Bach, Eliot

– J. S. Bach. Passacaglia & Fugue in C minor, BWV.582

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement—
Driven by daemonic, chthonic
Powers. And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.

– T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets: The Dry Salvages

Some Philosophy Books

Since I will have the opportunity to introduce Greek and Roman philosophy in my courses, I've been giving some thought to the books that formed my own philosophical outlook. It occurred to me that many people, who want to do philosophy, may lack an entrée into the discipline.


As the ancient, medieval, and modern canon* is (or ought to be) well-known to the liberally educated person, I've limited myself to books that might reasonably be called secondary sources or books that are reckoned---by me---to be generously illustrative of the Western tradition. (I leave altogether to one side the distinction between a philosopher who uses philosophical history to philosophize and a historian of philosophy.) I've appended a list of books written by non-academic philosophers; the authors of these books are, to my mind, wise to an exemplary degree and typify the lover-of-wisdom in the contemporary era. You won't learn a great deal about any one thinker or movement in their works; but perhaps even more than the other books, you'll glimpse what it means to live a philosophical life.


* (If unfamiliar with the canon, that deficiency can be redressed by looking to the historians of philosophy --- Copleston and Brehier below --- for a comprehensive survey.)

I've tried to provide a list that addresses, in sum, the prime branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Natural philosophy, political philosophy, psychology, and logic are addressed only tangentially. It is, in short, an idiosyncratic catalog of my own interests and education, a catalog perhaps broad enough to accommodate others' curiosity and interest in the discipline.


General


* Etienne Gilson

Being and Some Philosophers


The Unity of Philosophical Experience


God and Philosophy


* Jacques Maritain


An Introduction to Philosophy


Degrees of Knowledge

* Pierre Hadot

Philosophy as a Way of Life

* Frederick Copleston, SJ


A History of Philosophy (11 vols.)

* Karl Jaspers

Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy

* Leszek Kolakowski

Metaphysical Horror

Why is There Something Rather than Nothing?


* Iris Murdoch

Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

* Charles Taylor

Sources of the Self


A Secular Age


* Emile Brehier


The History of Philosophy


* Alasdair MacIntyre

After Virtue


Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

* Josef Pieper


Leisure, the Basis of Culture

* Alvin Plantinga

God, Freedom, and Evil



Movements, Thinkers, Epochs


* Roger Scruton: Modern Philosophy; Kant: A Short Introduction


* Pierre Hadot: What is Ancient Philosophy?; Plotinus: The Simplicity of Vision


* A.E. Taylor: Plato: The Man and His Work


* Etienne Gilson: The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy; The Christian Philosophy of St.Thomas Aquinas


* Ernst Cassirer: The Philosophy of the Enlightenment


* Leszek Kolakowski: The Main Currents of Marxism


* Jonathan Lear: Aristotle: The Desire to Understand


* Robert Sokolowski: An Introduction to Phenomenology


* Charles Taylor: Hegel


* Julian Young: Schopenhauer; Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography; Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism


* William Richardson, SJ: Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought


* Werner Jaeger: The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers


* W.K.C. Guthrie: A History of Greek Philosophy (6 vols.)


* David Roochnik: Retrieving the Ancients: An Introduction to Greek Philosophy


* Babette Babich: Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life


* John Caputo: How to Read Kierkegaard


* Frederick Beiser: German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism (1781-1801)


Books You Probably Won't Find in the Philosophy Section


* E.F. Schumacher: A Guide for the Perplexed


* Viktor Frankl: Man's Search for Meaning


* Wendell Berry: Life is a Miracle


* C.S. Lewis: The Abolition of Man


* Richard Weaver: Ideas Have Consequences


* Ivan Illich & David Cayley: The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich as Told to David Cayley


* G.K. Chesterton: St. Thomas Aquinas

The Anonymous Artist

The common, perhaps predominant, concept of the artist is someone who expresses himself in his art, both as virtuoso and an individual with unique ideas. The art, in turn, is a reflection of him. He is the star of his art, which reflects his ideas about the world, his character, his style, his theories, and so forth. Art is particular instead of universal.

In contrast to this conception, seen in a long-running trend but typified and exalted in Nietzsche, consider the thoughts of some of the twentieth century's great artists on the idea of the anonymous artist.

–

Glenn Gould, in conversation in
Glenn Gould: The Alchemist (dir. Bruno Monsaingeon, 1974)

A funny thing happened on the way to the 16th century, to put a bad pun on a musical from a few years back. Composers went in search of identity. And identity somehow became, by what we think of as the high renaissance, equated with system: my system versus your system. On the way to the 16th century there were some characters who preserved something of the pre identity-quest sense.

The thing about [Orlando] Gibbons is that he is not a completely individual composer, he sort of straddles the era of delicious anonymity that the pre-Renaissance knew about and explored and the era of really, almost total, exploitative individuality of the Early Baroque, which was about to come.

He's quite different from his contemporaries. Contemporaries like. . . William Byrd, for instance who. . . played Richard Strauss to his Mahler. . . was much more virtuosic, much more obviously composer-like, as opposed to a more spiritual entity. . . Byrd is marvelous, but every canon is there to be admired.

Ingmar Bergman
Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman (1960)

There is an old story of how the cathedral of Chartres was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its old site. They worked until the building was completed — master builders, artists, labourers, clowns, noblemen, priests, burghers. But they all remained anonymous, and no one knows to this day who built the cathedral of Chartres.

. . .it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans; 'eternal values,' 'immortality' and 'masterpiece' were terms not applicable in his case. The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility. Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation.

T. S. Eliot
Tradition and Individual Talent, 1919

Poetry is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. . . significant emotion has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives not merely in the present, but in the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

Reflections on Political Moderation

In light of our recent discussion of political moderation in our look at Harry Clor's book On Moderation, it seemed prudent to try to apply, or at least consider, its role in current political discourse. Sven Wilson's article at Pileus and the recent discussions about pragmatism at Ricochet have prompted me so do go at both. For the most part here I just want to bandy the ideas around and see what turns up, so pardon my discursive rambling and lack of final answers.

First off we should consider definitions. We remarked that one aspect of political moderation is simply settling for less (with the factor of expediency being the tradeoff.) For example, you could consider the authors of the constitution of settling for less by signing a document that didn't address slavery and lacked a bill of rights. Passing it despite such flaws was a compromise, and with liberty of all things. They didn't know whether what they did would trend toward liberty or tyranny, but I think most people would suggest the outcome was reasonably positive for liberty. Yet not all compromise is inherently moderate. I'm sure much of the left considers recent healthcare initiatives as precursors to more comprehensive plans.

Such proposals, and many other contemporary ones, present a particular challenge because they present conflicts not just of administration or policy but of philosophy of government. You can debate and compromise about administration or policy rather easily if everyone agrees about certain fundamentals. The notion of government, and society in general, implies some type of accord. Federalism itself implies that everyone agrees on some things, most people agree on a larger set of things, and so on down to the local level. One of the political benefits of federalism and liberalism is that they allow people to get along without agreeing on everything. (It is the contention of many liberals, i.e. classical liberals and libertarians, that society trends toward centralization and consensus, creating a need to fight regularly and vigorously for individual rights. Even Aristotle, no libertarian, observed that the state was a naturally occurring construction.) Let us, though, consider political moderation specifically relative to liberty since I think it is the principle people would least like to compromise with.

Let us consider the non-political, though, for a moment. Internally we compromise even with liberty. For while in the political sense we may free to do what we wish so long as we harm no one, we must curb certain desires in order to preserve the ability to do certain things even though we would wish to do everything we wanted all the time if possible. Perhaps there is a philosophical question we must address in the difference between a hierarchical organization of values and one that is based on imperatives. Compromise is certainly more amenable to the former.

