Good Quote

Since much of my life rests on two divides. On the first, it is America and Canada, and this comes only since I have resided in Canada for the last 2.5 years. The second is, of course, invoked by the imagery of my blog's title, and that is the analytic/continental Divide. I found this quote a while back and wanted to share it with you. It comes from Gary Gutting's review of Leiter's Future of Philosophy over at the NDPR. I've been wondering if Leiter's newest edited anthology by Oxford University Press is a product of Gutting's deadly accurate criticism.

I agree that there is no fruitful analytic-Continental division in terms of substantive doctrines distinctively characteristic of the two sides. But it seems to me that we can still draw a significant distinction between analytic and Continental philosophy in terms of their conceptions of experience and reason as standards of evaluation. Typically, analytic philosophy reads experience in terms of common-sense intuitions (often along with their developments and transformations in science) and understands reason in terms of formal logic. Continental philosophy, by contrast, typically sees experience as penetrating beyond the veneer of common-sense and science, and regards reason as more a matter of intellectual imagination than deductive rigor. In these terms, Continental philosophy still exists as a significant challenge to the increasing hegemony of analytic thought and, as such, deserved a hearing in this volume.

Babette E. Babich's Essay on the Analytic/Continental Divide

This essay is far-reaching and well-accomplished. It spells out methodological difficulty of the stylistic propensity of our philosophical climate with a keen eye to Heidegger and Nietzsche. Very good.

Here's the link:

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/babich02.htm

Philosophical Gourmet Report Tirade

Brian Leiter is now approaching the two year point where he uses 469 nominated evaluators to speak for a profession of 10,000 philosophy PhDs in North America, and countless numbers elsewhere. I cannot help but this is really an unfair evaluation process since it really doesn't do justice to the work or contribution of philosophers in general. I've always wondered why the current Continental Philosophy list never included the following schools:

1. Southern Illinois University Carbondale
2. Depaul University
3. Duquesne University
4. Villanova
5. University of Oregon
6. Middlesex University (in the UK)
7. Marquette University
8. University of Ottawa (Canada)
9. University of Guelph (Canada)

You can compare the 2006 - 2008 rankings on Leiter's page with the Society of Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy's website.

Good programs in Continental philosophy are specialized programs that offer chances to study texts in the original language, groups that informally study the texts of the European tradition, have foreign exchange programs with sister-universities in Europe and have more than just the typical "token" Continental in an overwhelmingly analytic department. In fact, this is upsetting since many schools proferred as places to study Continental philosophy like Cambridge, I imagine, do not have the same resources that, say, Penn-State University or New School University have to develop good solid Continental philosophers.

Don't get me wrong. There are several good recommendations on the list of the PGR's breakdown. I just don't imagine that 469 people can speak for the work done by 10,000. Instead, we should all follow the advice of the APA statement on rankings which encourages aspiring graduate students to seek out Graduate Directors of programs. Leiter's list becomes more of a developed high school popularity contest than truly representing the interests of European philosophers. Moreover, such a mainstream conception of philosophy tends to overlook really unique programs where one can study marginalized areas outside mainstream philosophy. There are some good programs in Indian philosophy at the University of New Mexico, University of Hawaii and perhaps Temple University--these schools are only taken seriously by evaluators insofar as they are good places to do Indian philosophy, but will never approach what is valued as mainstream philosophy. I think such perceptions pernicious to a discipline that is rooted in the "love of wisdom."

Julia Annas and Moral Phenomenology

In a recent article, Phenomenology of Virtue (March 2008), Julia Annas wants to know how to distinguish the content of what it is to be virtuous from what it is to be less-than virtuous. For her and myself, there must be a content to the experience of being a virtuous person. For her, this follows that virtue ethics makes claim about what type of people we ought to be, and the methodology of doing ethics in this way assumes what I also take for granted as a phenomenology--there is content in how we experience phenomena in the first-person-perspective. Both the virtue ethicist, and the phenomenologist meet on these assumptions about the subject/moral agent as an experiencer of subjective content in relation to having an experience.

In her view, she suggests Aristotle's answer that the virtuous person finds being virtuous pleasant is the solution to what the phenomenology of virtue consists. While I make no claims about her substantive proposal. Her suggestion might just be the case. She grounds her interpretation of Aristotle's answer in a very closely familiar Heideggerian way. She invokes notions of practical involvement, the exercise of being absorbed in our world through the work of social psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's "flow experience." This proposal sounds very, very, very Heideggerian to me. Consider this part of the text that captures of the core of the view:

Defensible forms of virtue ethics, in my opinion, hold that virtues are acquired
and exercised in a way which is relevantly similar to the acquisition and
exercise of practical skills. The person learning to be brave will need to ask
herself, when faced by a situation in which someone needs to be rescued, what
would be a brave thing to do here, or what a brave person would do
here...Someone who is, as we say, truly or really brave, the mature brave
person, will respond to the other person's need for rescue without having to
work out what a brave person would do, or what would be a brave action here. not
only do we not need to suppose that such thoughts occur, we can see how they
might, in the brave person, actually inhibit the needed response (p. 24)

I'm going to think about this for a while, but I anticipate this interpretation will come close to Heidegger's construal of Dasein as "being-in."

