Lenin was just the first of the great vision-driven dictators of the 20th century. Like Hitler and Mao after him, Lenin was prepared to sacrifice the lives of millions of human beings on the altar to his vision.Even in democratic nations, there are people who can impose their vision on other people, with no consequences for being wrong and no requirement that they prove themselves right.
Social workers have for years tried to stop white couples from adopting orphans from minority groups because that goes against their vision. They don't need a speck of evidence to back up their preconceptions.
Many a minority child has been ripped out of the only home they have ever known by social workers who have sent them off to live among strangers, or a whole succession of strangers in foster homes, simply because a vision says that this is better than having them grow up with a white couple who have raised them from infancy.
Everyone has visions but everyone is not in a position to indulge those visions, or to impose them on other people, without suffering any consequences for being wrong. Even the biggest businesses can find themselves looking red ink in the face if their idea of what the public wants turns out to be different from what the public will buy. Federal judges, however, pay no price for being wrong, even if the costs to others -- sometimes the whole society -- turn out to be catastrophic. When murder rates skyrocketed after 1960s judges started conjuring up new "rights" out of thin air for criminals, there were no consequences for those judges, who had lifetime appointments and were not likely to be living in high-crime neighborhoods.
Can there be any certainty in the death of Jacques Derrida ? The obituarists� objective attempts to place his life in a finite context are, necessarily, subject to epistemic relativism, the idea that all such scientific theories are mere �narrations� or social constructions. Surely, a postmodernist deconstruction of their import would inevitably question the foundational conceptual categories of prior science � among them, Derrida�s own existence � which become problematised and relativised. This conceptual revolution has profound implications for the content of future postmodern and liberatory science of mortality. Is God dead? It was, perhaps, Alan D. Sokal who most heuristically challenged the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook in his brilliant exegesis of Derridian principles Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Dr Sokal�s inclusive review of the literature (see especially Hamill, Graham. The epistemology of expurgation: Bacon and The Masculine Birth of Time. In Queering the Renaissance, pp. 236-252. And also Doyle, Richard. Dislocating knowledge, thinking out of joint: Rhizomatics and the importance of being multiple), and his eerily exact summary of the complementarity principle (Instead of a simple �either/or� structure, deconstruction attempts to elaborate a discourse that says neither �either/or� nor �both/and� nor even �neither/nor� while at the same time not abandoning these logics either) make his reading of Derrida irrefutable. We know only two things. We do not know. And M Derrida is in no position to enlighten us.More on Dead Derrida from the London Times.
And a long and helpful piece from the LA Times:
"Of Grammatology," his most famous work, focuses on the submerged dualisms and hierarchies that Derrida considered the foundation of Western thought. He said that embedded in any text were oppositional pairs such as good/evil, mind/body, male/female, truth/fiction. He further said that the first term in any set of such "binary opposites" is valued or privileged over the second. It is these oppositions, Derrida argued, that must be deconstructed .. To illustrate how the greatest philosophers contradict themselves, he often cited Plato's declaration that oral discourse "is written in the soul of the listener." If speech, as the father of Western thought asserted, was superior to writing, how could it then be "written" in the soul? Like a Freudian slip, Plato's choice of words undercut his own argument, Derrida insisted, demonstrating that speech is not more authentic or closer to truth than writing .. What may have been most threatening about deconstruction was its embrace of disorder, of the view that the world is not a simple place, reducible to such absolute concepts as good versus evil, hero versus villain, sane versus insane.
His intellectual legacy essentially is to have articulated a theory proposing that communication is impossible. Think about that for a second, because that's what deconstruction really is: a theory that argues communication is impossible. As one critic of deconstruction has pointed out: "It is a contradiction to say that nothing can be said, and a multiple contradiction to say it at length." My co-author Mark Molesky and I have written an entire chapter on Derrida and his fellow French intellectuals in our new book, Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France. (The chapter is called "Fables of the Deconstruction.") We discuss Derrida, Sarte, de Man, and others. Much of what these men wrote is abstruse -- after a dose of Derrida, it's just possible to believe that communication really is impossible, though not for the reasons Derrida supposes. At any rate, Mark and I tried to make sense of what these folks were saying, put it in historical context, and explain its influence on America.
