Steven Douglas Maloney

Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category

One of the nice discoveries of being in a Derek Parfit reading group – aside from encountering Parfit – is that I am going to stumble upon some other interesting and thoughtful blogs as others host the chapters.  As such, I have very belatedly run into an Arendt question that apparently has people talking, both here and here.  

Is Hannah Arendt a philosopher?

I believe that the answer is yes, but with a qualification.  She is one “with a hammer,” as Nietzsche would say.  I think Arendt would agree with Hubert Dreyfus’ reading of Nietzsche’s aphorism about God having been killed by man in The Gay Science, as indiciating that God is not the Christian God, but God is the idea (going back to Plato) that there is a perspective on the universe that will completely explain all things, and that the judgment of our lives and their meaning is in accordance to this standard.  

In following Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc. down this road, Arendt is in some sense an “anti-philosopher.”  She takes multiple cuts at perceiving the same thing over and over again, the way an artist makes multiple sketches, and sometimes multiple versions (like Monet, for example) in order to work out her relationship with the world.  

Many commenters on the two above cited blogs have stressed that Arendt says she is not a philosopher as a way that sets her up as an anti-philosopher like Nietzsche or Kierkegaard.  Where I think we can take Arendt at her own word about what she is doing is when she said in an interview with Gunther Gaus, “I want only to understand.” and that if her work helped others understand, that would feel like, “being home.”  For me, that is the Arendt comment on Arendt that is worth thinking through in order to understand what she has done.

I’ve known about Brian Leiter for a while, mostly for his philosophy department rankings. However, in teaching On the Genealogy of Morals, I decided to have a go at reading Leiter’s Nietzsche on Morality (thoughts on this topic later)- which I think is excellent.  I also know that Leiter is a legal realist, and I was curious if he responded to the decision to expand the scope of Twombley to civil rights cases today (definitely more on this later). 

While looking for such a post, I found a blog post that inspired my heart to soar.  I now know that I love Brian Leiter.  His post that I adore?  “Does the NY Times Not Realize That Stanley Fish is Philosophically Incompetent?” 

… Aaaaand cue the man-crush.  

 

“Regimes depend on men’s virtues, not on institutions; if the highest virtues are not present in the rulers, an inferior regime must be instituted.”  

  Bloom is talking about what he thinks one of the critical lessons of The Republic is.  I have to say that I am somewhat warm to the statement.  It seems as if institutions need to be crafted around virtues (or lack thereof), and not as much the other way around.  I see Bloom’s comment not as a lament that we are not virtuous enough for the best regime, but that we are involved, as the rulers of our state, in coming to make wise compromises with our defects.

Vanity Fair has the list of “16 Rules to follow for the Thomas Kincaid look.”  I cannot help but be reminded of the existentialist complaint that strict rule-following only gets you elementary knowledge and not mastery.

No, this is not a post about Daniel Craig’s abdominal muscles.  I’m about three or four hours from seeing the new Bond movie for my birthday.  I was reading Nietzsche today, looking, to pile on the word plays, for a quantum of solace of my own after attending a rather shocking lecture on bioethics, Christianity, and the liberal citizen.  I got what I was looking for, which was mainly insight into my own foolishness, but I also stumbled upon an interesting turn of phrase in Walter Kauffman’s translation of “Twilight of the Idols.”

 

The new Germany represents a quantum of fitness, both inherited and acquired by training, so that for a time it may expend its accumulated store of strength, even squander it.

Later in the passage, he writes,

One will notice that I wish to be just to the Germans: I do not want to break faith with myself here. I must therefore also state my objections to them. One pays heavily for coming to power: power makes stupid.  The Germans–once they were called the people of thinkers: do they think at all today? The Germans are now bored with spirit, the Germans now mistrust the spirit; politics swallows up all serious concern for really spiritual matters.  Deutschland, Deutschland, uber alles– I fear that was the end of German philosophy.

 

And now to return to matters that lack seriousness, let’s watch the fake Quantum of Solace Trailer again!

UPDATE:  Another quote a couple of pages later that I missed originally:

In the end, no one can spend more than he has: that is true of the individual, it is true of a people. If one spends oneself for power, for power politics, for economics, world trade, parliamentarianism, and military interest–if one spends in this direction the quantum of understanding, seriousness, will, and self-overcoming which one represents, then it will be lacking for the other direction.

“Quantums”-a-plenty!

has been greatly exaggerated. The constant drum-beat of gloom against the “moral emptiness” of liberalism has been sounded for quite some time (and I must confess I was an unfortunate participant in the chorus earlier on in my academic life). While it certainly does not culminate in this article in Prospect, the arguments are notably typical.  

The critique goes something like this: Liberalism, in championing pluralism to such an extent, makes it very difficult for people to be free to pursue their own ends because it conditions people to accept that they are their own best judge on what is and is not morally acceptable regardless of how preposterous their moral choices. This gives rise to cynicism, relativism, etc. that poison our values and make us he vapid, dishonorable, and viscous creatures that we are today.  

 

There are two problems with this argument. The first is that it does not acknowledge that liberalism originated itself, as a resistance movement to the stagnation of moral understanding that had formed between 16th-18th Century Europe.  For example, Immanuel Kant’s case for Enlightenment rest on being allowed to push forward in making our moral world more intelligible.  Enforcing a comprehensive moral understanding of an illiberal sort will likely lead to the same future stagnation. When that day comes, we will probably wish we had toleration back.  