Most people compromise somehow, but perhaps the more interesting question is whether the compromise leads to an unraveling of the value. Is the current illiberality (as perceived by libertarians) of the U.S. simply the result of previous compromises with liberty? It would seem so, at least to a large extent. How else could it have come about? Unfortunately, though, taking a "hard line" might not actually bring about the idea, as much as it preserves the integrity of the person holding the idea.

Does one compromise in the case of emergencies? (Rand's "The Ethics of Emergencies" comes to mind.) What if the alternative is globally catastrophic? I recall not too long ago there was a discussion by mainstream libertarians (it might have been at The Volokh Conspiracy) where the question was if you would violate property rights to save the world somehow. Is this "extreme?" If not, what is? On the other hand the left frequently labels Ron Paul as an extremist. Perhaps in order to be moderate one has to be aware of the most absolute extremes and then see where a given proposal lies. Such was Clor's contention and it seems a prudent, even necessary, measure in order to recognize the moderate position. 

Is there a hierarchy of values, though? Are some more important or at lest more generally agreed upon than others? A prohibition of murder is quite common amongst societies. It is safe to say if one person believes you can kill and steal, that he can't live with anyone else. But how many values are there which require accord? Very few, libertarians would say. On the other hand there are people who believe it is acceptable to pass extensive laws protecting (or that they think will protect) the environment. Can these two groups live together?

Ought either side compromise? The answer seems to be rather obvious, that people agree on some things and not others. Federalism would seem a force of help here for any number of parties. Perhaps living together is only possible within some federalist-libertarian framework in which initiating force is not permitted and people tend to live and move to jurisdictions with laws they favor. For example, one might have strong or even extreme ideas but not don't claim the right to exercise them over anyone else. Is this plausible, utopianism, or simply libertarianism? Do permanent institutions like states mandate bonds among people, bonds which force accord and thus compromise? If this is so, then one's opinion of the legitimacy and/or necessity of the state might dictate whether compromise is a necessity. If the state is necessary, then you have to compromise with it lest you prevent it from completing its necessary function.

Now if there is a hierarchy of values then to be "completely" free, intelligent, et cetera, one might have to sacrifice much else and be completely lacking in other things to accomplish such consistency in one part of your life. Is this desirable? Even if the situation is moderated, who wants to be "half-free" or "half-loved?" Perhaps the missing element is the role of choice and hence (in part) why liberty has found so many adherents. Everybody does, as we said, make compromises, but everyone wants to make them themselves. Still this approach does not seem to help in a situation of hierarchical values.

In that situation perhaps one may only compromise with a value if one thinks the compromise will benefit that same value somehow later. Perhaps it is only acceptable to jeopardize it temporarily if you hope by that means eventually to strengthen it. As we said, in the manner of Aristotle, these situations are too many to foresee. We observe though that imperatives are not so amenable to compromise. Is to have one, then, even "to be moderate" itself immoderate?

Perhaps this is a case of over-thinking an issue. Many people, even people who believe strongly in a cause, recognize limits to it in some circumstances.

One thing seems clear, though. As Mr. Wilson said, compromise is not a virtue in itself, only doing something good is (regardless of whether or not compromise is involved.) Moderation is a good not insofar as it splits the difference but as it achieves some particular good.

Book Review: On Moderation

On Moderation: Defending an Ancient Virtue in a Modern World
by Harry Clor. 2008.

In everything it is no easy task to find the middle. . . therefore goodness is both rare and laudable and noble. –Aristotle

I have tried to imagine a reader who would not benefit from Harry Clor's On Moderation, to find someone for whom this volume is of no use. Surely this book must be redundant for the philosophically literate? No. Too esoteric for the layman? No. Too long? Certainly not, at 120 pages. On Moderation has enough of tempered sagacity to earn the trust of the old and enough challenges to common suppositions to stir the youthful. It is neither sententious nor witless, chastising nor therapeutic. It neither overwhelms with footnotes nor suffers from a lack of references. On Moderation is for everyone. Perhaps it is a banal, even hokey, compliment to say that a book titled On Moderation is itself of moderate proportions but such is quite a feat. How might we fare weaving the thread of one of Western Civilization's oldest ideas throughout all of its history? And not just through its treatment at the hands of philosophers but by authors and in the lives of political figures?  And then presenting it in a clear and useful form for any reader? Quite a feat.

Why attempt it, though? Why be moderate? To answer this question we obviously must define the idea and Clor divides the task into three categories: What does it mean to practice, 1) political moderation, 2) personal moderation, and 3) philosophical moderation. In each Clor seeks out the the proponents and examples of moderation and issues which seem to present challenges to moderation, i.e. people and problems who urge or seem to require some more extreme course of action. Present throughout is the author's own moderation. In particular Clor is always attentive to the alternative sides of an argument, the limits of what one may know of particular circumstances, the potential to gain insight from a position that seems generally wrong or unreasonable, and lastly that there exists a multitude of goods and one may not always attain them all.



Political Moderation

Clor begins discussing political moderation with a frank question. "Isn't political moderation just splitting the difference?" This is depressingly plausible, isn't it? We don't seem to be off to a great start. He then continues with an inviting and elucidating anecdote:

Once while teaching a course on the American Founding I thought it appropriate to stress the virtues of political moderation. An outstanding student (and congenital debunker) responded with a challenge: "So you would have been against the American Revolution or you would have looked for some compromise to avoid it!" At the time the question threw me embarrassingly off balance. [Clor, 11]

First off, anyone who has taught for any duration can spare a chortle for his experience. More to the point, though, Clor (citing the late Martin Diamond's amusingly-titled essay, "The Revolution of Sober Expectations") observes that the revolution was moderate as far as revolutions go. Unlike the French and Bolshevik ones it did not seek to overthrow all of society, to change man's nature, or to attain a massive list of rights. No one marched in the streets chanting, "We will have equality or we will destroy civilization," as in the French Revolution. Clor uses this example to demonstrate how moderation in political life consists in part of putting up with defects or limiting aspirations in order to bring about some good (presumably enough so that the defects are bearable.) Some may find this approach unsatisfying and tantamount to a revisionist approach in which certain events are demonstrated really to be moderate, yet another of the author's points provides a corrective to this criticism: that perspective and an impersonal distance are required for political moderation. One must step away and examine the issue, and its extreme positions, in order to perceive the moderate position.

Another aspect of political moderation Clor identifies is that of acknowledging a multiplicity of principles. Not mere conflict and strife, he points out, but multiple values deserving of your attention and which must be balanced, though preserving one may damage the other. Similarly, Clor identifies the principle of proportionality as appropriate to political moderation, finding it in the American system of government which achieves the balance of "constituted representative democracy" in contrast to "radical populistic democracy." Applying Burke's words to the American system, one may say that it "tempers together those opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work."

In contrast to the aforementioned principles of moderation Clor finds the so-called "value pluralism" unpersuasive as a force of moderation, for while its toleration is preferable to polarized struggles for control of the state, "tolerance by itself does not produce the sense of community on which it depends." [Clor, 20] That is, toleration is really only plausible when some underlying fundamentals, often unspoken, exist. Too, value pluralism, extolling diversity itself as a virtue, requires one to praise all walks of life and actions as good without recourse to any particular understanding of a "good life." Well how can they all be good?

One of the most important aspects of political moderation Clor picks up from Aristotle, who argued that we "ought not expect more precision from our study than the subject matter permits." This means not that there are no universal truths but that prescriptions to bring them about or abide by them may only be offered in outline because particular instances are variable. A few obvious examples follow, namely the two which philosophers have wrangled with and tried to, once and for all, proclaim as evil: lying and murder. Are they not sometimes the lesser of evils, for example if they prevented mass devastation? Too, does power really "always corrupt" or is it sometimes necessary as a force to counter evil? Clor infers two points from Aristotle's observation: 1) do not attempt to turn politics into an exact science, and 2) don't turn ethics into a body of categorical imperatives. Do so, and every political decision you make becomes an intractable one without any hope of negotiation. If all issues are moral ones, then no societies are possible except for ones in which everyone agrees about everything or about nothing. Most societies reach some degree of moderation, permitting some things and forbidding others.