True enough, Derrida was right to oppose the Platonic theory of meaning -- but unfortunately he had nothing sensible to replace it with, only an extended reductio ad absurdum via a madness of puns and metaphor without end. His own approach could have learned much from infinitely more profound anti-Plantonic work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Derrida in his American years had no time for that, he was far more interested in playing word games, as he did when I saw him give the lectures published as Spectres of Marx. The Derrida I saw was a "joke" -- laughable and yet seriously repellent at the same time.
So lets give Derrida a thumbs up for his anti-Plantonism and a thumbs down for his mistaken view of language, truth, and literature. And a big, big thumbs down for his truly dismal influence on fashion hungry second-raters the world over.
From the London Telegraph:
Jacques Chirac, the French president, said yesterday that in Prof Derrida, "France has given the world one of its greatest contemporary philosophers, one of the major intellectual figures of our time". Prof Derrida's work pioneered a complex and controversial form of philosophy which interpreted different kinds of human thought and knowledge as ambiguous "texts" with multiple and apparently endless layers of meaning. The method, though often impenetrable, had an enormous impact on literature, linguistics, philosophy, law and architecture. Over a 40-year career, the flamboyant doyen of Parisian intellectuals became one of the best-known and controversial philosophers in the world - loathed, adored and seldom fully comprehended .. While his followers acclaimed him a playful genius of language, critics said he merely created an obscure form of relativism, in which anything could mean anything. His famously difficult and literary style made him particularly unpopular among many English and American philosophers, most of them reared in the tradition of plain-speaking Anglo-Saxon thought.From the NY Times:On the continent .. Prof Derrida was a celebrated figure - akin to a pop star among students. In recent years, he began to intervene regularly in political debates. In a debate on global terrorism, he refused to describe September 11 attacks as an act of "international terrorism", arguing that "an act of 'international terrorism' is anything but a rigorous concept that would help us grasp the singularity of what we are trying to discuss".
Mr. Derrida was known as the father of deconstruction, the method of inquiry that asserted that all writing was full of confusion and contradiction, and that the author's intent could not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself, robbing texts - whether literature, history or philosophy - of truthfulness, absolute meaning and permanence. The concept was eventually applied to the whole gamut of arts and social sciences, including linguistics, anthropology, political science, even architecture.From the Guardian:While he had a huge following - larger in the United States than in Europe - he was the target of as much anger as admiration. For many Americans, in particular, he was the personification of a French school of thinking they felt was undermining many of the traditional standards of classical education, and one they often associated with divisive political causes.
Derrida focused his work on language, showing that it has multiple layers and thus multiple meanings or interpretations, challenging the notion that speech is a direct form of communication or even that the author of a text is the author of its meaning. Deconstructionists like Derrida explored the means of liberating the written word from the structures of language, opening limitless textual interpretations. Not limited to language, Derrida's philosophy of deconstructionism was then applied to western values.From Le Monde:
Il �tait le dernier survivant de ces penseurs des ann�es 60, catalogu�s "penseurs de 68", (Althusser, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, Deleuze, etc..), grands pourfendeurs de la notion de "sujet" .. Jacques Derrida, qui portait beau une �paisse chevelure blanche, propose, � partir de textes philosophiques classiques, une "d�construction", une critique des pr�suppos�s de la parole, une mani�re de d�faire de l'int�rieur un syst�me de pens�e dominant.[English translation].
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BLOGOSPHERE REACTIONS: Michelle Malkin -- "DING DONG! DERRIDA IS DEAD":
Dan Flynn has a great chapter on Derrida in his new book [Intellectual Morons : How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas].Jack Balkin -- "Derrida was an important influence in my intellectual life":
Perhaps the most important thing to say about Derrida is that he was not a Derridean. Other people made use of his work in ways that would probably have horrified him.David Carr -- "The End of an Earache":
.. to say that he has "died" is to, perhaps, impose a structural context defined by the ontology of Western metaphysics. In the grammatic, linguistic and rhetorical senses he has merely desedimented, dismantled and decomposed. Indeed, this is a grand narrative undoing in the egological, methodological and general sense, as opposed to a mere critique in the idiomatic or Kantian sense.Technorati search "Derrida".
"The most celebrated Morgenbesser anecdote involved visiting Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin, who noted that it was peculiar that although there are many languages in which a double negative makes a positive, no example existed where two positives expressed a negative. In a dismissive voice, Morgenbesser replied from the audience, �Yeah, yeah��
"Don't accept the post or stay unless you have an understanding with the president that you're free to tell him what you think �with the bark off� and you have the courage to do it."