Second, the best liberals (Kant, Rawls, Nozick, Locke, Berlin, Mill, etc.) are all interested in moral philosophy. Many of the rest of us fall short of realizing this liberal ideal. However, it is not clear that the philosophy itself is the causal agent. The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our belief in society as a fair system of cooperation, but in our empiricism. The great thinkers listed above all thought seriously about questions of how we come to believe that we know something, and this is where our political culture seems to have simply quit en masse.  

The problem lies in the common belief that, to paraphrase Allan Bloom’s observations of his students, “truth is relative, and everyone is entitled to his or her opinion” is not a distinctly liberal phenomenon, as we see it advanced and countered as far back as Plato’s Republic.  A liberalism with a serious epistemic foundation works better than any particular moral system because it is the least threatened by the new discoveries of our evolving understanding of the world. No system without a serious epistemic foundation works well at all. The argument against liberalism, in this context, boils down to surrendering on truth and just forcing one system on everyone for the sake of coherence and expediency. The author of this piece cites Alisdair MacIntyre approvingly, let us not forget that the only advice we get from MacIntyre at the end of After Virtue, is to “pick a philosophy and jump, and don’t look back.” Or, put another way, it is better to be against truth-tracking in bad faith than it is to be against it in good faith. Good liberals believe that it is better not to be against it at all.  You tell me which sounds like the most morally empty position.

The Washington Post is up in arms about the truth with an article about falsehoods perpetuated by both campaigns and the EJ Dionne question “Does the Truth Matter Anymore?” Candidates poison the information market for their own gain, embarrssing themselves with such nonsensical logic as Republican Strategist Mr. John Feheery’s analysis in the article:

“The more the New York Times and The Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there’s a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she’s new, she’s popular in Alaska and she is an insurgent,” Feehery said. “As long as those are out there, these little facts don’t really matter.”

I do regret missing that day in philosphy when we examined the relationship between the varying sizes of facts. Of course, the reason why men and women of great accomplishment are forced to engage in such mind-numbing behvaior every election season (and it would be impossilbe to say that anyone who ran for President in either field was not a person of remarkable accomplishment) is because the competition for elective audience demands it.

No matter that a free and independent mind should rather incur physical pain than say such stupid things without accepting correction and apologizing, the core problem is the Mr. Feehery is, in his own perversley put way, telling the truth about what does and does not work in democratic politics in our age.  What he does for a living works. And before you start thinking up examples of people victimizing others that “work” for the vicitimizer like a sotry about an excellent bak robber or some such thing, you can spare me right now. It seems quite obvious that there is a “pull” in the information market for such lunacy, and Mr. Feehery and his colleagues and oppostie numbers on the Democratic side are as much rushing to fill demand as they are to create it. It is way harder to create demand for something than it is to supply something that people already want.

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21 Days until the LHC gets turned on in Geneva!  I don’t understand science particulalry well, so I found claims that the LHC might destroy earth a little troubling.  But then, I read some more, and have come to realise that this seems to be a poor exercise in public reason. I am not sure what will happen when the LHC is turned on. Neither do the physicists. If they did, they would not say there is a miniscule chance of danger. They are saying miniscule because they cannot think of any danger they could create given the world as they understand it.

My favorite argument against the LHC is the one which takes the form: “According to Hawking’s theory of the universe, black holes will burn off Hawking radiation… but Hawking’s theories are disputed.”  Of course, as I understand it, you have to agree with Hawking’s theories about the universe to expect mini black holes MIGHT be created in the first place.  I don’t know much about cosmology, but I do think it seems like an unreasonable premise to be worried about a theoretical risk because you do not trust the cosmological understanding that generates the risk in the first place–I don’t think that you can sort of grocery shop what you do and don’t think quantum physics implies the way that critics are doing… maybe I’m wrong.

Mostly, I am thinking about Hume and inductive reasoning. The LHC seems to me to be a revelatory moment that we link our actions to expected outcomes with a strength much closer to habit than reason as to be a little upsetting.  Why do I think typing on my keyboard won’t destroy the universe?  It’s not because I can mentally rule out all possible catastrophic chains of events coming from writing this as much as because I do it all the time, and in fact, lots of people do it all the time and it seems to be a pretty safe physical collision almost every time (save carpal-tunnel syndrome and writing inflamatory messages).  I am not initially scared of a super-collider because I know that it will be dangerous. I am initially scared because I do not know what it does.  Even in acquiring enough information to believe that it is safe for the best possible reasons, and knowing that there is an inductive pattern of the same objections against smaller colliders that have all not destroyed earth, knowing that it might work does not provide the same comfort as experience. In that way, it is a great bogeyman of doomsday proclamation to threaten all future experience with destruction from an experiment that could not be more alien to me. Once I am honset about that, it becomes easier to come back to reason to restore my faith in it as how to make public decisions.

What is the “weak man” fallacy? Well, you can read it explained here:

a person sets up the opposition’s weakest (or one of its weakest) arguments or proponents for attack, as opposed to misstating a rival’s position as the straw man argument does.

 

The Chronicle of Higher Education seems to have a nice example with this article on violent video games.  Rather than argue about violence in video games with, I don’t know, Dr. Craig A. Anderson of Iowa State University, whose APA fact sheet seems to include reference to many peer-reviewed articles showing empirical studies on the subject spanning many years, the author picks on Senator Clinton of New York and Mayor Bloomberg of New York City. They of course, do not have the best reasons of all the people who hold the same point of view.  

But wait, there’s not only a “weak man” fallacy, there is also a “straw man” fallacy. Did you catch it? Go ahead and look, I’ll put it below the jump.

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For the first time in English, “The Motives That Ought to Encourage us to the Sciences” by Montesquieu. I will try and add some reflections here after I am less sleepy.