A "moderate" political citizen then, with these "situational ethics" in mind, has much to observe in trying to negotiate what is and is not acceptable. Yet what happens when something is finally decided upon? It is usually made into some kind of law. How useful is this? Clor, again channeling Aristotle, notes that on the one hand laws are made by fallible men and thus may be biased and imperfect, and on the other they are still more dispassionate than any human judgment would be on the spur of the moment by virtue of their distance from the event in question. Again, on the one hand the law provides an impartial standard for a situation and on the other there are times when a "judgment call" is needed. It is hard to foresee every circumstance. Sentencing someone to life in prison for violating a rule which has been superseded or rendered defunct would be "excessive legalism." The rule of law itself, then, is a moderator in need of moderation.

Finally, then, the politically moderate man must be able to balance the demands of various principles, to calculate reasonable goals, to admit a degree of uncertainty to the situation, to refrain from moralizing, to be diligent about obtaining the facts, and maintain capacity for disinterested examination. Too, he must remember that all men are subject to passions and that even reason may find itself passion's instrument.



Personal Moderation

Nietzsche contest with the ancients for man's nature is at heart of this chapter. For both parties man may be of two natures, of reason and chaos, but in which does his ideal state exist? The former sees in  chaos the will to create and the latter in harmony the happiness of man. Does reason reveal the path to prosperity or does it simply saddle and devitalize one's passions and inner drive? After laying out the arguments for passion and reason, for order chaos and order, Clor makes a recommendation for moderation all the more powerful and sensible for its brevity: Are we not reasoning and social creatures, do we not carry various imperatives and entertain different claims upon us? Is an energetic or happy human really one in which many of these claims lay undeveloped? Relax control, maybe here and there, but only if you have a moral constitution as the norm. Clor concludes, "the demands of rationality may be relaxed by a mind in which reason retains a prominent voice." [Clor, 58] Such moderation feels almost like a relief from the extreme claims.

The author begins his discussion of love without much hope that he will find room for moderation. Who wants to be loved moderately? To recommend a "temperate ecstasy" is to invite parody. Yet if moderation has no place here than its overall usefulness to us is considerably less. Clor weaves through the extremes, though, noting, "if you don't want happiness and unhappiness to be a kind of lottery, you had better be in some position to judge the qualities of the person you consider giving yourself to and cherishing." [Clor, 60] As in political moderation, self-restraint and a rational consideration of character are called for. Yes, the act is the act regardless of whether it is good, but it cannot be fitting for man or you without some deliberation about life, self, and other. Love requires both dependency and independency. Love requires dedication, but general happiness requires investment in many pursuits, of which the attachment of love is but one. Clor finds in Freud just such a sort of pragmatic injunction for moderation. "Any choice that is pushed to an extreme will be penalized by exposing the individual to the dangers which arise if a technique of living that has been chosen as an exclusive one should prove inadequate." [Clor, 63]

While discussing man's capacity for passion Clor makes an interesting stop to discuss compassion. Yes, of course it maintains certain personal and social benefits. Yet is it somehow overrated? Perhaps, but perhaps one simply ought to distinguish more finely just what it is.  Sometimes compassion is simply rooted in a fear that the same thing could happen to you. Second, you may feel pity and empathy for someone's suffering but such is not the same as persistent concern for his well-being. Neither of these instances of "compassion" are quite so laudable as we might think. Lastly, one may indeed be deserving of compassion but also of anger or indignation. Compassion is not a virtue, something that refines a passion toward some good end, but a passion itself. As such, it requires guidance and consideration of goods since it can be properly or improperly directed.

Concluding Clor's discussion of the nature of man's passions he asks: are they wholly benevolent or do they need to be vigorously squelched? On the one hand we may consider if they are wholly benevolent, a position which Clor finds supported in some modern psychologies in which in which one needs to "grow" and "be oneself" and be "open to possibilities." In this thinking one must forge "contacts" through which the self will reconfigure and very little can be seen to be determinedly wrong. Though clearly unpersuaded by this immoderate approach, Clor, persistently moderate, accords gestalt psychology its due noting that, "the idea that personality develops through the experience and incorporation of connections with others is a sensible one as far as it goes, but the other side of wisdom is full recognition of the fact that not all contacts are good ones."[Clor, 74]

Yet if some passions are moderated, how is this accomplished? It seems foolish to think that one can "temper impetuous impulses by remonstrating with them." To Aristotle, one's habits and dispositions, the ways in which the passions are incorporated into one's disposition, moderate otherwise unrestrained desires. Repeatedly choosing an action, under whatever guidance or communal pressure, slowly makes that way of dealing with the passion part of who you are. Personal moderation, like political moderation, would seem to require much of the individual. In fact it requires nothing less than an awareness of self and society. It requires rationally choosing values but also understanding those which one has unconsciously acquired through habituation. It requires building a character but also understanding the values one has inherited as an individual in a particular family and country and even those one has by chance. It requires measured introspection and accordingly corrective action, not dogmatism or unlimited "openness" to any outcome. It requires having a character, which necessitates the ability to perceive a situation and reason what the right thing to do is, and then the will to temper oneself. One might say it requires both wisdom and virtue.



Philosophical Moderation

We have several times spoken of reason and therefore must defend it as legitimate. We must defend reason if we are to justify the habituation, education, and self-discipline that moderation calls for. A defense of reason is necessary, as Clor puts it, because, "one who has no respect for reason is ill-disposed to listen to argument, entertain viewpoints differing from those one currently holds, and cultivate that capacity for deliberation that is part and parcel of a self-controlling character." [Clor, 86]

Clor takes on a number of the postmodernist attacks on reason and his first is surprisingly simple. If it is so that "everyone is coming from somewhere" and that no one can escape his influences and circumstances, why bother with structures of any kind? Why bother with a liberal education, for example, if reason and debate are meaningless? Why bother with structures for legislative deliberation if it is really just a contest of wills? Clor makes an excellent and subtle observation about Plato's Republic

The persons Socrates encounters in the Platonic dialogues assert opinions that reflect their (diverse) personalities, backgrounds, or aspirations, and the encounters are designed to show the attentive reader both who difficult it is to make them entertain challenges to their received opinions and that it is sometimes possible to do so. Platonic dialogues recognize that everyone is coming from somewhere, but that where you are going is, at least on occasion and with the right person, open to effectual discussion. [Clor, 87]

Indeed, postmodernist anti-reason ideologies do not promote questioning traditional thought so much as they "render the injunction 'know thyself' virtually meaningless." [Clor, 88] Such attacks on rationality of course also affect all norms and standards, which "are dissolved under the acids of a critique that pronounces them to be groundless if not fraudulent." Clor refers to this as an "ultra-libertarianism," quoting Dostoevsky's disapproving observation, "everything is permitted." The postmodernist position also unravels society by rendering all lifestyles equal. Clor makes less than he could of the disconnect between these postmodernist ideas and the positions of some contemporary liberals that "equal respect is a categorical imperative." (Never to us a straw man, Clor uses Dworkin's 1977 Taking Rights Seriously as an example.) As with political moderation, there must be some recourse to values which transcend particular circumstances lest the whole enterprise of moderation be equally relativistic. Using Clor's example, a terrorist leader who compromises amongst the extreme demands of his followers cannot be considered a moderate.

