Deirdre McCloskey On Taxation

In her book The Bourgeois Virtues, Deirdre McCloskey makes a use of Immanuel Kant’s second categorical imperative to make a case against taxation: "The tempting shortcut of taxing the rich has not worked, for two reasons. First, I repeat, taxation is taking, and as the philosopher Edward Feser puts it, “Respecting another’s self-ownership… [reflects] one’s recognition that that other person does not exist for you…The socialist or liberal egalitarian…rather than the Nozickian libertarian… is… more plausibly accused of ‘selfishness.'” No left egalitarian has explained how such takings square with Kant’s second formulation of the categorical imperative: “So act as to use humanity, both in your own person and in the person of every other, always at the same time as an end, never simply as a means.” Taxing Peter to pay Paul is using Peter for Paul. It is corrupting. Modern governments have been encouraged to think that any abuse of Peter is just fine, that Peter is a slave available for any duty that the ruler has in mind. A little like nonmodern governments."

Galileo Versus Aristotle

In my post, “On The Anti-Aristotelianism of the Renaissance,” I talk about the anti-Aristotelianism of Erasmus, Martin Luther, and Francis Bacon. The anti-Aristotelianism that was sweeping Europe, in the time of the Renaissance, touched a new high with the publication in 1632 of Galileo Galilei’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which is written in the form of a Platonic dialogue for debating the fundamental scientific principles which govern the universe. The conversationists in Galileo’s Dialogue include a scholar of Copernicus, a man called Salviati, who makes a presentation of Galileo’s own scientific views, calling him a respected academician, and an Aristotelian scholar called Simplicio who presents the arguments for the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic view of the universe. Galileo’s contempt for Aristotle is clear from the name that he has given to the Aristotelian scholar—“Simplicio” means simpleton. The Dialogue of more than 600 pages is a direct confrontation between Galileo and Aristotle—the arguments that Simplicio presents are demolished one by one by Salviati who presents evidence in the form of scientific graphs, mathematical equations, and information derived from the direct observations through the telescope. They discuss the movement of heavenly bodies; the craters and mountains on the moon; the phases of Venus; the relation between ocean tides and motion of the earth; and much else. In the end, Galileo (through Salviati) manages to establish that while Copernicus was right on most things, Aristotle (and Ptolemy) had an erroneous view of the universe. The book became influential during the Renaissance; its first edition was sold out immediately after publication, but the religious establishment was outraged by the disrespect shown to Aristotelian cosmology. The Dialogue was placed in the list of forbidden books and on October 1, 1632, Galileo was summoned before the Inquisition to face prosecution for defaming the religious order.

Schopenhauer On Kant's Writing Style

In his essay, “Criticisms of The Kantian Philosophy” (Chapter: Appendix; The World as Will and Representation, Volume 1), Arthur Schopenhauer talks about Kant’s writing style:

"Kant's exposition is often indistinct, indefinite, inadequate, and occasionally obscure. This obscurity is certainly to be excused in part by the difficulty of the subject and the depth of the ideas. Yet whoever is himself clear to the bottom, and knows quite distinctly what he thinks and wants, will never write indistinctly, never set up wavering and indefinite concepts, or pick up from foreign languages extremely difficult and complicated expressions to denote such concepts, in order to continue using such expressions afterwards, as Kant took words and formulas from earlier, even scholastic, philosophy. These he combined with one another for his own purpose, as for example, "transcendental synthetic unity of apperception," and in general "unity of synthesis," which he always uses where "union" or "combination" would be quite sufficient by itself. Moreover, such a man will not always be explaining anew what has already been explained once, as Kant does, for example, with the understanding, the categories, experience, and other main concepts. Generally, such a man will not incessantly repeat himself, and yet, in every new presentation of an idea that has already occurred a hundred times, leave it again in precisely the same obscure passages. On the contrary, he will express his meaning once distinctly, thoroughly, and exhaustively, and leave it at that."

Schopenhauer laments that by his complicated style of writing, Kant legitimized the use of obscure language in philosophy and thereby enabled the madness of Hegel: "The public had been forced to see that what is obscure is not always without meaning; what was senseless and without meaning at once took refuge in obscure exposition and language. Fichte was the first to grasp and make vigorous use of this privilege; Schelling at least equalled him in this, and a host of hungry scribblers without intellect or honesty soon surpassed them both. But the greatest effrontery in serving up sheer nonsense, in scrabbling together senseless and maddening webs of words, such as had previously been heard only in madhouses, finally appeared in Hegel. It became the instrument of the most ponderous and general mystification that has ever existed, with a result that will seem incredible to posterity, and be a lasting monument of German stupidity."

On The Anti-Aristotelianism of the Renaissance

During the Renaissance, anti-Aristotelianism was at its zenith: Erasmus and Martin Luther despised Aristotle because they believed that he was the fountainhead of Scholastic philosophy that was polluting their religion and culture; Francis Bacon thought that Aristotle’s philosophy was barren, disputatious, and wrong in its objectives, an he held Aristotle responsible for the decline in scientific thinking in Europe. The work of Erasmus, Martin Luther, and Francis Bacon convinced the religious and the scientifically minded people of their time that Aristotle was having a baleful influence on their society and culture. The word “dunce”, derived from the name of the Aristotelian philosopher from the High Middle Ages, Duns Scotus, became a term of abuse and a synonym for Aristotelian scholars. Even playwrights like Shakespeare became caught in the wave of anti-Aristotelianism that was sweeping across Europe. In his play Hamlet, Shakespeare has Hamlet say, “And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” In the play, Horatio is inspired by the ideas of Aristotle.

My Doubts About the “Men of Reason"

A “man of reason” is someone who develops his understanding of the world through his perception and not through his projection. But most people who claim to be a man of reason fail on this very account—their belief in reason leads them to project an ersatz world in which they are always right, always moral, full of knowledge, and capable of holding better opinions than everyone else. An analysis of most votaries of reason will reveal that their thinking is warped and so is their projection of themselves. More often than not, the man who claims to be a “man of reason” is an ignorant person who is clueless of the great complications that a man faces in the use of reason and verifying the knowledge derived through it.

The Libertarian Notions of Liberty are Impractical

The libertarians believe that liberty is a magic wand that can cure society of all its woes. But history of last two thousand five hundred years shows that most city-states and nations where people enjoyed a high level of liberty were remarkably short-lived. The example of several societies can be considered to establish the point that greater the liberty, shorter the lifespan of the society: Ancient Athens after the Peloponnesian War, Ancient Rome, and Florence during the time of the Renaissance.