UPDATE: Here's the ABC News story based on the content of last night's ABC News special Rumsfeld's Rules of War.
Now THIS is really interesting. Quotable:
I've had a suspicion for a while that despite the astonishing success of the first generation of computer scientists like Shannon, Turing, von Neumann, and Wiener, somehow they didn't get a few important starting points quite right, and some things in the foundations of computer science are fundamentally askew. In a way I have no right to say this and it would be more appropriate to say it once I've actually got something to take its place, so let me just emphasize that this is speculative. But where might things have gone wrong?The leaders of the first generation were influenced by the metaphor of the electrical communications devices that where in use in their lifetimes, all of which centered on the sending of signals down wires. This started, oddly enough, with predecessors of the fax machine, continuing in a much bigger way to the telegraph, which turned into the telephone, and then proceeded with devices that carry digital signals that were only machine readable. Similarly, radio and television signals were designed to be relayed to a single wire even if part of their passage was wireless. All of us are guided by our metaphors, and our metaphors are created by the world around us, so it's understandable that signals on wires would become the central metaphor of their day.
If you model information theory on signals going down a wire, you simplify your task in that you only have one point being measured or modified at a time at each end. It's easier to talk about a single point in some ways, and in particular it's easier to come up with mathematical techniques to perform analytic tricks. At the same time, though, you pay by adding complexity at another level, since the only way to give meaning to a single point value in space is time. You end up with information structures spread out over time, which leads to a particular set of ideas about coding schemes in which the sender and receiver have agreed on a temporal syntactical layer in advance.
If you go back to the original information theorists, everything was about wire communication. We see this, for example, in Shannon's work. The astonishing bridge that he created between information and thermodynamics was framed in terms of information on a wire between a sender and a receiver.
This might not have been the best starting point. It's certainly not a wrong starting point, since there's technically nothing incorrect about it, but it might not have been the most convenient or cognitively appropriate starting point for human beings who wished to go on to build things. The world as our nervous systems know it is not based on single point measurements, but on surfaces. Put another way, our environment has not necessarily agreed with our bodies in advance on temporal syntax. Our body is a surface that contacts the world on a surface. For instance, our retina sees multiple points of light at once.
We're so used to thinking about computers in the same light as was available at the inception of computer science that it's hard to imagine an alternative, but an alternative is available to us all the time in our own bodies. Indeed the branches of computer science that incorporated interactions with the physical world, such as robotics, probably wasted decades trying to pretend that reality could be treated as if it were housed in a syntax that could be conveniently encoded on a wire. Traditional robots converted the data from their sensors into a temporal stream of bits. Then the robot builders would attempt to find the algorithms that matched the inherent protocol of these bits. Progress was very, very slow. The latest better robots tend to come from people like Ron Fearing and his physiologist cohort Bob Full at Berkeley who describe their work as "biomimetic". They are building champion robots that in some cases could have been built decades ago were it not for the obsession with protocol-centric computer science. A biomimetic robot and its world meet on surfaces instead of at the end of a wire. Biomimetic robots even treat the pliability of their own building materials as an aspect of computation. That is, they are made internally of even more surfaces.
And this:
I think the idea that von Neumann and others were misled by technological metaphors gets things the wrong way around. It is clear from von Neumann's speculations in the First Draft on EDVAC that he was utilizing the then state of the art computational neurobiology � McColloch and Pitts� (1943) results on Turing equivalence for computation in the brain � as grounds for the digital design of the electronic computer. In other words, it was theoretical work in neural computation that influenced the technology, not the other way around. While much has been made of the differences between synchronous serial computation and asynchronous neural computation, the really essential point of similarity is the nonlinearity of both neural processing and the switching elements Shannon explored, which laid the foundation for McColloch and Pitt's application of computational theory to the brain.
The logical positivists are often condemned for their botched effort to understanding science, language, and knowledge etc. But rarely do folks look take a good close look at their related theorizing about society, which is heavily influenced by 19th century fashions in Marxism, socialism and post-Kantian social philosophy. Take for example the writings of Hans Reichenbach ... .
The first 17 volumes of the complete works of Ludwig Wittgenstein are now being published, and to the mark the event -- the premiere of Wittgenstein's only known musical work.
