, blind fury at their enemies, real or imagined.
Nihilism in Germany worked to exacerbate economic and political resentments by undermining the only weapon that could have dealt with them. The intellectuals wanted to destroy values; the public shaped by this trend ended up wanting to destroy men.
The social corollary of "Weimar culture" was a country animated, and torn apart, by hatred, seething in groups trained to be impervious to reason.
The political corollary was the same country put back together by Hitler.
If this sounds interesting, you can listen in on the podcast -- just download the session's MP3 directly, or listen to it with the little player on the right, or subscribe to the podcast series over on the Seminar's TalkShoe page. And if you have something to ask or add, please do pick up the book and join the discussion! We meet at 8:00pm Mountain on Mondays, for about an hour.
By Greg Perkins @ 5:00 PM The Objectivism Seminar is working through Dr. Leonard Peikoff's all-too-topical book, The Ominous Parallels. In it, he explores what gave rise to to the fascist, totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany -- and analyzes whether and how a fascist, totalitarian regime could emerge here in America.
Our focus this week was Chapter 9, "The Nazi Synthesis" -- a reference to what gave the Nazis the ability to seemingly offer everything to everyone. Topics we discussed included:
How "The nationalists, at heart, were socialists. The socialists, at heart were nationalists. The Nazis took over the essence of each side in the German debate and proudly offered the synthesis as one unified viewpoint. The syntheses is: national socialism."
This synthesis stressed the basic principles common to all groups and served as an opening to every major segment of the population, reactionary and radical alike. At the same time, the non-Nazi parties limited themselves to a narrower, more specific consituency while alienating the rest of the country.
The "Twenty-Five Points" document outlining the Nazi agenda: how it demanded special state action on behalf of virtually every group, with the middle class as its most obvious target of appeal. These are the white-collar workers, small tradesmen, bureaucrats, academics -- those ravaged by the war and hit hardest by the hyperinfltion, and who felt pinned between government-protected cartels above and government-supported unions below.
How the Nazis offered private deals and/or public promises to virtually every significant group in Germany to broaden their support -- all the way down to the spinsters. What enabled the Nazis to offer conflicting messages tailored to appeal to each audience, flattering everyone as uniquely important, soothing concerns about their interests, promising punishment of those they felt pitted against.
The one real consistency the Nazis offered was that of supporting and sacrificing to the "public interest" -- rejecting the Weimarian mixed economy with its partial freedoms for utter totalitarianism.
And much more...
The chapter closes by saying:
The poor hated the rich, the rich hated "the rabble," the left hated the "bourgeoisie," the right hated the foreigners, the traditionalists hated the new, and the young hated everything, the adults, the Allies, the West, the Jews, the cities, the "system."
The Nazis promised every group annihilation, the annihilation of that which it hated. Just as Hitler offered Germany a synthesis of ideas, so, appealing to the nationwide, classwide spasm of seething fury, he offered the voters a synthesis of hatreds. In the end, this combination was what the voters wanted, and chose.
If this sounds interesting, you can listen in on the podcast -- just download the session's MP3 directly, or listen to it with the little player on the right, or subscribe to the podcast series over on the Seminar's TalkShoe page. And if you have something to ask or add, please do pick up the book and join the discussion! We meet at 8:00pm Mountain on Mondays, for about an hour.
By Greg Perkins @ 2:00 PM The Objectivism Seminar is working through Dr. Leonard Peikoff's all-too-topical book, The Ominous Parallels. In it, he explores what gave rise to to the fascist, totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany -- and analyzes whether and how a fascist, totalitarian regime could emerge here in America.
Our focus this week was Chapter 8, "The Emotionalist Republic" -- a reference to how there was one fundamental principle "everywhere in the ascendancy -- among artists and educators, radicals and traditionalists, young and old alike": the wholesale rejection of rationality for emotionalism. Topics we discussed included:
Why Peikoff characterized art as "the barometer that lays bare a period's view of reality, of life, of man."