Liberty is that it leads to flowering of art, science, and private enterprise; it brings prosperity and comfort to the people. But liberty has unintended consequences too: it leads to the rise of a libertine society. When people have too much prosperity and comfort, they lose their character and passion for hard work—they become complacent, lazy, degenerate, and arrogant; they start taking their freedom for granted. A stage comes when a significant part of the society’s population becomes uninterested in being free and they start lusting for a statist political system.

The libertarian notion that liberty is the cure of all social problems is wide of the mark—liberty solves some problems, but not all, and eventually it leads to rise to several new problems. Liberty has within itself the seeds of its own destruction. A self-governed society which allows a high degree of liberty to its people might be good in the short term, but in the long term this society will be unstable. The paradox is that a free society with minimal government can only survive for a minimal amount of time.

Arendt On Political Judgment of Scientists

In the Prologue to her book The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt asserts that the political judgement of scientists qua scientists should be distrusted. Here’s an excerpt:

"Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being. If we would follow the advice, so frequently urged upon us, to adjust our cultural attitudes to the present status of scientific achievement, we would in all earnest adopt a way of life in which speech is no longer meaningful. For the sciences today have been forced to adopt a "language" of mathematical symbols which, though it was originally meant only as an abbreviation for spoken statements, now contains statements that in no way can be translated back into speech. The reason why it may be wise to distrust the political judgment of scientists qua scientists is not primarily their lack of "character"—that they did not refuse to develop atomic weapons—or their naiveté—that they did not understand that once these weapons were developed they would be the last to be consulted about their use—but precisely the fact that they move in a world where speech has lost its power. And whatever men do or know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about. There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves."

The Three Ways of Philosophers

There are three ways by which a philosopher can convince his audience that his philosophy is good: first, he can try to show that his philosophy is logically consistent; second, he can try to prove that his philosophy works; third, he can assert that his philosophy is perfect because it is his philosophy and he is never wrong. A good philosopher will adopt the first way; a mediocre philosopher will adopt the second way; and a philosopher who is after political power will adopt the third way.

Meno: The Paradox of Inquiry

Socrates and Meno are discussing what virtue is and whether it can be taught in Plato’s dialogue Meno. This dialogue offers a good impression of the Socratic dialectical style. In it Socrates rephrases something that Meno has said in the form of a paradox. Here’s an excerpt:

MENO: How will you look for it, Socrates, when you do not know at all what it is? How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know? 

SOCRATES: I know what you want to say, Meno. Do you realize what a debater’s argument you are bringing up, that a man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know? He cannot search for what he knows—since he knows it, there is no need to search—nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for. 

(Plato: Complete Works; Edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson; “Meno,” translated by G.M.A. Grube; Page 880)

If you know what you are looking for, there is no need for an inquiry; if you don't know what you are looking for, then an inquiry is impossible—this is essentially a sophistical argument; it is possible for someone to know the question and not have an answer. But Socrates takes the argument seriously and goes on to propose his famous doctrine of recollection.

Philosophy is a Series of Footnotes to Plato

This excerpt from Alfred North Whitehead's book Process and Reality is my favorite saying on Plato: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writing an inexhaustible mine of suggestion.”

On The Socratic Way of Philosophizing

In his Introduction to Plato: Complete Works (Edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson), John M. Cooper writes:

"Socrates was a totally new kind of Greek philosopher. He denied that he had discovered some new wisdom, indeed that he possessed any wisdom at all, and he refused to hand anything down to anyone as his personal ‘truth’, his claim to fame. All that he knew, humbly, was how to reason and reflect, how to improve himself and (if they would follow him in behaving the same way) help others to improve themselves, by doing his best to make his own moral, practical opinions, and his life itself, rest on appropriately tested and examined reasons—not on social authority or the say-so of esteemed poets (or philosophers) or custom or any other kind of intellectual laziness. At the same time, he made this self-improvement and the search for truth in which it consisted a common, joint effort, undertaken in discussion together with similarly committed other per- sons—even if it sometimes took on a rather combative aspect. The truth, if achieved, would be a truth attained by and for all who would take the trouble to think through on their own the steps leading to it: it could never be a personal ‘revelation’ for which any individual could claim special credit."

In the following paragraph, Cooper talks about Plato’s way of writing the dialogues:

"In writing Socratic dialogues and, eventually, dialogues of other types, Plato was following Socrates in rejecting the earlier idea of the philosopher as wise man who hands down the truth to other mortals for their grateful acceptance and resulting fame for himself. It is important to realize that whatever is stated in his works is stated by one or another of his characters, not directly by Plato the author; in his writings he is not presenting his ‘truth’ and himself as its possessor, and he is not seeking glory for having it. If there is new wisdom and ultimate truth in his works, this is not served up on a plate. Plato does not formulate his own special ‘truth’ for his readers, for them to learn and accept. You must work hard even to find out what the author of a Platonic dialogue is saying to the reader— it is in the writing as a whole that the author speaks, not in the words of any single speaker—and the dialogue form demands that you think for yourself in deciding what, if anything, in it or suggested by it is really the truth. So you have to read and think about what each speaker says to the others (and also, sometimes, what he does not say), notice what may need further defense than is actually given it, and attend to the author’s manner in presenting each character, and the separate speeches, for indications of points on which the author thinks some further thought is required. And, beyond that, you must think for yourself, reasoning on the basis of the text, to see whether or not there really are adequate grounds in support of what it may appear to you the text as a whole is saying. In all this, Plato is being faithful to Socrates’ example: the truth must be arrived at by each of us for ourselves, in a cooperative search, and Plato is only inviting others to do their own intellectual work, in cooperation with him, in thinking through the issues that he is addressing."

On Philosophical Judgements

Point1: A philosopher is judged by his intentions and vision. 

Point 2: A philosophy is judged by its methodologies and the quality of its arguments. 

Point 3: A philosophical movement is judged by its achievements.

Ethics is the Art of the Approximate

Being a master of ethical philosophy and being capable of mastering yourself are two different values which seldom coexist in a man. There is not a single philosopher of ethics who has demonstrated through his conduct that he is capable of practicing the ethical ideas that he preaches. When judged on the basis of their own ethical principles, all philosophers of ethics appear unethical. Aristotle was right when he defined virtue as the “golden mean” between the two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency. The identification and the practice of perfect virtues is beyond the scope of the human mind—the best we can do is try to approach the approximate or the “golden mean” of the virtues.

Voegelin on Classical and Modernist Thought

In his essay, "The Classical Studies,” Eric Voegelin notes that Plato and Aristotle have created philosophy as the science of the nature of man, but the Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy is in conflict with the contemporary climate of opinion. Voegelin lists nine points of disagreement between classical thought and modernist thought. Here are five of his principal points:

1. Classic: There is a nature of man, a definite structure of existence that puts limits on perfectibility.

Modern: The nature of man can be changed, either through historical evolution or through revolutionary action, so that a perfect realm of freedom can be established in history.