At last Clor tackles Nietzsche's epistemology. If we take Nietzsche's philosophy to be true, with its conclusion that  philosophy is not reasoned inquiry but creativity driven by the will to power, then what do we make of it? If we do believe it, how can we believe it? Clor seems slightly offended by Nietzsche's own response to the question, that if you realize this conundrum, "So much the better." So much the better?" asks Clor. Truly? Yet Clor's moderation restrains him and he seeks a moderate view of Nietzsche, culling from the bluster that from Nietzsche's perspectivism we learn that our understanding is often only partial, that seeking the truth is not precluded but rather no one can presume to have grasped the whole of it.

Despite such observations about epistemology, which Clor, perhaps with tongue-in-cheek, calls "contributions to moral relativism," Nietzsche's philosophy itself praises something and discourages others. It affirms zeal over enervation and struggle over complacency. In Nietzsche Clor does not find the philosopher of "anything goes" but of "a demanding spiritedness." "What is to be admired is "energetic commitment, which is, at its pinnacle, self-creative." [Clor, 93] Whether or not one agrees with this reading of Nietzsche, it certainly is allows a moderate person to learn something from the philosophy without committing to its extreme prescriptions. It also casts considerable doubt upon it as anything workable on its own.

Perhaps the most novel attack on reason, though, comes not from Nietzsche but from Rousseau, who argued that reason (and imagination) produce desires which are distinct from our natural, necessary, inclinations. "Sensual desires are inflamed into lusts. . . thought makes possible egoism." [Clor, 99] Nature's impulses are simple, inescapable, and able to be sated. Appetites rooted in thought may not be. Clor counters:

Without thought, "know thyself" is impossible, and it is even quite doubtful that without thought you could come to have a self at all. . . Rousseau's original man has no ego about which to be egotistic. Who among us would want to trade places with that "man" and pay that price? [Clor, 100]

There is in this a bit of a challenge to the Rousseauian, Nietzschian, and post-modernist programs: if you want to live like that, go ahead, but you'll end up tempering it with something anyway.


Conclusion

On Moderation is a terrific and spirited read. It makes the task of living the good life, navigating its extremes, seem challenging, rewarding, and even noble. The text starts with simple examples using famous political figures like Franklin Roosevelt and Churchill and eases the reader into more complex discussions of Rousseau and Nietzsche. It is judiciously footnoted with a short suggested reading list of recommendations ranging from Jane Austen to George Will. Clor is so consistently even-handed and concerned with useful learning over proving, the book is as much a model for moderation as a discussion of it. One may tire of the many "what ifs" and "on the other hand" but such scrutiny and even-handedness, such work, well that's moderation.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Last year we discussed in a pair of essays works of art which we said created the experience they depicted. We saw some which pulled the viewer into the experience. In our discussions regular reader Tom suggested Macbeth as a candidate for this unique group of works. Having finally revisited the play I say: indeed!


Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Macbeth: She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word:
To morrow, and to morrow, and to morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last Syllable of Recorded time:
And all our yesterdays, have lighted Fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief Candle,
Life's but a walking Shadow, a poor Player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the Stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a Tale
Told by an Idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

This is just an extraordinary passage, how Shakespeare manipulates time and weaves everyone who partakes in the play together.

There is no more time for tomorrow, for she is dead. There are no more tomorrows. Shakespeare draws us in to the day-to-day-to-day drudgery and then thrusts us, literally, to the end of time. How cruelly effective a way to recreate the feeling that life is simply such a damn repetition forever. So too with his use of the word "yesterdays," which encourages us to think not of the past as a monolith but of all the specific past days of our own, days he asks us to recall only to remind us they carry us to the same end. Shakespeare does not say "all candles will go out" or something similar but rather "Out, out, brief Candle," because the candle will go out. It has to, so it might as well. A "walking shadow." Something of illusory permanence, illusory agency.

Shakespeare weaves us all into this tragedy. First, "all our yesterdays." Then not just Macbeth but "the poor player," the actor himself. At last the teller of the tale, the author himself. (Though this could rightly include both the player and Macbeth.) Who would bother to tell such a futile tale?

No one escapes.

Philosophy and the Solace of Self

Nowhere is there a more idyllic spot, a vacation home more private and peaceful, than in one's own mind, especially when it is furnished in such a way that the merest inward glance induces ease. . .

–Marcus Aurelius, Meditations. IV.3

To what might one owe peace of mind? To a hard day's work or the satisfaction of a job well done? To feats and victories, heroism and valor? To the forbearance of suffering and endurance throughout the languish of pain? To piety and devotion? As the Epicureans said, might it simply be the avoidance of all such pains and extremes?

Though Aristotle's advice might seem the most obvious it is in fact the most difficult: to do the right thing, in the right measure, at the right time, always. And that one's happiness is ever the balance of pleasure derived from one's present task, received from past deeds, and expected  from future ones. Surely anyone who has read what Aristotle expected from a man might see such a task as positively Herculean. To do so one would have to be responsible for ever moment of his life, to have lived each moment at least as best as he was able. Or at least to have redeemed one moment's failure with another's success.

One must of course possess a relentlessly introspective nature. It is not enough merely to do, but one must assess. Worse still, one must do and assess in moderation, not ever yielding to passive torpidity or unguided exuberance.

This virtue of moderation so praised by long gone cultures, cultures who praised the man both musician and astronomer, who tilled the earth and tweaked poetry, is not so much valued today as specialization. Yet how would the main whose intellectual facilities are developed at great disproportion to his mastery of his self react to the temptations of the body, the rights of the condemned, or the uncertainties of philosophy? One need not look far to find brilliant scientists with eggshell philosophy, or  lofty, ivory-tower intellectuals who could not arbitrate the case of a lost dog without caucus and a dissertation on metaphysics.

It follows then that one must have a moral code against which to judge one's actions but this guarantees little peace of mind. No one is born with a fully formed moral system and whose does not change, at least a little, over time? Thus at the end of one's life one is bound to see some misdeeds, yet those same misdeeds may have spurred the creation of the new moral view. There is no escaping the function of time on happiness.

At many points in his life a man will find himself at a crossroads considering the man he has become and the man he hopes himself one day to be. At those points he will have much to consider. First and foremost he will be limited by his intellectual ability and desire for self-criticism. Perhaps most integrally of all, should he lack either of these I scarcely imagine he would realize it. Such a man, philosophy's exile, deserves the pity of all other men. Who is deaf to Plato's timeless call to, "γνῶθι σεαυτόν" and the endless questions and conundrums unleashed by Plato's prompt holds never the world in a grain of sand but ever is held within the limits of his myopia.

What might the balance of these innumerable variables look like? Aristotle and Marcus point the way, though not nearly so precisely as we would hope. What is expected of man is nothing less than the reconciliation of past, present, and future. To relish in the contradiction of man's inescapable indignity and his supernal potential. To form in the self the eclectic communion of the dignitaries of humanity and the peerless spark of the individual. To make the man neither rationalistic automaton nor gross id. To relish every grasp of the flesh and every glimpse of the divine. To say to oneself, "far have I come, far must I go, but gladly." To relish the journey, the destination, and the contradiction. To look back on every grace as undeserved and service as unrequired. To be steward, supplicant, and king; brother, friend, son, father, and foe. To be creature of Prometheus and child of God.

Yet finding solace in the self is not simply an act of moderation between the extremes of opposing philosophical schools. Rather it is the act of moderation between self and other. What is most obviously the great challenge of political life, the balance of individuality and community, is less often seen in the context of developing a character, a character neither ex nihilo nor pastiche, neither alien to other men nor subsumed into group-think. To have knowledge not encyclopedic for the sake of knowing, but catholic for the sake of understanding and living. To make of one's mind not a computer calculating conditionals but a retreat fashioned with the furniture of a lifetime of learning–furniture new and old, sometimes shuffled around, maybe re-finished, and maybe built yourself if you're lucky. To be eclectic not as affectation but as the expression of a curious and uncommon character. What's in your room? Does it clamor with the croaking frogs of Aristophanes and the eternal laughter of Mozart?