Pejmanesque has a new reader's poll going. Which philosophers do you like -- and which philosophers don't you like? Here's what I posted in the comments section:
Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Wittgenstein -- for the same reason. They both understand the primacy of "doing" over "saying" for understanding both meaning and social order. And they both understand that the primacy of "doing" has both a biological basis and a grounding in shared ways of doing things which has been passed down through training. This insight is important for understanding such things as language, law, mathematics, mind science, economic coordination and social evolution. It also allows us to understand how the legacy of Plato in philosophy -- extending even to the work of folks like Hume, Kant, Carnap, Popper, Quine, Fodor, etc. -- is fatally flawed. But that is a topic for another day.
Tom Smith from The Right Coast on moral philosophy and moral philosophers:
I have found it amusing over the years to observe, for example, that many moral philosophers seem to have trouble living very morally. My philosophy advisor, a truly wonderful man and teacher, Norman Kretzman, who died some years ago, once remarked at a meeting in which one of his (now pretty well known) philandering colleagues was assigned to teach the course "Contemporary Moral Problems" that "it takes one to know one."
I've noted the same phenomena. I've actually seen a "moral" philosopher steal wood from an unsuspecting neighbor. He was actually stealing it, sneaking around so he wouldn't get caught. Weird.
Ignorance is bliss in the pedestrian world of everyday academic research:
Over a restaurant dinner (Harris tells us), three professional mathematicians resurrected an issue from the great "crisis of foundations" that racked mathematics in the early 20th century � during roughly the period from Russell�s paradox (1901) to G�del's theorem (1931). This "crisis of foundations" arose because mathematicians had begun inquiring into the logical and philosophical underpinnings of their subject, trying to find the fundamental axioms underlying all of math, trying to find unshakably firm foundations for the process of mathematical proof, asking questions like: "What is a number, really?"Well, the three diners all expressed different opinions on the issue in question, which is a very crucial one. ("The ontological status of the continuum" � but you don't need to know this to understand my point.) Harris sought to pursue the discussion down into deeper matters�but found that his colleagues did not have the necessary knowledge, and didn't actually care. These foundational issues, though interesting in their own right, and fine for a few casual conversational exchanges over the dinner-table, do not really matter in the day-to-day work of most mathematicians.
My point is that a field of knowledge can endure a "crisis of foundations," in which the most fundamental issues are opened up for inquiry and deconstruction, without causing any permanent harm to the field. Harris's restaurant colleagues were working mathematicians � number theorists, actually � who knew about the "crisis of foundations" and found it mildly, historically, interesting, yet went on with their daily work as if it had never happened.
Chris Bertram interviews Michael Walzer. Quotable:
Elizabeth Anderson has recently asked the following hypothetical question: 'if much recent academic work defending equality had been secretly penned by conservatives, could the results be any more embarrassing for egalitarians?' How do you view current philosophical work on equality, especially with respect to its relevance for the left?Walzer: I think that Anderson's article is right on target. I agree with many of her positive arguments, but I am especially sympathetic to her critique. She is right to say that much contemporary philosophical writing about equality fails to address or even to recognise 'the concerns of the politically oppressed' and the actual 'inequalities of race, gender, class, and caste.' Maybe there is a natural disconnect between academic philosophy and political struggle, and maybe it is a good thing if philosophers are disengaged, looking on from afar. I don't want to argue that academic work is the same as work in the political arena. Still, there are reasons that we are interested in equality and inequality, and Anderson is right to insist that philosophers today don't always have a good grasp of those reasons. There are, however, contemporary writers whose grasp is very good indeed: consider the work of Ian Shapiro (Democratic Justice), Anne Phillips (Which Equalities Matter?), Charles Beitz (Political Equality), David Miller (Principles of Social Justice), and Iris Young (Inclusion and Democracy). It is interesting that these people are not working in philosophy departments; they are political theorists and feminist theorists, and they take their starting point from politics-on-the-ground.
For myself, I think that one great mistake of contemporary academic philosophers, starting with Rawls himself, is the claim that our natural endowments are 'arbitrary from a moral point of view' and should not be allowed to have effects in the social world � or, better, the effects they have should never be philosophically ratified. As Rawls wrote, we have to 'nullify the accidents of natural endowment.' This puts philosophy radically at odds with ordinary morality. Sometimes, of course, that is a useful conflict, but in this particular encounter, philosophy does not fare well. Our natural endowments make us what we are, and what we are necessarily has consequences in the social world, and some, at least, of these consequences must be legitimate. John Rawls deserved the honours he won by writing A Theory of Justice � even if his intelligence was an accidental effect of the natural lottery. Beautiful men and women may not deserve the sexual and marriage offers that they get (we have different, but not entirely different, ideas about intelligence and beauty); still, they cannot be obliged to share their wealth or, as Phillipe Van Parijs has suggested, to compensate the losers in love. This last is one of Anderson's most telling examples, and she goes on to point out that those of us who are not beautiful have never organised to demand such compensation. There is something to learn even from political struggles that never happened!