2. Classic: Philosophy is the endeavor to advance from opinion (doxa) about the order of man and society to science (episteme); the philosopher is not a philodoxer.

Modern: No science in such matters is possible, only opinion; everybody is entitled to his opinions; we have a pluralist society.

3. Classic: Society is man written large.

Modern: Man is society written small.

4. Classic: Man exists in erotic tension toward the divine ground of his existence.

Modern: He doesn’t; for I don’t; and I’m the measure of man.

5. Classic: Through the life of reason (bios theoretikos) man realizes his freedom.

Modern: Plato and Aristotle were fascists. The life of reason is a fascist enterprise.

Nationalist Sparta and Democratic Athens

Classical Athens was a noisy democracy, while Sparta was a militaristic and nationalistic state; both were political rivals and they fought against each other in the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC). The alliance led by Sparta was victorious over the Athenian alliance. For reasons that are unclear, the Athenian society, which was crippled and demoralized by the defeat in the Peloponnesian War, gave rise to several brilliant minds, including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The militarily powerful Sparta did not produce any major thinker, but it can be said to have played a role in keeping Athens safe from invaders—this, I think, can be seen as the contribution that the Spartans have made to the cause of philosophy, literature, and art. In 480 BC, the Persian King Xerxes would have wiped out Athens and rest of Ancient Greece if the Spartan King Leonidas had not stopped the Persian army comprising of more than 200,000 soldiers at the narrow passageway of Thermopylae. Without nationalistic and militaristic Sparta, there would not have been any democratic and liberal Athens—and without Athens, it is possible that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and several other artists and writers might not have found a conducive social environment for doing their work. 

On The Invention of Fanaticism

The British scientist and philosopher J.B.S Haldane counts religious intolerance among the only four really important inventions made between 3000 B.C. and 1400 A.D. In his essay, “Is History A Fraud?” (Page 56; The Inequality of Man and Other Essays by J.B.S Haldane), he writes:

“Between 3000 B.C. and A.D. 1400 there were probably only four really important inventions, namely the general use of iron, paved roads, voting, and religious intolerance. Perhaps I should have added coinage and long-distance water supply. Gunpowder had been known for a long time before A.D. 1400 in China, but did not begin to win battles in Europe till the seventeenth century. Some­ what before that date, however, it had helped to acceler­ate the decay of feudalism by diminishing the military value of castles.”

I am not a fan of Haldane, but it is an interesting thought that fanaticism which is widely seen as a cause of political violence in our times was in the early days of civilization a miraculous instrument for energizing men and inspiring them to give rise to new societies and nations. The first major nations in the history of humanity were the creation of the religious fanatics.

Hoffer on the Rise of New Fanatical Faiths

Eric Hoffer in True Believer:

"A wide diffusion of doubt and irreverence thus leads often to unexpected results. The irreverence of the Renaissance was a prelude to the new fanaticism of Reformation and Counter Reformation. The Frenchmen of the enlightenment who debunked the church and the crown and preached reason and tolerance released a burst of revolutionary and nationalist fanaticism which has not abated yet. Marx and his followers discredited religion, nationalism and the passionate pursuit of business, and brought into being the new fanaticism of socialism, communism, Stalinist nationalism and the passion for world dominion."

"When we debunk a fanatical faith or prejudice, we do not strike at the root of fanaticism. We merely prevent its leaking out at a certain point, with the likely result that it will leak out at some other point. Thus by denigrating prevailing beliefs and loyalties, the militant man of words unwittingly creates in the disillusioned masses a hunger for faith. For the majority of people cannot endure the barrenness and futility of their lives unless they have some ardent dedication, or some passionate pursuit in which they can lose themselves. Thus, in spite of himself, the scoffing man of words becomes the precursor of a new faith."

On The Problem of Contradictions

It is easy to proclaim that contradictions cannot exist in nature, but it is impossible to resolve the contradictions in your own philosophy. There is not a single philosophy in the last three years that is not full of contradictions. The process of identifying the contradictions in the work of a good philosopher can involve a multitude of scholars working over a period of centuries—these contradictions are never resolved. The contradictions cannot be resolved. A philosophy without contradictions is not possible to mankind. The quest for a philosophy free from contradictions is as futile as the quest for the mythical city of gold, El Dorado.

On Woolf’s To The Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf's writing style can be compared with that of Marcel Proust; she was an admirer of Proust, while she disliked James Joyce for his “whirls of obscenity”. Here's a scene from Woolf's To The Lighthouse (Part II, “Time Passes”; Chapter 3):

"But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore.

"It seemed now as if, touched by human penitence and all its toil, divine goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it, single, distinct, the hare erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking; which, did we deserve them, should be ours always. But alas, divine goodness, twitching the cord, draws the curtain; it does not please him; he covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth. For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.

"The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer."

On Modernity & Atheism

Modernity and atheism do not mix well. In the last 250 years all movements led by atheist politicians and intellectuals promised to establish a utopia of reason, science, and liberty, but on attaining power they unleashed a reign of terror and established a socialist and racist regime. The atheistic regimes have the record of prosecuting more people of other religions and races than most normal democratic governments. The important learning of last 250 years is that all atheists are potential jacobins and bolsheviks—they cannot be trusted with political power.

Selfishness is Not a Virtue

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog 

Eric Hoffer did not regard selfishness as a virtue. He belittles the idea of selfishness in Chapter 7, “The Inordinately Selfish,” of his book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. He writes:

The inordinately selfish are particularly susceptible to frustration. The more selfish a person, the more poignant his disappointments. It is the inordinately selfish, therefore, who are likely to be the most persuasive champions of selflessness. 

The fiercest fanatics are often selfish people who were forced, by innate shortcomings or external circumstances, to lose faith in their own selves. They separate the excellent instrument of their selfishness from their ineffectual selves and attach it to the service of some holy cause. And though it be a faith of love and humility they adopt, they can be neither loving nor humble. 

In his book The Passionate State of Mind: And Other Aphorisms (Chapter 5, “The Readiness to Work”), Hoffer notes that selfishness subsumes self-abnegation:

There is even in the most selfish passion a large element of self-abnegation. It is startling to realize that we call extreme self-seeking is actually self-renunciation. The miser, health addict, glory chaser and their like are not far behind in the exercise of self-sacrifice. Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self.

Philosophical Movements Have Unintended Consequences

Philosophical movements have unintended consequences. A movement dedicated to the cause of brotherhood of man may lead to jealousy and factionalism. A movement dedicated to the cause of individualism and happiness may lead to collectivism and misery. A movement dedicated to the cause of reason may lead to irrationality and mysticism. A movement dedicated the cause of freedom may lead to groupthink. Only the philosophers who are hungry for power over others and have a delusional view of human psychology waste their time on movements.