The rise of the Expressionism movement in art with its open break with the intellect, with material reality, with all 'middle class' values such as work and personal success, industrial civilization, money, business, section standards, law and order, etc. The spread of these values into everything from cartoons in the newspapers, architecture, films, poetry, music.
The Conservative reaction to this, which they regarded as a product of "reason": turning to their traditional values of intuition and feeling with artists who portrayed an irrational, heroic, mystic world "beset by treachery, overwhelmed by violence, drowned in blood, and culminating in … an orgy of self-willed annihilation".
How the "same epistemological cause leads ultimately to the same social effect (whatever the form). The left culturati called their political ideal "socialism." the right culturati called theirs "Prussianism." But, as Spengler pointed out in an influential work entitled Prussianism and Socialism, there is no essential difference between these two concepts. Under both approaches, he noted, "Power belongs to the whole. The individual serves it. The whole is sovereign… Everyone is given his place. There are commands and obedience."
The spread of these values via the efforts of both the left and the right into the youth movements and the educational institutions.
The effects of such emotionalism in economics: the failure in hyperinflation they would suffer as their mixed, Bismarckian-style economy drove individuals to join into pressure-group warfare.
How this all combines into a miserable, volatile circumstance ripe for someone to deliver change and hope...
If this sounds interesting, you can listen in on the podcast -- just download the session's MP3 directly, or listen to it with the little player on the right, or subscribe to the podcast series over on the Seminar's TalkShoe page. And if you have something to ask or add, please do pick up the book and join the discussion! We meet at 8:00pm Mountain on Mondays, for about an hour.
By Diana Hsieh @ 2:00 PM
Here's an unexpected demonstration of the power of philosophy, even amongst those completely oblivious to it. In this video, a rather ditzy vegan girl addresses the charge that vegans and vegetarians are guilty of killing tons of wild animals in the process of planting and harvesting crops. (It's true!)
The doctrine (or principle) of double effect is often invoked to explain the permissibility of an action that causes a serious harm, such as the death of a human being, as a side effect of promoting some good end. It is claimed that sometimes it is permissible to cause such a harm as a side effect (or "double effect") of bringing about a good result even though it would not be permissible to cause such a harm as a means to bringing about the same good end. This reasoning is summarized with the claim that sometimes it is permissible to bring about as a merely foreseen side effect a harmful event that it would be impermissible to bring about intentionally.
How does that apply here? According to ditzy-vegan-girl, it's morally okay to do something wrong (like killing animals) as an unintended side effect of pursuing a good end (like eating veggies) but not okay to do that same wrong thing (killing animals) as a direct means to your ends (like eating meat).
Of course, the doctrine of double effect doesn't actually help her answer the moral charge here. The doctrine is a handy tool of rationalization for people with ethics so disconnected from reality that they simply must violate them to live. It's not a real ethical principle.
Ditzy-vegan-girl surely hasn't ever heard of the doctrine of double effect, yet she's using it all the same. That's the power of philosophy.
By Diana Hsieh @ 11:00 PM
In this episode of PhiloFiles, I discuss various Design Arguments for the existence of God, focusing on William Paley's Analogical Argument for Design.
By Greg Perkins @ 5:00 AM The Objectivism Seminar is working through Dr. Leonard Peikoff's all-too-topical book, The Ominous Parallels. In it, he explores what gave rise to to the fascist, totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany -- and analyzes whether and how a fascist, totalitarian regime could emerge here in America.
Our focus this week was Chapter 7, "United They Fell" -- a reference to Germans' widespread agreement on important fundamentals despite often fierce political differences that were evident as they strove to create a new, constitutional republic. Topics we discussed included:
A tour of the political diversity in both means and ends that was present as Germans drew up their nations new, republican constitution: the four major groups forming two broad coalitions in the Wiemar Assembly -- and the two paralleling major groups in the "street".