News flash for Andrew Sullivan -- morality is not a product of our reason. Sullivan has always struck me as a rationalistic Millian liberal, rather than a Oakeshottian or Burkian conservative. Consider this statement:
surely the government does need to provide some kind of reasonable justification for a law expressing "morality," which doesn't just rely on what people have always believed or always assumed.
Conservatism doesn't rule out reflective consideration, but it does rule out the sort of naive rationalism which would hope to derive morality through "reason" or a morality which would meet hope to some ultimate demand for justification. This way leads nihilism and scepticism -- both in morality and epistemology. And it's all based on a grossly mistake demand for justification, modelled on the example of geometric proof. An interesting story, but one I won't pursue further here.
Heidegger and anti-Americanism:
The fifth and final stratum in the construction of the concept of anti-Americanism - and the one that still most powerfully influences contemporary discourse on America - was the creation of the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Like his predecessors in Germany, Heidegger once offered a technical or philosophical definition of the concept of Americanism, apart, as it were, from the United States. Americanism is "the still unfolding and not yet full or completed essence of the emerging monstrousness of modern times." But Heidegger in this case clearly was less interested in definitions than in fashioning a symbol - something more vivid and human than "technologism." In a word - and the word was Heidegger's - America was katestrophenhaft, the site of catastrophe.In his earliest and perhaps best known passages on America, Heidegger in 1935 echoed the prevalent view of Europe being in a "middle" position:
Europe lies today in a great pincer, squeezed between Russia on the one side and America on the other. From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same, with the same dreary technological frenzy and the same unrestricted organization of the average man.
Even though European thinkers, as the originators of modern science, were largely responsible for this development, Europe, with its pull of tradition, had managed to stop well short of its full implementation. It was in America and Russia that the idea of quantity divorced from quality had taken over and grown, as Heidegger put it, "into a boundless et cetera of indifference and always the sameness." The result in both countries was "an active onslaught that destroys all rank and every world creating impulse.... This is the onslaught of what we call the demonic, in the sense of destructive evil."
America and the Soviet Union comprised, one might say, the axis of evil. But America, in Heidegger's view, represented the greater and more significant threat, as "Bolshevism is only a variant of Americanism." In a kind of overture to the Left after the Second World War, Heidegger spoke of entering into a "dialogue" with Marxism, which was possible because of its sensitivity to the general idea of history. A similar encounter with Americanism was out of the question, as America was without a genuine sense of history. Americanism was "the most dangerous form of boundlessness, because it appears in a middle class way of life mixed with Christianity, and all this in an atmosphere that lacks completely any sense of history." When the United States declared war on Germany, Heidegger wrote: "We know today that the Anglo Saxon world of Americanism is resolved to destroy Europe.... The entry of America into this world war is not an entry into history, but is already the last American act of American absence of historical sense."
In creating this symbol of America, Heidegger managed to include within it many of the problems or maladies of modern times, from the rise of instantaneous global communication, to an indifference to the environment, to the reduction of culture to a commodity for consumption. He was especially interested in consumerism, which he thought was emblematic of the spirit of his age: "Consumption for the sake of consumption is the sole procedure that distinctively characterizes the history of a world that has become an unworld.... Being today means being replaceable." America was the home of this way of thinking; it was the very embodiment of the reign of the ersatz, encouraging the absorption of the unique and authentic into the uniform and the standard. Heidegger cited a passage from the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke:
Now is emerging from out of America pure undifferentiated things, mere things of appearance, sham articles.... A house in the American understanding, an American apple or an American vine has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, or the grape that had been adopted in the hopes and thoughts of our forefathers.
Following Nietzsche, Heidegger depicted America as an invasive force taking over the soul of Europe, sapping it of its depth and spirit: "The surrender of the German essence to Americanism has already gone so far as on occasion to produce the disastrous effect that Germany actually feels herself ashamed that her people were once considered to be 'the people of poetry and thought.'" Europe was almost dead, but not quite. It might still put itself in the position of being ready to receive what Heidegger called "the Happening," but only if it were able to summon the interior strength to reject Americanism and push it back to the other hemisphere.