Yet happiness is not just being able to close your eyes and watch Achilles fight the Scamander or sit with Bertram Wooster in the garden, but to be content with one's deeds. Not just with heroic feats and discoveries, but in what you have shared with others, with family, coworkers, friends, and acquaintances. Retreat to a room quirky and quiet, but not empty. Retreat, but only to live. Retreat to a mind, as Marcus says, neither "lavish nor crude," neither preoccupied with the machinations of thought nor swept up in the urgencies of whim.

Craft this self not obsessively or relentlessly but with prudence and patience. Craft a self that knows self and other, that is in time and timeless. It's beginning will be its end, so from one philosopher and time to another, know thyself. Remember the rose garden. Through time time conquer, and betwixt past and future, dance. This mind, this presencing self, this world weaving through worlds and time. . .

Nowhere is there a more idyllic spot, a vacation home more private and peaceful. . .

–Marcus Aurelius, Meditations. IV.3

Beyond the Infinite

Once again we will be considering Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Last time we considered it in the context of epistemology. This time I would like to consider it in the light of ontology. I offer a pair of ideas, the first via quotations from Thomas Aquinas (from his Summa Contra Gentiles) and then, from Nietzsche. In Kubrick's spirit of not forcing an interpretation of the film I will refrain from synthesis and merely offer these ideas as food for thought.

–

L. For whatever is imperfect in a species seeks to acquire the perfection of that species. Thus, whoso has an opinion about a matter, and therefore an imperfect knowledge about it, for this very reason is spurred to the desire for certain knowledge about it.

This immediate vision of God is promised to us in Holy Scripture: We see now through a glass in a dark manner; but then face to face. It would be impious to understand this in a material way, and imagine a material face in the Godhead. Nor is it possible for us to see God with a bodily face. Thus then we shall see God face to face, because we shall see Him immediately, even as a man whom we see face to face.

It is through this vision that we become most like God, and participators of His blessedness, since God understands His substance through His essence, and this is His blessedness. Therefore it is said (I John iii.2): When he shall appear, we shall be like to Him; because we shall see Him as He is.

LII. However, it is not possible for any created substance to attain, by its own power, to this way of seeing God. For that which is proper to the higher nature cannot be acquired by a lower nature, except through the action of the higher nature to which it properly belongs. . . Therefore no intellectual substance can see God through the divine essence, unless God Himself bring this about.

If any two things have to be united together so that one be formal and the other material, their union must be completed by an action on the part of the one that is formal, and not by the action of the one that is material; for the form is the principle of action, whereas matter is the passive principle.

Hence it is said (Rom. vi. 23): The grace of God is life everlasting. For we have proved that man's happiness consists in seeing God, which is called life everlasting.

LIV.  There should be proportion between the one understanding and the thing understood. But there is no proportion between the created intellect, even perfected by this light, and the divine substance; for there still remains an infinite distance between them. Therefore the created intellect cannot be raised by any light to see the divine substance. 

. . . because it is not seen as perfectly by the created intellect as it is visible, even as one who holds a demonstrated conclusion as an opinion is said to know it but not to comprehend it, because he does not know it perfectly, that is, scientifically, although there be not part of it that he does not know. 

LIX. All the intellect sees in the divine substance, it sees at once. Hence Augustine says: Our thoughts will not then be unstable, going to and fro from one thing to another, but we shall see all we know by one glance.

LXI. Therefore this vision takes place in a kind of participation in eternity. Moreover this  vision is a kind of life, because the act of the intellect is a kind of life. Therefore by that vision the created intellect becomes a partaker of eternal life. . . The intellectual soul is created on the border line between eternity and time. . . therefore by this vision it enters into a participation of eternity. . .

For this reason our Lord says (Jo. xvii. 3): This is eternal life, that they may know Thee, the only true God.

–

Regarding Nietzsche

(Picking up on our discussion of Nietzsche from our previous look at 2001.)

What of the man of the final scenes? What does he do? It is he who creates from the primordial soup or is it the monolith? Does he do everything or nothing? Is he creative or impotent? Is his final gesture one of supplication or resolve? Affirmation or negation? Clearly his final reaction to the monolith differs from the others. Is he the übermensch or the last man?

With both St. Thomas and Nietzsche in mind: 

Consider the title of the final act: Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite. Consider the use of György Ligeti's Requiem in the famous "Star Gate" scene. Who dies and who is born? Lastly, is the monolith ever comprehended by anyone in the film? Does it actually affect the characters or is the film about man's dialogue with this unknown? How does the final encounter with it differ? Is the scene of the star child birth or re-birth?

To Be or Not To Be

In conjunction with the recent publication of Dr. Hubert Dreyfus's new book, All Things Shining, co-authored with Sean Dorrance Kelly, I'm posting a trailer for a movie produced by a former student of Dr. Dreyfus.

 

• You can read Eric Ormbsy's WSJ review of the book here. 

• Do listen to Dr. Dreyfus's lectures on Heidegger.

 

Philosophy as a Way of Life

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Culture and Community

This essay is a sequel of sorts to Primitive Romance.

There could scarcely be two words which enjoy more esteem than art and culture. Indeed any man of letters would fancy himself a connoisseur of the these things. Yet the casualness with which these terms are bandied about ought to cause use pause.

Let us consider culture first. Culture is one of several words deriving from the Latin verb collere, to till. From collere we use colony, cult, and culture. Obvious differences aside, these words share several senses: that of a particular place and a particular value, and that this value ought to endure and must be tended to. To embrace all of these notions is the essence of the agrarian man, but culture does of course extend beyond him. Yet these general characteristics, no matter the specifics to which they are applied, have implications, all of which fall under the category of bounds.

Yet it is also possible to speak of culture as the opposite: culture as creativity, i.e. culture as breaking bounds. If we say that a culture has ideas which bind it together, we may also say its art is a creative act of expressing those ideas. Alan Bloom described this as "culture as art." [Bloom, 188] Now in Bloom's discussion of culture we see a similarity with T. S. Eliot's essay, "Notes Toward the Definition of Culture." There Eliot noted that various aspects of a culture, e.g. religion, politics, and science may struggle for dominance with creative result. He gives of course the example of Sophocles' Antigone which in this line of thinking is an even more extraordinary work, but extraordinary for perhaps what it is not. It is not a treatise on human nature, duties to family versus duties to the state, the rights of rulers and citizens, and religious obligations. Such a work could have been written by a philosopher or intellectual and read by no one. Yet that it is artistic, that it was performed and received  by an audience means that all of those complex conflicts were meaningful to the audience. Culture is here what Bloom said, "the house of the self, but also its product." [Bloom, 188]

Now speaking of Antigone, Bloom and Eliot both touched on what is the most obvious question of culture: where does it come from? Bloom emphasizes the aspect of cohesion and the "harshness" which is needed to create community, quoting Rousseau in II, 7 of The Social Contract where he discusses how the Legislator must transform individuals so they will function as a society. Rousseau writes that "if each citizen is nothing, can do nothing, except by all the others, and the force acquired by the whole is equal or superior to the sum of the natural forces of all the individuals, one can say that the legislation is at the highest point of perfection it can attain." This emphasis on unity was shared by Plato but criticized by Aristotle, who suggested too much unity would destroy self-sufficiency, the affection people have for their private property, and the bonds of friendship. In contrast Eliot acknowledged cohesion was necessary but also stated that culture cannot be made but must be "grown from the soil" and that you cannot encourage it culture but only remove what stands in its way. [Eliot, 19] In Eliot's conception an individual has a culture, so does a class, and so a society. He adds that a society ought to refrain from setting before the group what can only be the aim of the individual. [Eliot, 19] This is a rather fascinating addition which while it has implication for liberty ought not to be interpreted strictly or even primarily in terms of liberty.