The Ethics of Christmas: Readers make Comments

I wanted to throw this out there since, yes, I'm updating my philosophy blog on Christmas Eve. No life, I know, I know. Anyway, here's the question:

If you accept a moral prohibition on lying (as many normative theories lend themselves, I believe), then what about participating in the deception of children for Christmas?

Give a bunch of answers, as I'm curious what people's intuitions are.

Nietzsche Reading Group in Vancouver

For those that follow my blog close by...I'll be starting up a Nietzsche or Heidegger reading group. No one is thrilled at the stigma of reading Heidegger out in the open, but some of you are into the naturalist readings of Nietzsche through Brian Leiter. Many analytic philosophers have been looking to Nietzsche as a speculative naturalist. I'm thinking of focusing on this:

Nietzsche and Morality, ed. Brian Leiter

The Eleatic Impasse and the Moral Impasse

Heidegger’s seminal Being and Time announces itself amidst a Platonic aporia. The impasse is quoted from the Sophist by the Eleatic Stranger who says,

For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression “being.” We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed (BT, p. 1).

Like Heidegger, I announce my intention with a state of observed philosophical perplexity. Unlike, Heidegger my concerns haven’t been completely eschewed by philosophers as the question of the meaning of Being. Instead, moral philosophers have paid attention to what I call the basic concepts of the good, the right and the just, and their opposite privations. Yet, it is the manner of contact these moral philosophers in the tradition have articulated understanding that demands phenomenological attention.

Moral philosophers are fragmentary in their reflective efforts to produce a coherent whole of unified beliefs concerning the possibility of moral knowledge, what moral values are, what, if any, principle(s) determine what we ought to do and what are the contents of morality itself. In their efforts, moral philosophers have left a collage of various moral intuitions and beliefs that require constant investigation, and piecemeal precision. The landscape of our normative condition is scattered with various problems in normative ethics and meta-ethical domains, maybe even both.

With this condition, the possibility of a unified moral philosophy that answers wholly the previously mentioned concerns is regarded as a pipe-dream, an implausible philosophical hubris too common to mention. Alasdair MacIntyre observed this lack of morality’s unity, and the implausible aims of ethics itself as a lack of historical and metaphysical commonalities to which all of us comply. Observing this dire state of ethics, he writes:

What we possess [in terms of morality]…are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality. (After Virtue, p. 2)

Now, I think it fair to say that MacIntyre is like the Eleatic Stranger. We have lost our way in moral thinking, and our culture, Western at large and the world, have either retreated to offer minimalist standards of obligation in some way, rejecting the possibility of ethics completely in nihilism or error theory, or somewhere in between these two extremes. Either we give up on the unity completely, reject the possibility of unity or lie somewhere in between. However, what is suspect in ethics is the entire spectrum of these possibilities. While to some they might be answers, they only conceal what is at issue in the poor neglect where we find ethical theorizing.

Observing these difficulties and considering them aright, moral philosophers are forced to answer some tough concerns. The very possibility of unity and objectivity in our moral thought is challenged by the fact that discourses take place within the simulacra of morality. We have lost those historical and metaphysical grounds that used to ground moral discourse in meaningful ways. There is no significance to these past historical habits of moral speech, words and concepts we employ. In effect, we are as Heidegger observed living in a time unconcerned with the most primordial of questions. For me, such a question is not about being, but about our basic conceptual tools to make sense of our moral life.

The very reason the simulacra of morality exists is the very reason I find the question of ethics so vitally important. Human beings care about morality. They cannot live without being so encumbered by morality. For we all care about how the world ought to be, even if by “ought” we do not mean good or right for all—instead, only “me.” Thus, the basic condition of human life is normative, and therefore it is likely that since morality is so intimated to what human beings are and live, then it follows that we would use our moral terms, language, speech and concepts even unknowingly in cases where there is no context or tie to the meaning in which such terms, language, speech and concepts had meaning. We unwittingly and unknowingly perpetuate the simulacra.