Heidegger's political views are commonly deplored today because of his early and open support of Nazism, and many suppose that his influence on subsequent political thought in Europe has been meager. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Heidegger's major ideas were sufficiently protean that with a bit of tinkering they could easily be adopted by the Left. Following the war, Heidegger's thought, shorn of its national socialism but fortified in its anti-Americanism, was embraced by many on the left, often without attribution. Through the writings of thinkers like John-Paul Sartre, "Heideggerianism" was married to communism, and this odd coupling became the core of the intellectual Left in Europe for the next generation. Communist parties, for their own obvious purposes, seized on the weapon of anti-Americanism. They employed it with such frequency and efficacy that it widely came to be thought of as a creation of communism that would vanish if ever communism should cease. The collapse of communism has served, on the contrary, to reveal the true depth and strength of anti-Americanism. Uncoupled from communism, which gave it a certain strength but also placed limits on its appeal, anti-Americanism has worked its way more than ever before into the mainstream of European thought.
As Hayek long ago pointed out (and he wasn't the first) the Left and the German National Socialists had a lot in common. And they still do. Both were hostile to Western institutions, particularly those most closely identified with Britain and America -- things like the market economy and democracy. What we would call the institutions of freedom (think rule of law). The common sense is that Western liberalism is the enemy of solidarity, community, culture -- as well as the centralized perfection of the nation and the world. It is also somehow the enemy of both the the elite of society and the mass of the people. While the later gets the official propaganda, often this is used only to advance the psychological needs and material interests of the former.
Make no mistake, there is stuff in Heidegger's technical philosophy that heads in the right direction. But it's not clear that this is the stuff that attracts so many to the man. (link via Instapundit)
Philosopher Bernard Williams has died. You couldn't have spent any time studying philosophy and not have read at least two or three things by Williams. Worth quoting:
He argued that philosophers should look at moral life as it is experienced, rather than see our decisions in relation to some abstract, all-encompassing theory of right and wrong. He wanted a moral philosophy that was accountable not only to psychology but also to other branches of human enquiry, especially history.In this, he was to become best known for his criticism of Utilitarianism, the school of thought which holds that actions are right in so far as they promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Williams's contribution to the field was Utilitarianism, For and Against, one of the most influential critiques of the school.
Williams attacked Utilitarianism on a number of grounds. In one example, a bandit chief tells you that if you kill one of his captives, he will allow the other prisoners to go free; but that if you don't, he will kill all of them. On Utilitarian grounds, the right thing to do would be to do what causes the fewest deaths and kill the captive. But Williams wanted us to see that it is not just what happens (or the consequences) of an action that matter, but who does it. To perform such an act would damage our integrity as a moral agent and, incidentally, our psychological identity.
Similarly, Williams pointed out, a very quick way to stop people from parking on double yellow lines in London would be to threaten to shoot anyone that did. If only a couple of people were shot for this, it could be justified on a simple Utilitarian model, since it would promote happiness for the majority of Londoners.
Williams also famously attacked the philosopher Kant for his overly theoretical view of morals. Kant proposed that we can be properly blamed only for what we do voluntarily and intentionally and that what we should do (in accordance with the motive of duty) is the same for all of us and is discoverable by reason. In Moral Luck (1981) Williams suggested that some of our evaluations on whether or not we have done right or wrong are contingent.
For example, if you drive carefully and, through no fault of your own, strike and kill a child, you may well feel what Williams calls "agent-centred" regret: regret not only that the accident happened but also for the fact that you did it. Even though it was plainly bad luck, you may still feel a sense of guilt and the need to make amends.
In describing this conundrum, Williams looked to the life of the artist Paul Gauguin, who left his wife and children to go to the South Seas and paint. The fact that he produced great paintings, for Williams, made his life justifiable. Had Gauguin not been successful, he would have been at fault for having left his family. The outcome ultimately depended on luck, not - as Kant would have suggested - merely on having the right intentions (or "maxim for action").