On The Atmosphere of Officialdom

“The atmosphere of officialdom would kill anything that breathes the air of human endeavor, would extinguish hope and fear alike in the supremacy of paper and ink.” ~ Joseph Conrad in The Shadow-Line

Joseph Conrad On The Supernatural

When Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow-Line was published in 1916, the critics noted that the novella was a fantasy because in it the previous captain’s ghost is haunting the ship on which the story takes place. In the second edition of the book, which came in 1920, Conrad appended an Author’s Note in which he mounted a defense of natural world, noting that the world “contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is… I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural.” Here’s an excerpt from Conrad’s Author’s Note:

“This story, which I admit to be in its brevity a fairly complex piece of work, was not intended to touch on the supernatural. Yet more than one critic has been inclined to take it in that way, seeing in it an attempt on my part to give the fullest scope to my imagination by taking it beyond the confines of the world of the living, suffering humanity. But as a matter of fact my imagination is not made of stuff so elastic as all that. I believe that if I attempted to put the strain of the Supernatural on it it would fail deplorably and exhibit an unlovely gap. But I could never have attempted such a thing, because all my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is; marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural, which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.”

The ghost of the previous captain (a man called Mr. Burns) is described by one of the inmates of the ship in these words: “His face in the full light of day appeared very pale, meagre, even haggard. Somehow I had a delicacy as to looking too often at him; his eyes, on the contrary, remained fairly glued on my face. They were greenish and had an expectant expression."

Religion as an Embodiment of Reason

Santayana was not religious but being sensitive to man’s spiritual needs, he did not identify as an atheist. He believed that most atheists are in a quest for their own orthodoxy; they yearn for a different kind of religion, a materialistic religion. Here’s an excerpt from his book Reason in Religion, (Chapter 1, “How Religion May Be An Embodiment of Reason”):

"Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's, that "a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." In every age the most comprehensive thinkers have found in the religion of their time and country something they could accept, interpreting and illustrating that religion so as to give it depth and universal application. Even the heretics and atheists, if they have had profundity, turn out after a while to be forerunners of some new orthodoxy. What they rebel against is a religion alien to their nature; they are atheists only by accident, and relatively to a convention which inwardly offends them, but they yearn mightily in their own souls after the religious acceptance of a world interpreted in their own fashion. So it appears in the end that their atheism and loud protestation were in fact the hastier part of their thought, since what emboldened them to deny the poor world's faith was that they were too impatient to understand it."

He goes on to suggest that religion can have a bearing on life of reason:

"What relation, then, does this great business of the soul, which we call religion, bear to the Life of Reason? That the relation between the two is close seems clear from several circumstances. The Life of Reason is the seat of all ultimate values. Now the history of mankind will show us that whenever spirits at once lofty and intense have seemed to attain the highest joys, they have envisaged and attained them in religion. Religion would therefore seem to be a vehicle or a factor in rational life, since the ends of rational life are attained by it. Moreover, the Life of Reason is an ideal to which everything in the world should be subordinated; it establishes lines of moral cleavage everywhere and makes right eternally different from wrong. Religion does the same thing. It makes absolute moral decisions. It sanctions, unifies, and transforms ethics. Religion thus exercises a function of the Life of Reason. And a further function which is common to both is that of emancipating man from his personal limitations. In different ways religions promise to transfer the soul to better conditions."

But Santayana accepts that religion may debauch the morality it comes to sanction, and impede the science it ought to fulfill:

"What is the secret of this ineptitude? Why does religion, so near to rationality in its purpose, fall so far short of it in its texture and in its results? The answer is easy: Religion pursues, rationality through the imagination. When it explains events or assigns causes, it gives imaginative substitute for science. When it gives; precepts, insinuates ideals, or remoulds aspiration, it is an imaginative substitute for wisdom—I mean for the deliberate and impartial pursuit of all good. The conditions and the aims of life are both represented in religion poetically, but this poetry tends to arrogate to itself literal truth and moral authority, neither of which it possesses. Hence the depth and importance of religion become intelligible no less than its contradictions and practical disasters. Its object is the same as that of reason, but its method is to proceed by intuition and by unchecked poetical conceits."

Kant and Altruism: The Man and the Myth

By Roger E. Bissell

Leonard Peikoff has long propagated the myth that Kant is an altruist who advocates that one do one’s duty and sacrifice one’s values because they are one’s values, of “sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice, as an end in itself” (1982, 82). This is a serious distortion of Kant’s views. Doing one’s duty, for Kant, does not require setting aside one’s values, but merely one’s personal inclinations and desires, and then acting according to moral principle. One of his chief illustrations of this point is quite revealing, particularly in comparison to Rand’s “ethics of emergencies” (and please bear in mind, this is Kant writing in 1785 in Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals. His later, more evolved thinking on this is even more revealing, as I’ll show shortly):

To be beneficent when we can is a duty; and besides this, there are many minds so sympathetically constituted that, without any other motive of vanity or self-interest, they find a pleasure in spreading joy around them and can take delight in the satisfaction of others so far as it is their own work. But I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however proper, however amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth, but is on a level with other inclinations, e.g. the inclination to honor, which, if happily directed to which is in fact of public utility and accordant with duty and consequently honorable, deserves praise and encouragement, but not esteem. For the maxim lacks the moral import, namely, that such actions be done from duty, not from inclination. Put the case that the mind of that philanthropist were clouded by sorrow of his own, extinguishing all sympathy with the lot of others, and that, while he still has the power to benefit others in distress, he is not touched by their trouble because he is absorbed with his own; and now suppose that he tears himself out of this dead insensibility and performs the action without any inclination to it, but simply from duty, then first has his action its genuine moral worth. (Kant [1785] 1952, 258; emphasis in original)

Note carefully here that Kant is not saying that acting benevolently when one is so inclined is per se without moral worth, but only when one so acts out of that inclination, rather than setting it aside and acting instead from duty, that is, from one’s awareness and acceptance that this is the morally right thing to do, that one should “be kind where one can,” regardless of the personal feelings of honor, inner satisfaction, and so on that one may also experience as a result.

Now, it is true that Rand does not advocate being kind to others as a moral duty. The term “duty” is, in fact, anathema to her, for it signifies an obligation that is necessarily divorced from one’s values. But as we’ve seen, Kant does not regard moral obligation in this way either, and to claim that this is what he means by “duty” is a gross misrepresentation of his views. Instead, as already noted, “duty” for Kant means acting according to moral principle, regardless of your feelings and personal inclinations—of “doing the right thing,” even if you don’t feel like it. How different is this from what Rand advocates in the Objectivist ethics?