Now how did we get from culture to politics? Perhaps because as with politics culture has personal and communal aspects. Indeed as the state's activities are what everyone politically has in common, so a society's culture is what everyone has in culturally in common. It would seem also that as federalism and republicanism describe the cascading effects of hierarchical laws on society, so Eliot's description of personal, local, and societal culture. Bloom argued that politics disappears into "subpolitical (economic)" or "what claims to be higher than political (cultural) activity." It seems to me we tend to separate all three. We consider that which is economic inherently banal and at best a necessary evil, we consider politics practical, and culture the most esteemed. What expression might we say acknowledges any connection amongst these features of life? It will be even more interesting to add this spin to the question: what expression is a celebration or affirmation? Whether political or artistic, we tend to consider positive affirmations to be either partisan or dogmatic. For example modern political movies are mostly partisan hit-piece documentaries, not films which extol particular virtues. Today we find the genre of encomiastic literature quite off-putting and we consider pieces like Horace's second ode and Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito propaganda. When it comes to economics we separate it too from art. We don't like to think of a painter receiving a commission for a particular work; he ought to be given a "grant" and allowed to make what he wants. We don't like to think of Shakespeare having to put seats in the theater, Bach re-using his cantatas in his oratorios, or Mozart adding arias to Don Giovanni to appeal to a different audience.

So of course creating art has political, economic, and finally cultural dimensions, but perhaps we should approach the question from another direction. Of course whoever creates art, like whoever creates anything to trade, does so to sustain himself; but who partakes in art does so voluntarily. So an artistic event is partly defined by the artist and part by the audience, at least insofar as the experience is defined to  some extent by a shared language (in the most general sense.) Now as we have noted before this language is largely inherited. We don't get to decide what culture we inherit and so an artist cannot come up with a completely new language if he hopes to share his ideas with anyone. Yet languages do change for a variety of reasons and clearly cultures do too. Clearly then culture is not simply something to be inherited and stored, but something to be lived.


We seem to have considerably complicated our discussion of culture for now we must consider the aspects of 1) participation (politics and economics), 2) expression (art), and 3) ideas. Before we move away from politics, though, let us make a digression. Let us consider Western liberal democracies and say, notionally at least, they are all founded more or less upon the notions that government exists to permit man his "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The first two of those ideas are essentially political and economic, only the third is philosophical. It is also rather vague and as a result, as Plato said, in a liberal democracy we will see constitutions of every kind. One of the features of a liberal country is that it pushes many questions/ideas/values which were once set as a national policy into the private sphere.

So how does this liberality square with culture? Well, it seems to make speaking of common values harder, but again we are speaking of politics. Is it not possible to have a culture, people with shared values, without the use of force by government? Our partial definition of culture as bounds sort of complicates this question. Notionally it is possible to have bounds not delimited by law, bounds no one will cross but which in fact carry no penalty for transgression; voluntary bounds, if you will. Can we still call these bounds then? If not, then can we be said to possess culture?

This then is a test of liberal democracy. They can certainly be said to be freer and more materially prosperous, but do they surpass the cultures of other societies? Do they create art which extols particular values? Do they use a rich and living language to make such expressions? If they do then they are vindicated, but if not, why?

Now I'm not fingering freedom as the enemy of culture and I'm not saying liberal countries do not or cannot have culture. Not at all. In fact we haven't really answered our question about culture: namely, what is it? We have, though, in attempting to define it, continually come back to the question of community by way of politics, economics, and art. Now apart from describing proximity the word community implies some shared idea. Now Bloom makes the interesting suggestion that "everything connected with valuing comes from religion." [Bloom, 211] He discusses this in the light of Nietzsche and the notion that myth-makers lay down values for a society. Sacred ideas, their protection in law, and the fact that they are shared ideas are central toward establishing a culture. This is of course in concert with the concept of "culture as bounds" that Eliot prescribed. Indeed the concept of religion, of religio to the Romans, is essentially the notion of constraint, the notion that something commands your reverence or awe. It commands your subordination and it is the pious man who submits to this, to the claims his gods, his family, and his country have on him.

Certainly a liberal man will balk at the notion of submission, or at least forced submission. Too he will be disturbed by the notion of the state funding cults of worship for particular deities. Yet to the Romans all of this was everybody's business, everyone shared in the danger of divine retribution and the need to perform the requisite ritual to ensure success. Now I mention this not to suggest the Roman way ought to be emulated but to emphasize the similarity between the religious impulse and the esteeming or valuing impulse. Now we have added religion to our snowballing discussion of culture. Let us not be afraid to make one more discursion and mention philosophy. Philosophy is perhaps the only notion to enjoy more esteem than either art or culture. Despite the obvious meaning of its name, we can distinguish two facets of philosophy, a desire for the truth and a desire to do good. Now note those two goals aren't entirely complementary. To seek the truth is to risk of undermining the culture one has inherited. Certainly you can have a culture based on ideas believed to be true, but can you have one based on truths acknowledged to be provisional? Can you have a wholly progressive culture any more than you can have a wholly conservative one?

Nietzsche thought the Romans at their height lived without philosophy, presumably in the earlier days of the republic before Augustus attempted to grasp the threads of the fraying culture and fasten them to the idea of the Empire to preserve them. They did not go poking into their myths. I think it would be worth looking at a few quotes from Nietzche's Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks in our discussion.

If philosophy ever manifested itself as helpful, redeeming, or prophylactic, it was in a healthy culture. The sick, it made ever sicker.  [27]

. . .an unrestrained thirst for knowledge for its own sake barbarizes men just as much as a hatred of knowledge. The Greeks themselves, possessed of an inherently insatiable thirst for knowledge, controlled it by their ideal need for and consideration of all the values of life. [31]

A period which suffers from a so-called high general level of liberal education but which is devoid of culture in the sense of a unity of style which characterizes all its life, will not quite know what to do with philosophy. . . [37]

Philosophy is then a two-edged sword, a truth-seeking discipline which runs the risk of undermining everything that has been inherited. Yet how does one use it then, how does one use it with a "consideration of all the values of life?" Ought one impose limits on it? Can one? If one did could you rightly call it truth-seeking? Let us look at a few more quotations.

If readily forced for once to speak out, philosophy might say, 'Wretched people! Is it my fault if I am roaming the country among you like a cheap fortune-teller? If I must hide and disguise myself as though I were a fallen woman and you my judges? Just look at my sister, Art! Like me, she is in exile among barbarians. We no longer know what to do to save ourselves. True, here among you we have lost all our rights, but the judges who shall restore them to us shall judge you too. And to you they shall say: Go get yourselves a culture. Only then will you find out what philosophy can and will do.'" [38]

Philosophy is propelled by. . . an alien, illogical power–the power of creative imagination. [40]

Philosophy is distinguished from science by its selectivity and its discrimination of the unusual, the astonishing, the difficult and the divine, just as it is distinguished from intellectual cleverness by its emphasis on the useless. Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without 'taste,' at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost. Philosophical thinking, on the other hand, is ever on the scent of those things which are most worth knowing, the great and the important insights. [43]

It is hard to reconcile different paths of discovering the truth: tradition, revelation, reason. Bloom seemed fond of the notion that man ought to be a "tense bow," that he should struggle with opposites and not harmonize them. Only that conflict will permit creativity and the creation of values. [Bloom, 198]

Yet what does Nietzsche say? Not that philosophy will lead to culture, but "Go get yourselves a culture. Only then will you find out what philosophy can and will do." Philosophy then is perhaps not an end in itself, it is not the sheer knowledge of science, but something which ought to enrich and ennoble. And ennoble what? The culture, the body of ideas which constitutes a people and their manners and festivals and all the expressions of those ideas. And it is an artistic expression, at once personal and communal, earthly yet sublime, inherited yet created, which is the strongest expression of and in a culture. Without these ideas and expressions, what is there for philosophy to glorify or ennoble?