How despite the seeming ideological diversity, all of the major groups battling to shape Germany's new government nonetheless shared the same essential ideas in epistemology (anti-reason, mysticism), ethics (sacrificial, altruistic), and politics (anti-capitalist, collectivist). They argued fiercely, even violently, over more derivative matters: In the formal discussions of the Wiemar Assembly, in the end the marxist Social Democrats and their allies sought state control of the economy for the benefit of the lower classes -- versus the conservative/monarchical Nationalists who sought state control of the economy for the benefit of the upper classes. And at the same time the major parties active in the "street" were more pure in their desired ends, and more direct in their means to achieving them: the Communists fought for an all-powerful state to determine the fate of individuals' lives, versus the Free Corps who fought for an all-powerful ruler who would determine the fate of individuals' lives.
And much more...
The chapter closes:
Wherever the German turned -- to the left, to the right, to the center; to the decorous voices in parliament or to the gutters running with blood -- he heard the same fundamental ideas. They were the same in politics, the same in ethics, the same in epistemology.
This is how philosophy shapes the destiny of nations. If there is no dissent in regard to basic principles among a country's leading philosophic minds, theirs are the principles that come in time to govern every social and political group in the land. Owing to other factors, the groups may proliferate and may contend fiercely over variants, applications, strategy; but they do not contend over essentials. In such a case, the country is offered an abundance of choices -- among equivalents competing to push it to the same final outcome.
It is common for observers to criticize the "disunity" of Weimar Germany, which, it is said, prevented the anti-Nazi groups from dealing effectively with the threat posed by Hitler. In fact, the Germans were united, and this precisely was their curse: their kind of unity, their unity on all the things that count in history, i.e., on all the ideas.
If this sounds interesting, you can listen in on the podcast -- just download the session's MP3 directly, or listen to it with the little player on the right, or subscribe to the podcast series over on the Seminar's TalkShoe page. And if you have something to ask or add, please do pick up the book and join the discussion! We meet at 8:00pm Mountain on Mondays, for about an hour.
By Greg Perkins @ 5:00 AM The Objectivism Seminar is working through Dr. Leonard Peikoff's all-too-topical book, The Ominous Parallels. In it, he explores what gave rise to to the fascist, totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany -- and analyzes whether and how a fascist, totalitarian regime could emerge here in America.
Our focus this week was Chapter 6, "Kant Versus America" -- a reference to the fundamental opposition between core American ideals and German ideological imports. Topics we discussed included:
German metaphysical idealism coming to America via the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson et. al -- an eclectic "literary" version of German romanticism. Then decades of Hegel's purified Kantianism dominating American philosophy departments.
How some advocates of these ideas were open and clear about their rejection of reason for emotion/intuition/will, while others took the tack of presenting themselves as champions of rationality even while undercutting every essential element of it.
How advocates of the American system of rights and capitalism tried to find ideological support in classical economics and evolutionary biology -- and how this was ultimately a doomed effort because these are not philosophically fundamental. Mill, Smith, Say, and the rest of the classical economists tried to defend an individualist system while accepting the fundamental moral ideas of its opponents (altruism, collectivism). And on the biological evolution front, Herbert Spencer tried and failed to defend capitalism while adhering to more fundamental ideas which clash with it (advocating a species-based collectivist approach that would be inspiration for Eugenicists, and thinking evolution would eventually eliminate egoism in favor of altruism in humans).
What Pragmatism is and how it became the main American manifestation of the Kantian trend.
Why Pragmatists adopt codes of values and political ideas designed by others (non-pragmatists), usually without consciously acknowledging this, through cultural osmosis.
How Pragmatism was the only 20th century philosophy to gain broad, national acceptance in America (and how this happened through Orwellian twists of meaning and language to sell it to an audience who would otherwise recoil). How it enjoyed a disastrous acceleration by taking over the educational system (Dewey), its prevalence in politics, etc.
How academic philosophy then all but disappeared in America -- as the "dead end" of the Kantian dichotomy between thought and reality, with the public rightly rejecting the field of philosophy as worthless (even though they nonetheless remained powerfully influenced by philosophy).