Moreover, Rand does embrace the concept of an “obligation” to help others, which though not altruistic is very real and rationally justifiable. In fact, though nothing like an altruistic duty, Rand’s humanitarian “obligation” to help others is very much like Kant’s non-altruistic “duty” to help others. Helping others, for Rand, is a highly conditional, contextual matter, tied firmly to one’s self-interest, values, and happiness, and she discusses it at length, expressing principles such as the following: “If one’s friend is in trouble, one should act to help him by whatever non-sacrificial means are appropriate” (Rand 1963, 53; emphasis in original). “It is only in emergency situations that one should volunteer to help strangers, if it is in one’s power. For instance, a man who values human life and is caught in a shipwreck, should help to save his fellow passengers (though not at the expense of his own life)” (55; emphasis in original).

But observe that though these are conditional imperatives, they are imperatives, that is, moral principles. The “should’s” she uses multiple times in this essay are not a cynical ploy in order to deflect criticism that Objectivism is morally egocentric or sociopathic. When Rand says you should help others, she is making an emphatic statement of what as what she regards as morally right for you to do for others, given certain conditions. Not morally permissible, but morally required, obligatory. And these acts of helping others are not the right thing to do because one will get a heroic or warm-and-fuzzy feeling out of doing them—though one indeed may get such a feeling or other—but because they are virtuous acts, moral actions. Specifically, Rand says, they are acts of integrity, which she defines as “loyalty to one’s convictions and values…the policy of acting in accordance with one’s values, of expressing, upholding and translating them into practical reality” (52–53).

Also, Rand insists, there are limits on such moral obligations. As she colorfully illustrates this point: “…a man who values human life and is caught in a shipwreck, should [there’s that word again] help to save his fellow passengers (though not at the expense of his own life). But this does not mean…that he should spend his life sailing the seven seas in search of shipwreck victims to save” (55).

Now, considering what a vicious, sacrificial, duty-driven altruist that Rand and Peikoff paint Kant as being, you’d think Kant would have had nothing to do with such rational limits on the obligation to help others in need. Just give and give and give—and don’t ask if you can stop. Well, if your reading of Kant’s ethical writings never progressed beyond 1785, you might be excused for thinking this (though even then, only by overlooking the egregious misrepresentation of what Kant means by “duty” and “sacrifice”). However, consider this from Kant’s Introduction to the Metaphysical Elements of Ethics (1797):

If happiness, then, is in question, which it is to be my duty to promote as my end, it must be the happiness of other men whose (permitted) end I hereby make also mine. It still remains left to themselves to decide what they shall reckon as belong to their happiness; only that it is in my power to decline many things which they so reckon, but which I do not so regard, supposing that they have no right to demand it from me as their own (370, emphasis added).

And just to make absolutely clear that “permitted” end does not involve a blank check (compare to Rand’s rejection of the obligation to sail the seven seas!), Kant adds: “…no one has the right to demand from me the sacrifice of my not immoral ends” (370, emphasis added). Instead, deciding when and how much one is to “sacrifice” (give up) on behalf of another is a highly individual, open-ended matter, to be decided by the giver, not the receiver, of assistance.

As Kant says: “I am only bound then to sacrifice to others a part [note: not all or without limits] of my welfare without hope of recompense; because it is my duty [translate: my moral obligation], and it is impossible to assign definite limits how far that may go. Much depends on what would be the true want of each according to his own feelings, and it must be left to each to determine this for himself” (372, emphasis added). In other words, each person must be free to deter mine for himself when giving to others does or does not require “sacrifice of [his] not immoral ends,” and to be free to not go beyond the limits of non-sacrificial action.

True altruism, according to Kant, is simply not viable as a moral principle: “For that one should sacrifice his own happiness, his true wants, in order to promote that of others, would be a self-contradictory maxim if made a universal law” (373, emphasis added). This ought to be conclusive proof to Objectivists that Kant has been very unjustly portrayed as a moral monster by Rand and her followers. But of course, it won’t be, because Kant is such a convenient person to demonize and hold up as the root cause of all of our social problems, and recycling the distortions and context-dropping of Rand et al is so much easier than doing the heavy lifting of reading and truly trying to understand what Kant had to say.

Jung On The Stages of Life

Carl Gustav Jung, in his essay, “The Stages of Life,” (Chapter 1; The Portable Jung, Edited by Joseph Campbell; translated by R. F. C. Hull), points out that there are four stages in a man’s life, and he talks about the physiological issues that arise as a man transitions from one phase of life to other. Here’s an excerpt in which he is using the analogy of the sun’s motion to describe the difficulty a man faces in transitioning from the phase of mature adulthood to extreme old age:

"Experience shows us, rather, that the basic cause of all the difficulties of this transition is to be found in a deep-seated and peculiar change within the psyche. In order to characterize it I must take for comparison the daily course of the sun—but a sun that is endowed with human feeling and man's limited consciousness. In the morning it rises from the nocturnal sea of unconsciousness and looks upon the wide, bright world which lies before it in an expanse that steadily widens the higher it climbs in the firmament. In this extension of its field of action caused by its own rising, the sun will discover its significance; it will see the attainment of the greatest possible height, and the widest possible dissemination of its blessings, as its goal. In this conviction the sun pursues its course to the unforeseen zenith—unforeseen, because its career is unique and individual, and the culminating point could not be calculated in advance. At the stroke of noon the descent begins. And the descent means the reversal of all the ideals and values that were cherished in the morning. The sun falls into contradiction with itself. It is as though it should draw in its rays instead of emitting them. Light and warmth decline and are at last extinguished." 

Jung notes that it is fortunate that we are not like rising and setting suns, because that would fare badly with our cultural values. “But there is something sunlike within us, and to speak of the morning and spring, of the evening and autumn of life is not mere sentimental jargon.”

Macintyre on Philosophy and History

Theory and practice are conjoined, one informs the other. Alasdair Macintyre traces the artificial division between theory and practice (philosophy and history) to the Age of Enlightenment. Here’s an excerpt from Macintyre’s After Virtue (Chapter 5: “Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality”):

"Abstract changes in moral concepts are always embodied in real, particular events. There is a history yet to be written in which the Medici princes, Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, Frederick the Great and Napoleon, Walpole and Wilberforce, Jefferson and Robespierre are understood as expressing in their actions, often partially and in a variety of different ways, the very same conceptual changes which at the level of philosophical theory are articulated by Machiavelli and Hobbes, by Diderot and Condorcet, by Hume and Adam Smith and Kant. There ought not to be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts, one populated only by actions, the other only by theories. Every action is the bearer and expression of more or less theory-laden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorizing and every expression of belief is a political and moral action.