Again: what is culture? Perhaps Eliot was on the right track when he suggested culture as the "incarnation of religion." It is the turning of an idea into a way of life, and it is doing so with vigor and joy.

Some may think that, like great cultures of the past, there needs to be some threat of force behind the bonds which compel. Yet force holds only bodies, not minds. In some respect a liberal democratic society is the ultimate proving ground for ideas: to grow and prosper and prevail there, without the threat of force, requires the strongest belief and the most glorious expressions. To lament a lack of culture in such a country then, is to lament either the lack of power to force people or the lack of strength in one's own expression. One need not embrace a Nietzschean perspectivism or the will to power to see culture as competitive. One need not see the philosopher as the "procreator" or the "creator of the world." (Beyond Good and Evil, s.206.) Yet Nietzsche can be most instructive. It seems to me often the case that when people seek to promote a value they seek to do so through law and to force people to behave a certain way. This commands obedience through fear and/or habituation. In contrast it also seems that to persuade through lifestyle, through creative expression, is far more persuasive, enriching to and respecting of the individual, and vivifying to the value and culture. There is no law which is as persuasive as artistic expression and the sight of a joyful man living his values.

–

Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind:  How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students. Simon and Schuster, New York. 1987.

Eliot, T. S. Notes Toward the Definition of Culture. Harcourt, Brace, and Company. New York. 1949.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. (trans. Cowan, Marianne.) Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Regnery Publishing. Washington DC. 1998.

On MacIntyre on Capitalism

This essay is a sort of sibling to my previous one, Caution: Intellectual's At Work.

Philosophy in Plato's Apology certainly seems to be very political and indeed it is. There are ideas behind all actions and Socrates' teaching certainly had broad effects. (To make an enormous understatement.) Thus how we act and interact part of political philosophy.  Yet where is the line between political and personal? At what point does someone trying to live a good life become a busybody trying to reorient other people?

I was pondering those questions, and others, after I read this essay on Alasdair MacIntyre in Prospect. It was a curious read for me because I in many was have an Aristotelian outlook on life. So MacIntyre seems to also, and yet we were not as nearly in accord as I would have expected. Let me share some of my concerns.

"MacIntyre yearns for a single, shared view of the good life as opposed to modern pluralism’s assumption that there can be many competing views of how to live well." Is that not a little. . . unnerving to hear? In the other of this pair of essays I mentioned that the intellectual ought to be humbled by the philosophical endeavor and a little reluctant to start reordering society.The administration of justice, to Aristotle, was the principal order of society, not a consensus on how one ought to live.

Such is a problem with intellectuals, that they are so intelligent they don't see the bounds of what they can and ought to do. Likewise, they seek perfectly logical systems of belief, at the expense of whether something is likely to work and often in contrast to observation. Hence the extraordinarily immoderate ideas of many highly intelligent people. Such would not be so problematic if they did not lend their stamp of authority on highly dangerous figures and movements. Such is not to say consistency is not laudable, but that it may have a price. The author reports one of MacIntyre's ideas in a very Aristotelian phrase, "The telos for human beings is to generate a communal life with others." Of course living with others is natural, but it is too easy to misread this phrase as, "because one lives (and must live) with others that one lives only to live with others" which is rather off base. (This may be an awkward paraphrasing of MacIntyre, I suspect.)

Too, today the word modernity is invoked as a buzzword to summon up images of industrialization, pop music, and kids who don't read listening to iPods.  This sort of association is not unlike the association between the word "factory" and images of sooty stone buildings with Mr. Moneybags taking advantage of child labor. (Modern medicine, modern online libraries, and the like don't get much praise.) This cliché is wearing tenuously thin. If one has a particular idea to critique, do so.

Wearing thin with me also is the tendency of people to use the word capitalism without defining it. The word is usually used to mean something tantamount to "something bad involving money." It is used nine times in this essay and we have no remote, let alone satisfactory, definition of it. 

The economics he describes, or at least how it is presented, is also particularly confused.

Take the following example:

For workers are also consumers and capitalism requires consumers with the purchasing power to buy its products. So there is tension between the need to keep wages low and the need to keep consumption high. Capitalism has solved this dilemma, MacIntyre says, by bringing future consumption into the present by dramatic extensions of credit.

Not quite and not having defined capitalism, understanding this paragraph is problematic. How does capitalism require anything? You don't have to buy anything. If there is demand for something, someone might create the product to meet the demand. If not, the productive capacity will go to produce something else. I suppose in theory if you couldn't produce anything that anyone wanted, you could just support yourself farming. What MacIntyre is in fact against is mainstream Keynesian economics. This economics, now offered up as our saving grace by certain economic big wigs, relies on buying for the sake of buying just to get demand up. (An absurd notion since people don't buy just anything, they don't by globs of GDP by products they need.) The asset bubbles created by the government were created, in part, under the assumption that you could continuously engineer growth and have an everlasting rise in values. The government, not only "people behaving badly," created the easy credit which made taking risks (which at any other time would have been regulated and rendered impossible by a market) possible.

He continues,

This expansion of credit, he goes on, has been accompanied by a distribution of risk that exposed to ruin millions of people who were unaware of their exposure. So when capitalism once again overextended itself, massive credit was transformed into even more massive debt. . .

What imperative exactly is he implying here? First, that you have a responsibility to disclose something of the risk to the borrower. This sounds very nice, but how do you actually ensure someone understands something? They sign the paperwork, they nod. You could explain it perfectly clearly and still not be sure they knew what they were getting into. Second, he is implying that the borrower does not have the responsibility to figure this out for himself.

Moving on,

Not only does capitalism impose the costs of growth or lack of it on those least able to bear them, but much of that debt is unjust. And the “engineers of this debt,” who had already benefited disproportionately, “have been allowed to exempt themselves from the consequences of their delinquent actions.”

Indeed, but that only happens if you force people to pay back the debt of others. If the only people affected are the lender and the borrower, no one else is implicated. This is an issue of the "debt engineers" having corrupted the members of the government, i.e. the people with the monopoly on the law, and "persuaded" them to force citizens to pay back the debt.

Oddly, he proposes regulation but according to this article does not consider his proposals "regulation." Yet when he writes that, "since regulations merely 'have as their aim the prevention of further large-scale crises' he is in a sense correct because the regulations, like his own non-regulation regulations, seek to put managing the economy in to the hands of elites instead of allowing individuals to manage their own affairs and assess risk for themselves.

The question again, as we have discussed before, is where does discipline and order come from? MacIntyre properly faults the "capitalism" of the government-run sort, but would replace it with his non-regulation regulations. The distributist model discussed in the article is likewise statist by nature.  

Overall, the economic thinking in this essay is lamentably muddled. (As presented, the association between "money-trading" (another vague term) and inequality is so thin I can't even critique it.) In a way this is unsurprising, since as Jesus Huerta de Soto demonstrated in his essay, "Economic Thought in Ancient Greece" [1] philosophers seem unable or unwilling to consider economics as a separate discipline. They're also, though often admittedly, not concerned with liberty. What is not admitted is that in a free economy, one not managed by the government, you wouldn't have to fear the debasement of your money and you wouldn't have to engage in any kid of activity you don't want to.

Virtue in Aristotle is in fact a most complicated notion and discussing it also requires familiarity with his logical books. Discussing the political aspects requires familiarity with nearly of Aristotle. In Aristotle virtue is a complex of innate desire and conscious action, inducement and freedom, nature and cultivation. It is impossible to speak about it glibly and do it any justice.

Perhaps MacIntyre does not provide a legitimate critique of capitalism, but rather of capitalism as most people think of it, i.e. as an economy managed by the government. If so, his criticism may be well-placed.  It is laudable that MacIntyre attempts to acknowledge both the good and bad of, say, globalization, but I think his thinking would benefit from some more precise definitions. Of course it is possible MacIntyre is badly represented in this article, a potentiality I duly acknowledge. As presented in this article though, his cases are rather muddled.