And a lot more...
If this sounds interesting, you can listen in on the podcast -- just download the session's MP3 directly, or listen to it with the little player on the right, or subscribe to the podcast series over on the Seminar's TalkShoe page. And if you have something to ask or add, please do pick up the book and join the discussion! We meet at 8:00pm Mountain on Mondays, for about an hour.
By Diana Hsieh @ 11:00 PM
I must admit, I had all kinds of fun preparing and recording Episode #16 of Rationally Selfish Radio. (Sadly, it was delayed by hours of downtime by my podcast host.) Here it is, just for you!
In this episode, I discuss Design Arguments for the existence of God, particularly objections to Aquinas' Teleological Argument and the Fine Tuning Argument.
By Greg Perkins @ 5:00 AM The Objectivism Seminar is working through Dr. Leonard Peikoff's all-too-topical book, The Ominous Parallels. In it, he explores what gave rise to to the fascist, totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany -- and analyzes whether and how a fascist, totalitarian regime could emerge here in America.
Our focus this past two weeks (due to technical difficulties) was Chapter 5, "The Nation of the Enlightenment" -- a reference to the central influence of the ideas and spirit of the Enlightenment in America's founding. Topics we discussed included:
The eras of reason in Western philosophy, and how this relates to Peikoff's characterization of the US as the Nation of the Enlightenment. Whether the US is indeed unique in being a "nation of ideas".
How achievements in science and philosophy basically proclaimed the world open to reason -- with reason becoming a virtue, the norm and expected.
The difference between early America and the America that the Founders built. How the American Enlightenment is a 'profound reversal' of the Puritans' philosophic priorities. What brought about the dislodging of Puritanism, and the religious outlook of the founding leaders.
Why Aristotle is the first father of this new world. And Locke's contribution to that legacy.
How the founders integrated their considerable knowledge of history to devise a brilliant, practical implementation of these abstract ideas with checks and balances, trying to isolate the operation of the state as much as possible from the moral character of any of its temporary officials, as well as subversion by an aspiring dictator or temporary sentiment.
How this rising nation of ideas then fell prey to bad ideas in Europe: There was no American attempt to give systematic statement to and defense of the American approach to liberty -- we had no major philosophical innovators and relied on Europe to provide this (e.g., Locke). Unfortunately, there were gaps and problems, leading to the "American conflict" between the implicitly egoistic upholding of rights vs. the explicitly altruistic morality of the culture.
And a lot more...
If this sounds interesting, you can listen in on the podcast -- just download the session's MP3 directly, or listen to it with the little player on the right, or subscribe to the podcast series over on the Seminar's TalkShoe page. And if you have something to ask or add, please do pick up the book and join the discussion! We meet at 8:00pm Mountain on Mondays, for about an hour.
By Greg Perkins @ 5:00 AM The Objectivism Seminar is working through Dr. Leonard Peikoff's all-too-topical book, The Ominous Parallels. In it, he explores what gave rise to to the fascist, totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany -- and analyzes whether and how a fascist, totalitarian regime could emerge here in America.
Our focus this week was Chapter 4, "The Ethics of Evil" -- a reference to the implications for peoples' lives that flow from the ideas they accept about values. Topics we discussed included:
How Obama matches and doesn't match fascists in history -- an important distinction to observe.
The two fundamentally opposed approaches to morality.
How Kant carried Christianity's ethics to its climax -- and how Christianity "prepared the ground" for modern totalitarianism by entrenching three fundamental ideas in the Western mind.
Christianity's non-sacrificial ethical nod to Pagan egoism -- and how Kant expunged this.
How Kant felt he wasn't an innovator in the realm of morality, but yet he was an innovator in in an important respect: actually divorcing morality from values, with moral perfection being uninterested action devoid of any love or desire.
What evil consists in, for Kant: not self-love per-se, but giving self-love priority over morality in one's heart. Kant's version of Original Sin.