Leo Strauss -- his daughter explains the man, rebuts the myth. And a former student gives his account of what Strauss actually taught. Worth quoting:
Strauss perfectly appreciated the fact that the political science bequeathed to us by Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke had brought into existence functional, humane and prosperous regimes such as the United States. They had done so, moreover, by rejecting the classical idea that the highest purpose of politics was to mold virtuous souls; instead, they settled on the more limited, but realizable, ambition of fashioning a politics in which one might hope in some sense to be "free." This was an immense historical achievement, and Strauss, a refugee from Nazi Germany, knew it very well.Strauss also knew, however, that the "moderns" of political philosophy from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Karl Marx to Friedrich Nietzche had also been the inspirations for Jacobinism, communism and Nazism, and thus were in some sense responsible for all the blood shed in their respective names. And he knew that even liberal democracies, the most benign of the modern regimes, were susceptible to a corrosive egalitarianism that, left unchecked, could corrode all standards, lead to a soul-deadening conformity, and pave the way to what Alexis de Tocqueville identified as "the tyranny of the majority." ..
As Strauss saw it, it was his duty as a friend and beneficiary of liberal democracy and the duty of academia in general to preserve some critical distance from liberal democracy. This distance could only really be gained by having some sense of the entire catalogue of political alternatives available. This was a comparative politics in the broadest sense, one that included not just existing regimes but also vanished and imaginary ones. In the teachings of the ancients, Strauss found some of the ingredients he believed modern regimes lack: A Socratic concern for human excellence, a Periclean sense of grandeur, an Aristotelian insistence on moderation.
At the same time, Strauss believed that there were dangers involved in this rediscovery of political alternatives. The foundations of liberal democracy may, upon close inspection, not be quite as solid as liberal democrats would like to believe. The trick was to examine and strengthen the foundations without causing the edifice above it to collapse and no less importantly without causing it to collapse on top of those (like Strauss) who examine the foundations.
In other words, prudence was required. If the result of unfettered philosophical inquiry in a liberal democracy was to bring the house down, neither philosophy nor democracy would be well served. Strauss, though in some ways a quiet radical himself, had no patience for the brash academic radicalism that came into vogue in the late 1960s, with its sharp challenges to the moral, cultural and political orthodoxies of the day. Even if liberal democracy was based on nothing but enabling fictions (and Strauss did not believe that at all, only that it was based on incomplete truths), these were fictions that today's academics have a duty to defend. Failure to do so would only invite more oppressive regimes communism, in Strauss's day in which the freedom of inquiry would be much more severely restricted.
File this under POSEUR ALERT:
Kagan considers that the United States and Europe have come to reflect the incompatible views of the world held by two great philosophers, Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant. The former lived through the English civil war of the 164o's, whose horrors impressed on him that the law of the jungle is the natural order of mankind and that the sole resource available to tame the general beastliness is the state’s possession of superior power, coupled with the resolve to wield it. Kant, on the other hand, living in the relative calm of the 18th century, maintained that reason is the tool for perfecting society and ensuring perpetual peace.
Peter Berkowitz defends the good name of Leo Strauss.
The world according to Leo Strauss?
He held that philosophy is dangerous because it brings into question the conventions on which civil order and the morality of society depend. This risks promoting a destructive nihilism .. He also argued that Platonic truth is too hard for people to bear, and that the classical appeal to "virtue" as the object of human endeavor is unattainable. Hence it has been necessary to tell lies to people about the nature of political reality. An elite recognizes the truth, however, and keeps it to itself. This gives it insight, and implicitly power that others do not possess. This obviously is an important element in Strauss's appeal to America's neoconservatives. The ostensibly hidden truth is that expediency works; there is no certain God to punish wrongdoing; and virtue is unattainable by most people. Machiavelli was right. There is a natural hierarchy of humans, and rulers must restrict free inquiry and exploit the mediocrity and vice of ordinary people so as to keep society in order. This is obviously a bleak and anti-utopian philosophy that goes against practically everything Americans want to believe. It contradicts the conventional wisdom of modern democratic society. It also contradicts the neoconservatives' own declared policy ambitions to make the Muslim world democratic and establish a new U.S.-led international order, which are blatantly utopian.
This is from an article in a Paris newspaper on the American "neoconservatives" in the Bush administration.
Where would Burke stand on Bennettgate? And should we avoid inconsistency and hypocracy when we're dealing with moral arguments and ethical behavior. A blogger named John takes on Jonah Goldberg and other in-the-closet Straussian philosophers.
Dennett dissected. The book is titled Freedom Evolves. Something about morality, evolution and The Intentional Stance, i.e. Dennett brings it all together (he wishes).