"Thus the transition into modernity was a transition both in theory and in practice and a single transition at that. It is because the habits of mind engendered by our modern academic curriculum separate out the history of political and social change (studied under one set of rubrics in history departments by one set of scholars) from the history of philosophy (studied under quite a different set of rubrics in philosophy departments by quite another set of scholars) that ideas are endowed with a falsely independent life of their own on the one hand and political and social action is presented as peculiarly mindless on the other. This academic dualism is of course itself the expression of an idea at home almost everywhere in the modern world; so much so indeed, that Marxism, the most influential adversary theory of modern culture, presents what is just one more version of this same dualism in the distinction between basis and ideological superstructure."

Why is Libertarian Political Analysis so Lousy?

Why is political analysis by libertarian scholars so lousy? This is because libertarians tend to take a philosophical approach to politics. They don’t get it that political activism and philosophizing do not mix well. Good politics is one thing; good philosophy is entirely another thing. You can either be a philosopher, or a political activist. If you try to orchestrate a shotgun marriage between politics and philosophy, they will not live happily ever after—they will rip each other apart, and a stage will be reached when there will be neither good politics nor good philosophy left.

On The Limitations of Human Reason

Hugo Mercier and Daniel Sperber in the Introduction to their book The Enigma of Reason:

"Human reason is both biased and lazy. Biased because it overwhelmingly finds justifications and arguments that support the reasoner's point of view, lazy because reason makes little effort to assess the quality of the justifications and arguments it produces. Imagine, for instance, a reasoner who happens to be partial to holidays at the beach. When reasoning about where to spend her next vacation, she will spontaneously accumulate reasons to choose a sunny place by the sea, including reasons that are manifestly poor (say, that there’s a discount on the flight to the very place where she would like to go, when in fact the same discount applies to many other destinations as well).

"The solitary use of reason has two typical outcomes. When the reasoner starts with a strong opinion, the reasons that come to her mind tend all to support this opinion. She is unlikely, then, to change her mind; she might even become overconfident and develop stronger opinions. But sometimes a reasoner stars with no strong opinion, or with conflicting views. In this case, reason will drive her toward whatever choice happens to be easier to justify, and this sometimes won’t be the best choice. Imagine she had the choice between visiting her horrible in-laws and then vacationing at the beach, or somewhat cheaper. Reason will drive her toward what seems to be the rational decision: taking the cheaper option."

A Passage from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness (Page 53-54): "Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once—somewhere—far away—in another existence perhaps. There were moments when one’s past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare for yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect."

Robert Burns: Letter to an Unknown Critic

“Thou eunuch of language; thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed; thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms; thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution; thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice; thou cobler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory; thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity; thou butcher, embruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography; thou arch-heretic in pronunciation; thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis; thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences; thou squeaking dissonance of cadence; thou pimp of gender; thou Lyon Herald to silly etymology; thou antipode of grammar; thou executioner of construction; thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded; thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax; thou scavenger of mood and tense; thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance; thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense; thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom; thou persecutor of syllabication; thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus.” ~ Robert Burns | Letter to an unknown critic, 1791

What Turns Intellectuals into Strident, Ruthless, Slavedrivers?

Eric Hoffer, in his essay, “The Readiness to Work,” observes that most intellectuals, even those who stand for liberty and individualism, cannot feel wholly at home in a free society. Here’s an excerpt:

"The paradox is, then, that although the intellectual has been in the forefront of the struggle for individual freedom, he can never feel wholly at home in a free society. He finds there neither an unquestioned sense of usefulness nor favorable conditions for the realization of his talents. Hence the contradiction between what the intellectual profess while he battles the status quo, and what he practices once he comes to power. At present, in every part of the world, we see how revolutionary movements initiated by idealistic intellectuals and preserved in their keeping tend to crystallize into hierarchal social orders in which an aristocratic intelligentsia commands and the masses are expected to obey. Such social orders, as we have seen, are ideal for the performance of the intellectual but not for that of the masses. It is this circumstance rather than the corruption of power which has been turning idealistic intellectuals into strident, ruthless, slavedrivers." ~ (The Ordeal of Change by Eric Hoffer; Chapter 5, “The Readiness for Work”) 

I think that our modern society offers several examples to substantiate Hoffer’s point of view.

The Advantage of Having a Philosophical View

To have a philosophical view is like going up a mountain and from the height taking a look at the world below. The filth and confusion, sadness and pain, irrationality and malice fade away and what you have is a sanitized, grand, orderly, and sublime view of civilization.

Heart of Darkness

The final page in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: 

When Mr. Kurtz, the rogue ivory trader, dies his last words are: “The horror! The horror!” By then the novel’s narrator, Charles Marlow, is himself very ill—he is in the borderline between life and death when he contemplates about the sadness of life in these words:

“Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life is — that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself — that comes too late — a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be.” 

Marlow survives and returns to London and there be breaks the news of Kurtz’s death to his fiancé. But in the settings of the modern world he is unable to tell her the truth and lies about Kurtz’s life and business in the jungles of Africa. When she asks him what were Kurtz’s last words, Marlow replies: "The last word he pronounced was—your name.”

Schopenhauer On University Philosophy

Arthur Schopenhauer talks about university philosophy in his book The World as Will and Representation, Volume Two, Chapter 17, “On Man's Need for Metaphysics.” Here’s an excerpt:

"As for university philosophy, it is as a rule mere juggling and humbug. The real purpose of such philosophy is to give the students in the very depths of their thinking that mental tendency which the ministry that appoints people to professorships regards as in keeping with its views and intentions. From the statesman's point of view, the ministry may even be right, only it follows from this that such philosophy of the chair is a nervis alienis mobile lignum*, and cannot pass for serious philosophy, but only for philosophy that is a joke. Moreover, it is in any case reasonable that such a supervision or guidance should extend only to chair-philosophy, not to the real philosophy that is in earnest. For if anything in the world is desirable, so desirable that even the dull and uneducated herd in its more reflective moments would value it more than silver and gold, it is that a ray of light should fall on the obscurity of our existence, and that we should obtain some information about this enigmatical life of ours, in which nothing is clear except its misery and vanity. But supposing even that this were in itself attainable, it is made impossible by imposed and enforced solutions of the problem.”

*"A wooden puppet moved by extraneous forces." [Tr.]

Moral Argument is Rationally Interminable

Why can’t mankind reach an agreement on the problems of wars, abortion, welfare state, and several other issues? Why is it that the philosophical and political debates on these issues are always unending? According to Alasdair Macintyre, in modern times all moral argument is rationally interminable. In Chapter 2, “The Nature of Moral Disagreement Today,” of his book After Virtue, Macintyre writes:

“Contemporary moral argument is rationally interminable, because all moral, indeed all evaluative, argument is and always must be rationally interminable. Contemporary moral disagreements of a certain kind cannot be resolved, because no moral disagreements of that kind in any age, past, present or future, can be resolved.”