–

[1] http://mises.org/daily/4707 and my response: http://apologiaproliterativita.blogspot.com/2010/09/response-to-economic-thought-in-ancient.html

See also:

• Common Objections to Capitalism [video lecture] by Art Carden
• Cooperation: How a Free Market Benefits Everyone by Jeffrey Tucker 
• Economics As Science: A Catholic Defense of the Free Market by Thomas E. Woods Jr.
• No, the Free Market Did Not Cause the Financial Crisis by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
• Bring Back the Guild System? by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
• The Empirical Case against Government Stimulus by Robert P. Murphy
• The History of Capitalism (excerpt) by Ludwig von Mises
• Why the Meltdown Should Have Surprised No One [video lecture] by Peter Schiff
• How A Marxist Sees the Crisis (a short observation) by Jeffrey Tucker
• The Meaning of Competition by Daniel Krawisz

Caution: Intellectuals at Work

I haven't read Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society[1] but ever so often I read something and share more in his skepticism of intellectuals: skepticism of what they do and what they want others to do. It sounds like such a nice word. It comes from the Latin intellegere, meaning "to understand" and it conveys a sort of lofty attention to reason, a philosophical detachment from emotions. The World English Dictionary lists it as, "delight in mental activity" which sounds so very cerebral, like you're some genius ecstatic by the quantity and profundity of your thinking. Now in all of this praise for oneself and one's endeavor is liable to make one quite haughty about both. "I'm a smart person, I've set my great brain on this matter, I've solved it, and people ought to listen. I'm an intellectual!"

Now I'm not going to start bashing reason and thinking, but I would like to raise a few questions about the intellectual project. Well, one at any rate: what is it? Namely, 1) does it attempt to understand by welcoming criticism, reflection, change, variation, modulation, interpretation, and perhaps synthesis with other ideas? 2) Does it imply that it itself is the truth and ought to be followed. Or 3) does it simply present itself and not impose any further? Perhaps #1 and #2 are silly questions: surely a thinker on the one hand hopes his ideas are true but on the other would welcome correction or incorporation into the truth. Now is position #3 possible? Can you actually write, think, or do something and not hope it to be emulated somehow?

I've pondered that question a lot when thinking about the possible effects of my own writing. It seems that all writing sort of exhorts the reader to do something. In fact could one say all thinking is to some end? So it's a sort of gamble, thinking. You could easily go very wrong. It's a sort of odd problem isn't it? How is it possible to think something which is impossible? Where did that thought come from? Why should we be able to imagine something which is not? I think that's what intrigued some philosophers when considering artists: how did they come up with that? From whence did that art come? Hence Nietzsche's fascination with the creative power of the artist and Plato's explanation for how a random person like Tynnichus came up with something like his famous paeon ode (he was inspired by the Muses.)[2] One might be tempted to say: yes you created something new but the potential was there. The words, notes, colors, et cetera already existed. (This argument, similar to Aristotle's explanation of change via the concept of the potential) has much merit. But what about an idea? Again on the one hand you might say that reality somehow prompted you to think that idea. Indeed, perhaps. Yet if it is wrong. . . then it's only an idea. For example, I can interpolate two ideas which are impossible in reality: the plane Jupiter with human feet. So this mis-perception has sort of produced something and thus it's really quite striking you could come up with something, however you do it, completely at odds with reality.

So that's a very long-winded way of saying it is possible to be wrong. Indeed. I apologize for the discursion. Yet truth is a fickle thing. For example, consider Shakespeare's Hamlet. It didn't happen, maybe it couldn't have, maybe nothing like it ever will. Yet there is something truthful about what happens in it. Likewise science seems only to offer provisional truths, each being superseded by a model more consistent with observed phenomena. Yet there is something truthful even in the primitive explanation.

Now I'm not advancing ditching reason, but I think an awareness of these epistemological issues should give an intellectual a little modesty. Such an awareness should make it a little harder to say, "Hey do x, y, and z" especially when they haven't been tried before. Or especially when they have been tried and have failed. You would think this kind of awareness would be present in intellectuals, if indeed they are intellectuals. Now we all have ideas about which we are fairly certain, very certain, not so certain, and so forth. Now aside from any particular moral reasons, you would think this uncertainty would affect what you exhorted others to do, let alone what you deign to force others to do. That's why, from this principle of philosophical uncertainty alone, I think federalism and republicanism are laudable practices. The ideas everyone believes in go at the top. Everyone follows those rules but there are very few of them. Some ideas apply only at the state level; there are more of them but not too many. And so forth down until you reach your personal values which are your own personal idiom.

Thus the intellectual might offer a caveat: "Here is what I am thinking, what I believe, or how far I've come in considering this problem." Perhaps we might add, "I hope it helps" or "Do good with it." Yet I keep wanting to add more caveats. You don't want to be responsible for leading someone to anything bad, but once you get someone thinking that's certainly a possibility. Of course it's not really your fault, per se, but how would you like to have been responsible for getting some dictator "thinking"? Now this problem is of course not new and has plagued philosophy from its birth. Socrates was of course tried for corrupting the youth. Surely if anyone could have vindicated philosophy Socrates could have.

Well, in his own defense he says that he didn't take any money for what he did. He also said that since bad people harm others, why would he corrupt anyone, who would come back and harm him? Thus he must have corrupted them unintentionally. In the Crito he notes that even if he is not guilty, he has been found guilty and must follow the laws. How could he disgrace the laws of the city that raised him? How could he accept exile and lose the rights of a citizen and live in other disorderly cities? Would not disobeying the law corrupt the youth, and then prove the judges right?–Is this is really a defense of philosophy?

In his apology he goes on to link philosophy to, "wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul." Now that is a more specific claim, but it lacks the how. How does philosophy bring those things about? Why? Does it always? Can it lead you astray? In discussing teaching Plato's Apology of Socrates, Allan Bloom said:

How would you understand the effect Socrates had on Alcibiades? Alcibiades was an ambitious, young, political man. What did Socrates teach him? Isn't it possible that if you take an ambitious young political man and you give him gifts of philosophic criticism you can turn him into a very dangerous man?

You must in your own experience have had students who sometimes turned sour. And who used what you taught them. . . [3]

Bloom didn't finish that line with any specific action, but we might infer "something bad." We also might use, "not toward the ends of wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul." Indeed it is not difficult to think of philosophers and specific works which were interpreted in such was as to bring about great ill. Yet perhaps more interestingly, Bloom then flips the problem: "What about a man who came along and caused pious men to suspend their faith until they had answers to certain philosophical questions?" We now have the problem of both dangerous truths and dangerous untruths, and beliefs which may be either (or both in admixture.)

Yet might also ask, "Is it moral not to question?" While reason and philosophy don't guarantee truth or goodness, you are at least aiming at both. If you are not questioning how things work, what your place is, what you ought to do, then how do you hope to do good?

To question or not to question? And if to question, how? And once you have your answer, how certain are you of it? And even if you are quite certain, what are the implications of that truth? Does it give you responsibility, authority?

In his apology Socrates tells the story of how he goes out seeking to disprove the oracle and find someone wiser than himself. He looks among those reputed to be wise, among politicians, among poets, and among the artisans. Those reputed to be wise had no sense of what they didn't know, the artisans thought because they knew one thing that they could speak of all things, and the poets could not even explain their own poetry. Socrates did not find any of these men wiser than himself because they had no hint of their own ignorance.

It seems that this underlying requirement of philosophy, and admission of ignorance, is in some tension with a desire to do good and improve one's soul, which are positive acts. The admission, though, ought not diminish one's zeal but rather temper his conceit.

–

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-Society-Thomas-Sowell/dp/046501948X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1290179591&sr=8-1
[2] Ion, 533-534; See also Apology
[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRnzrDpGN5A