Given this condition of groundless morality, ethics can be labeled as being in crisis. The crisis refers to ethics and its inability to fully unify its elements into a meaningful whole. The whole can only be representative of our moral life if we understand how moral life is structure. Moreover, it is the intention of this author to prepare a way for a ground of morality. I argue that the ground of morality can only be seen if we first understand how it is that morality is lived and experienced. Once we capture how it is that we truly are in relation to morality, once our moral-being-in-the-world is elucidated, the basic structures of ethics can come into relief. Hence, a good moral theory is one that captures the phenomenological insights of moral experience and all its aspects. Henceforth, I announce this intention to construct a moral phenomenology using those insights of phenomenology to face off a crisis that much of Husserl’s phenomenology directs itself.

The question facing me, now, is whether such a phenomenological shift in ethical theorizing is an appropriate response to the concern raised herein, and the larger question is what aspects of our moral life require the employment of the phenomenological reduction?

Applications Slow

It is a slow season. Working part-time and carrying 5 tutorials as a TA are taking a toll on me. In the city of Vancouver, I can do much apparently, but one of theme that pays the best for my time is TAing. It's a rewarding job that I enjoy very much.

On the up and up, I have had a good conversation with a Graduate Director at one of my top picks. Of course, this means little unless one gets in. However, I am confident that this school is likely to admit me if I get my application there first. I don't know if I can compete heavily for Fellowships, but an Assistantship, I think, is very possible given that I have been a TA at a serious university for about 3 years on a traditional academic semester calendar.

I've got two applications done, and I don't really want to do anymore. It takes up way too much time and you wind up being time consuming.

After having spent so much time in graduate school, I realize how deficient my life is. I just want to get back to the United States, or at least put us in Ontario where we are seriously just an 8 hour ride from our parents. This whole other side to North America isn't that special. The weather is nice given that it never reaches below freezing, but that also is coupled with the fact that it rains too much.

I know this blog is supposed to be my outlet for creative philosophical energies. But every once in a while, it is good to pause and bitch. It helps my day.

Upcoming ideas for projects:

1) A Sartrean contrast view to the typical desire-satisfaction model in Anglophone philosophy departments of agency.

2) Contrasting the views of realist phenomenology over the transcendental phenomenology. I still don't know where I stand in Husserl.

3) What is Husserl's theory of the imagination given it is the source of eidetic variation?

Is War Ever Justified?

In the following post, you'll note a contradictory attitude towards war that appears in the post "Heideggarian Proclivities" or "Dove with Hawk-like Vision". I always fight myself on whether or not I think violence is necessary or morally justified. There is a mess of beliefs that I am trying to wrestle with, but honestly, it might take more reflecting than just blog-writing to get some consistency on these beliefs. As a professor of epistemology told me, "Grad school is about practicing ideas." You have to explore whole sections of the mall before you can shop in it effectively so to speak.

I am wondering whether or not such an answer can readily be provided to such a provoking question. Recently, I bought Larry May's edited anthology, War: Essays in Political Philosophy. These questions have been on my mind from some of the readings. Moreover, as the election rolls around, a reflective look of my nation's foreign policy is largely needed. Presidential elections are a good time for a fresh look at the mistakes and successes (if there are any) of our current President, George Bush.

In this post, war is the active strategy of employing violence for the achievement of some end, whether that end be political, economic or other. States justify war in any number of ways: some moral, others more prudentially. For our purposes, I assume the ethical perspective, that is, looking for moral justification as to why we fought Iraq. I argue that a lacking justification from self-defense undermines how justified we are in having ever fought the Iraq War. Consequently, since we lack moral justification for our waging a war, the longer we remain in Iraq the more complicit we are in doing the immoral thing, even though in keeping the peace we are attempting to stabilize a mess we caused.

In order to understand my argument, we need to talk about what it means to justify morally an action. To say that an action is justified morally is to say some action ought to be done for these reasons. There's an "ought" component, an evaluative reason claiming that some party ought to act or refrain from acting. Usually, a state justifies a war in the interest of preserving itself from a threat. If there is no demonstratable threat from a state, then there is no justification for going to war. In Iraq, we found no WMDs, and the threat of no WMDs fosters skepticism about the original justification for war. In so doing, the United States is now seen as acting preemptively on faulty intelligence. It can be said for these reasons that the Iraq War is morally unjustified.

Yet, this is a typical political response. I'm wondering something a bit more narrow. I'm wondering if there are reasons that "go all the way down" in justifying war. Are states ever justified in fighting a war? If you find that the content of morality is distinguishable, then are there duties to wage war? Immediately, I can think of a consequential argument for the non-existence of moral justification for war. If war hurts more people than those who fight in the war, then when a war happens more suffering is engendered by waging it. In other words, the moral cost of the war is too high to be paid, and since any reasonably educated person ought to recognize that more people suffer in wartime than in peacetime, then the promotion of peaceful ends over those favoring violence create more good in the world.