Macintyre notes that this challenge of there being no rational way of securing agreement in moral disputes invites us to confront the philosophical theory of emotivism. He defines emotivism as a “doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.”

The Political Consequences of Destruction of Language

Eric Voegelin blames the intellectuals and their destruction of language for the rise of National Socialism. Here’s an excerpt from his Autobiographical Reflections:

"It is extremely difficult to engage in a critical discussion of National Socialist ideas, as I found out when I gave my semester course on “Hitler and the Germans” in 1964 in Munich, because in National Socialist and related documents we are still further below the level on which rational argument is possible than in the case of Hegel and Marx. In order to deal with rhetoric of this type, one must first develop a philosophy of language, going into the problems of symbolization on the basis of the philosophers’ experience of humanity and of the perversion of such symbols on the vulgarian level by people who are utterly unable to read a philosopher’s work. A person on this level—which I characterize as the vulgarian and, so far as it becomes socially relevant, as the ochlocratic level—again, is not admissible to the position of a partner in discussion but can only be an object of scientific research. These vulgarian and ochlocratic problems must not be taken lightly; one cannot simply not take notice of them. They are serious problems of life and death because the vulgarians create and dominate the intellectual climate in which the rise to power of figures like Hitler is possible. I would say, therefore, that in the German case the destroyers of the German language on the literary and journalistic level, characterized and analyzed over more than thirty years by Karl Kraus in the volumes of Die Fackel, were the true criminals who were guilty of the National Socialist atrocities, which were possible only when the social environment had been so destroyed by the vulgarians that a person who was truly representative of this vulgarian spirit could rise to power."

He notes that Hitler could come to power because society was intellectually and morally ruined:

"The phenomenon of Hitler is not exhausted by his person. His success must be understood in the context of an intellectually or morally ruined society in which personalities who otherwise would be grotesque, marginal figures can come to public power because they superbly represent the people who admire them. This internal destruction of a society was not finished with the Allied victory over the German armies in World War II but still goes on. I should say that the contemporary destruction of German intellectual life, and especially the destruction of the universities, is the aftermath of the destruction that brought Hitler to power and of the destruction worked under his regime. There is yet no end in sight so far as the disintegration of society is concerned, and consequences that may surprise are possible. The study of this period by Karl Kraus, and especially his astute analysis of the dirty detail (that part of it that Hannah Arendt has called the “banality of evil”), is still of the greatest importance because the parallel phenomena are to be found in our Western society, though fortunately not yet with the destructive effect that led to the German catastrophe."

On The Libertarian Flags

Why do some libertarian movements use as their flag the picture of a rattlesnake coiled ready to strike with the text “DON'T TREAD ON ME” written beneath it? I understand that the flag has a historical connection—it was designed in 1775 (during the American Revolution) by the American general and politician Christopher Gadsden. During revolutionary times a flag with this kind of a symbolism is fine, but it makes little sense to use it in times of peace and stability.

When the libertarians use such a flag, they risk sending out the signal that they are dogmatic in their thinking, full of hatred for all non-libertarians (which means vast majority of the population), and alienated from the society. Your philosophical, economic, and political thinking might be good, but few people will come forward to support your cause if your calling card contains the image of a rattlesnake with its fang bared and the text “DON'T TREAD ON ME”. People have a poor sense of history—most of them may not even know about the connection with the Gadsden flag.

Some libertarian scholars, I have noticed, use the image of a hemp leaf as their flag. Perhaps they think that that the hemp leaf stands for liberty and good life. I believe that people should be free to consume the intoxicants of their choice, but to use a hemp leaf as the flag for a social and political movement is not a good strategy as it creates the impression that this is a movement of the hedonists, by the hedonists, and for the hedonists.

The “DON'T TREAD ON ME” flag and the hemp leaf flag should be rejected because they create the impression that the libertarians are a community of unhinged and alienated people. A social and political movement is also about winning—your flag should be such that it helps you in making a positive impression on maximum number of people.

Skepticism is the Fountainhead of Philosophy

In his book Way to Wisdom,  Karl Jaspers writes, “The source of philosophy is to be sought in wonder, in doubt, in a sense of forsakenness. In any case it begins with an inner upheaval, which determines its goal.” ~ (Chapter 2: “Sources of Philosophy”). I think this is correct. Till about 70,000 years ago the human beings were more or less like animals—they lacked the ability to doubt anything. But if people believe in everything that their senses tell them, there can be no philosophy. Philosophy came into being when language become advanced and human beings developed the ability to communicate to themselves and share with each other their doubts about the nature of the world. The first spark of philosophy must have been lit by the man who for the first time propagated the idea that the things that he and others see can be something else or may not even exist. But this implies that  the idea that there is a reality outside the mind and that the world that we perceive through our senses is real has been gained through skepticism itself.

The Definition of an Intellectual

In his article, “The Definition of an Intellectual,” (February 16, 1969), Eric Hoffer gives a definition of the kind of intellectuals that he despised:

I have been wiping the floor with the intellectuals these many years, blaming them for everything under the sun. Though I have spelled out many times who these intellectuals are, I am still being asked quite often for a definition of the intellectual. Here it is:  

My intellectual is a person who feels himself a member of the educated elite with a God-given right to direct and shape events. He need not be well educated or very intelligent. What counts is the feeling of the being a member of the educated elite. 

What the intellectual wants above all is to be listened to—with deference. He will forgive you everything if you take him seriously, and allow him to instruct you. It is more important to him to be important than to be free, and he would rather be persecuted than ignored. 

He ends his article with these lines: “The intellectual knows with every fiber of his being that men are not equal, and there are a few things he cares for less than a classless society. He is convinced that government is too weighty and complex to be left to common people. He cannot see how anything originating in an uninformed, unprincipled and uncommitted populace could be of any value. There is nothing he loathes more than government by and for the people.”

MacIntyre's Comparison Between the Fall of Rome and Modern Civilization

Alasdair MacIntyre ends his book After Virtue with this paragraph:

“It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead – often not recognizing fully what they were doing – was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another – doubtless very different – St. Benedict.” (Page 304-305)

Since the barbarians are not at the gates, but are governing us, what should the modern man do?

Strauss on Success and Truth

In his discussion of the connection between historical knowledge and political philosophy, Leo Strauss says: "If, however, we do not worship “success” as such, we cannot maintain that the victorious cause is necessarily the cause of truth. For even if we grant that truth will prevail in the end, we cannot be certain that the end has already come." ~ (What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies by Leo Strauss; Page 61). I think this is a fine point—history has no beginning or an end and therefore the old cliche that truth will prevail in the end has no meaning.