How for Kant, "It is the lot of the moral man to burn with desire and then, on principle -- the principle of duty -- to thwart it. The hallmark of the moral man is to suffer. … It is sacrifice -- sacrifice as against apathy or indifference, sacrifice continual and searing -- which is the essence of Kant's moral counsel to living men." [p.80]
How Kant did not preach Nazism (he likely would have frowned on the Nazis) -- yet he established a necessary precondition for their development.
The rise of the formal doctrine of Altruism, giving a target to sacrifice… Then Hegel's development bringing 'social relativism' to ethics -- and how the Nazis' pragmatism dovetails with it to strengthen their sacrificial, collectivist program.
Why physical coercion and persuasion are the only two methods for people to deal with one another -- and how altruism gives the use of force a moral sanction, making it not just a practical recourse, but a positive virtue (in both secular and religious forms).
How the many "mindless activists and nonideological brawlers" were nonetheless in the grip of a particular philosophy, morphing and rewriting their program, yet never altering the three fundamental ideas that their program rested on from start to end.
That the world has not learned its lesson from history, with these three fundamental ideas still spreading throughout the Western world and increasing in their potency (and damage).
And a lot more...
If this sounds interesting, you can listen in on the podcast (just download the session's MP3 directly, or listen to it with the little player on the right, or subscribe to the podcast series over on the Seminar's TalkShoe page). And if you have something to ask or add, please do pick up the book and join the discussion! We meet at 8:00pm Mountain on Mondays, for about an hour.
By Diana Hsieh @ 6:00 PM
I've just posted Episode #9 of Rationally Selfish Radio. In this episode, I discuss the major objections to the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God. Three variants of the Cosmological Argument were presented in Episode #6.
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology by Ayn Rand. For more on the axiom of existence, see Chapter Six on "Axiomatic Concepts." For more on the invalid distinction between necessary and contingent, see Leonard Peikoff's essay "Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy."
By Greg Perkins @ 9:00 AM The Objectivism Seminar is working through Dr. Leonard Peikoff's all-too-topical book, The Ominous Parallels. In it, he explores what gave rise to to the fascist, totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany -- and analyzes whether and how a fascist, totalitarian regime could emerge here in America.
Our focus this week was Chapter 3, "Hitler's War Against Reason" -- a reference to the implications for peoples' lives that flow from the ideas they accept about knowledge and its acquisition and use. Topics we discussed included:
The connection between the rejection of reason and the use of force.
the Nazi "epistemology": the wholesale undercutting and replacement of reason as a source of knowledge and guide to action -- in favor of feelings, instincts, "will" or (as Hitler was so surprisingly breezy in putting it) whatever you want to call such things.
Irrationalism as the rejection of reason, Mysticism as the supplementing or replacement of reason, and [non-esthetic] Romanticism's existing strength in the German culture being necessary for Hitler and the Nazis to accomplish their aims.
The timeline and major philosophical players in the transition from the Enlightenment reliance on reason to its rejection for romanticism and voluntarism.
Hitler and the Nazi's profound, central reliance on and promotion of two forms of anti-reason: dogmatism and pragmatism.
How this mixture of dogmatism and pragmatism brought something new (and seemingly paradoxical) to the world: "the absolute of the moment, or the immutable which never stands still, issued by an omniscience that ceaselessly changes its mind."
A more general exploration of the subjectivism that underlies the above, how despite being present systematically since Greek times, it was able to take off and dominate a culture at this time and in this place.
The naked use of force that subjectivism/primacy-of-consciousness has always brought -- even necessitated -- in politics.
How the Nazis were utterly dependent on the groundwork laid by philosophers, merely "cashing in" on what was already in place.
And a lot more...
If this sounds interesting, you can listen in on the podcast (just download the session's MP3 directly, or listen to it with the little player on the right, or subscribe to the podcast series over on the Seminar's TalkShoe page). And if you have something to ask or add, please do pick up the book and join the discussion! We meet at 8:00pm Mountain on Mondays, for about an hour.
E-mail Diana Hsieh
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