The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

Ancient Greece, according to Josiah Ober, fell for virtually the same reasons for which it had once achieved greatness. In his The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Chapter 11: “Creative Destruction and Immortality”), Ober says: “Both greatness and fall had similar causes: high levels of specialization, innovation, and mobility of people, goods, and ideas as the result of distinctive political conditions.” But the fall of Greece was never total—it was more of a creative destructive, rather than a ruinous destruction leading to quick economic and cultural collapse. Many of the Greek city-states continued to thrive—Ober notes that “by the end of the fourth century BCE, it is likely that more Greek poleis were democracies than ever before.”

When Imperial Rome took control in second century BCE, the Greek world was flourishing. Impressed by Greek culture, the Roman elites themselves became hellenized and they ensured the preservation of Greek culture and its propagation throughout the expanding Roman Empire. Ober writes: “By the time imperial Rome took over a still-flourishing Greek world, the Romans had become eager consumers of Greek culture. By the second century BCE, Roman elites were deeply enough Hellenized to ensure the subsequent preservation and dissemination of Greek thought and culture throughout the huge and still-growing Roman empire and across the next several hundreds years. Having jumped scale to become a dominant imperial culture in one of the two biggest empires of the premodern world (the other was Han China), the immortality of Greece was, if not ensured, at least made possible.”

After the Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth to seventh centuries, Greek culture was preserved by the Eastern Empire and by the scholars and scientists of the medieval world.

Schopenhauer On Kant and Scholasticism

In his essay, “Criticisms of The Kantian Philosophy” (Chapter: Appendix; The World as Will and Representation, Volume 1), Arthur Schopenhauer notes that scholasticism lasted for 1400 years before Immanuel Kant, but this would mean that scholasticism predates Thomas Aquinas, and that the scholastic system got manifested towards the end of the Roman Empire when there was a significant rise in the power and influence of Christianity. Here’s an excerpt:

"That Kant's great achievements were bound to be accompanied by great errors is easy to understand on merely historical grounds. For although he effected the greatest revolution in philosophy, and did away with scholasticism, which in the above-mentioned wider sense had lasted for fourteen hundred years, in order really to begin an entirely new third world-epoch in philosophy, the immediate result of his appearance was, however, in practice only negative, not positive."

According to Schopenhauer, Kant was unable to break away from scholasticism in every region of his philosophy. As an example of the bad segments in Kantian philosophy which are reminiscent of a scholastic mindset, Schopenhauer mentions the chapter on the Transcendental Ideal in Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason.  “There now follows the chapter on the Transcendental Ideal, which at once takes us back to the rigid scholasticism of the Middle Ages.”

Philosophy is a Never-ending Dialogue

Julia Annas in her book Ancient Philosophy (Page 17):

"Ancient philosophy (indeed, philosophy generally) is typically marked by a refusal to leave things opaque and puzzling, to seek to make them clearer and more transparent to reason. Hence reading ancient philosophy tends to engage the reader’s reasoning immediately, to set a dialogue of minds going.

"Ancient philosophy is sometimes taught as a procession of Great Figures, whose ideas the student is supposed to take in and admire. Nothing could be further from its spirit. When we open most works of ancient philosophy, we find that an argument is going on – and that we are being challenged to join in."

The Ignorant are More Wise than the Learned

Eric Hoffer, in his article “The Cauldron of Youth” (Published on Feb 11, 1968), writes:

The ignorant are a reservoir of daring. It almost seems that those who have yet to discover the known are particularly equipped for dealing with the unknown. The unlearned have often rushed in where the learned feared to tread, and it is the credulous who are tempted to attempt the impossible. Where you see a revolution taking place without revolutionaries there the vulgar and the ignorant are at work.  They know not whither they are going, and give chance a chance. 

Often in the past the wise were unaware of the great mutations which were unfolding before their eyes. How many of the learned knew in the early decades of the 19th century that they had an industrial revolution on their hands? The discovery of America hardly touched the learned, but it influenced the minds of the common folk.

I think Hoffer is spot-on. A country of ignorant and hardworking folks is more likely to succeed than a country dominated by intellectuals.

On the Regime of Ignorance

Here’s an excerpt from the speech by Thon Taddeo in Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz:

"Ignorance has been our king. Since the death of empire, he sits unchallenged on the throne of Man. His dynasty is age-old. His right to rule is now considered legitimate. Past sages have affirmed it. They did nothing to unseat him.


"Tomorrow, a new prince shall rule. Men of understanding, men of science shall stand behind his throne, and the universe will come to know his might. His name is Truth. His empire shall encompass the Earth. And the mastery of Man over the Earth shall be renewed. A century from now, men will fly through the air in mechanical birds. Metal carriages will race along roads of man-made stone. There will be buildings of thirty stories, ships that go under the sea, machines to perform all works.


"And how will this come to pass?" He paused and lowered his voice. "In the same way all change comes to pass, I fear. And I am sorry it is so. It will come to pass by violence and upheaval, by flame and by fury, for no change comes calmly over the world.”

He glanced around, for a soft murmur arose from the community.

“It will be so. We will not will it so.”

“But why?”

"Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry: But that is how I see it."

(A Canticle for Leibowitz; Chapter 20; Pages 214-215)

Reading Kant in the 1790s

Germany, in the 1790s, witnessed the pantheism controversy, the effects of the French Revolution, and the rise of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. Jakob Friedrich Fries was introduced to Kantian philosophy by Karl Bernhard Garve, his teacher at the Moravian seminary in Niesky, where Fries was studying in the years 1792 to 1795. The brethren at the Moravian seminary considered Kant’s thought bad for religious faith and they did not take kindly to Garve’s endeavors for acquainting his students with Kantianism. Garve was relieved of his duties, but his efforts had the intended effect—at the top of the reading list of his students was Kant. In his book The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796-1880, Frederick C. Beiser writes about Fries’s attempts to read Kant at the seminary. Here's an excerpt: "At first the only books he could obtain were the Prolegomena and the so-called Prize Essay, that is, Kant’s 1764 pre-critical work Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral. Fries was greatly impressed by both works, which, he said, taught him a completely new method of doing philosophy. But how was Fries to get Kant’s masterwork, his Kritik der reinen Vernunft? Only with great stealth. Against regulations, Fries sneaked out of the seminary and walked to the bookdealer in neighbouring Görlitz. There he bought only parts of the book, some printed sheets; he dared not buy a whole bound copy, because this would have attracted the suspicion of the inspectors. When the seminary’s doctor visited the bookshop in Görlitz, the bookdealer praised the youth’s intellectual curiosity; the doctor raised alarm, and the inspectors duly confiscated the sheets. Fries managed to get them back by convincing the inspectors that he would do it again anyway." Beiser notes that “Kant had become “forbidden fruit” for students at the seminary. The temptation of reading him was all the greater precisely because it had been prohibited.”