I don't know if this argument goes far enough, yet it does have some strengths. First, any waging of a war must acknowledge the fact that more suffer from wars waged than those that fight in them. This consequential argument is powerful with respect that you can see that it works for whatever your measure of the good, and many types of good--knowledge, pleasure or virtue. War forestalls cultural development, the stability needed to do science, with perhaps the exception of war related research--which is marginal by the standards of all scientific research and many other valuable activities. So, with these strengths why question the consequential argument against war? The limitations comes in the very form of consequential arguments take to justify morally right action, consequences.

Suppose we can formulate a scenario in which the cumulative goods maximized by not fighting war are outweighed by actually fighting in a war. Such an example would be hard to construe, but certainly not impossibly by any stretch of the imagination. Imagine a rogue state with a nuclear arsenal that has harbored technology that it could fight a massive war to confront the entire Western world. Perhaps, significant innovation in artificial intelligence? All the states must come together in orchestrating one decisive campaign against this rogue state (or even a collection of states) to defeat that which threatens all levels of society. On this score, I have always found consequentialism limiting in its capacity to distinguish satisfactory accounts of right and wrong. It would seem that good consequential arguments are relative to the time-slice in which they are made, and that future scenarios could always be imagined in which doing what is prohibited is better than not doing it.

A deontological argument against war preserves our backward-looking glance at our moral intuitions, and is stronger in making sense of not fighting war. Or is it? A deontological theory grounds rightness and wrongness in independent principle, or principles. These principles are grounded in our rationality, God's law or nature. Deontological approaches characterize matters of right and wrong in the language of rights. I believe a general prohibition on fighting war would turn on protecting the rights of those civilians in the field. However, this approach has a shortcoming that can be seen a mile away. Any defense of someone's rights, such as protecting the innocent from harm might rest on not waging a war to endanger the innocent, or waging a war to protecting the innocent from imminent threat. Such a principle would be grounded in a Kantian way (rationality), in the just war tradition (God's law in some instances) and nature.

The trouble in these last two approaches rests, I think, in that deontology is backward looking at our intuitions, and consequentialism is limited by its forward-looking perspective. What is needed, if there is a reason to never fight a war, is a normative theory that can preserve the large negative impact war has on those that suffer from its practice. For this is the wrongmaking property of war--the suffering it causes. I think that virtue ethics capable of giving us what we want. In brief, virtue ethics of the Neo-Aristotelian variety tries to achieve a conception of flourishing for all involved in our community by pinpointing those virtues that get us to live the flourishing life. At this stage, we are at the international level, and the question becomes the flourishing of human beings at large. The question then becomes: Does war ever lead to flourishing?

A Working Introduction to a Project of Mine

I have been focusing as of late on Heidegger's critique of presence. The critique of presence is hard to pin down for someone of analytic background since by presence Heidegger describes the relation either between the traditional subject relating to an object of experience, or the subject as related to its own awareness of itself. Analytical philosophers often have a hard time with the generality and obtuseness of Heideggerian language. However, there doesn't need to be any confusion. The two descriptions of presence are simply propensities that characterize much of the history of ontology, that is, how various philosophers have described the subject's epistemic relation with objects, and the characterization of the transcendental viewpoint of the Cartesian subject as aware of itself. According to Heidegger's thought, the overlooked propensities of presence are biased unquestioned assumptions in the history of metaphysics that require exposure.

In exposing these common interpretive assumptions, Heidegger feels justified in calling them into question, and so he should since no assumption can be left unturned in philosophy. However, what you find in Heidegger is an anti-metaphysical, or what one might call an uncritical dismissal of philosophies that violate/perpetuate a "metaphysics of presence." This assumption has formed the bedrock of European philosophy for the last century, and on its own merits paints a picture of philosophy unlike anything I would call "philosophy." In fact, it is this very dismissal I take issue with. As such, I disagree with Heidegger's conception of the subject and being-in-the-world. Instead, Husserl offers a much better picture of philosophy's capability to provide insight into the very relations Heidegger denies through his critique of presence. One guiding thought motivating this essay beyond Husserl is that if these are biases of our tradition, then the re-emergence of these biases in the history of ontology might be productive for understanding in the Gadamerian sense of "bias" rather than a historic failing on the canonized metaphysicians of Western thought since Plato.

Heideggerian Proclivities

A philosophy professor once remarked to me that philosophies are relative to a time and place. He made this remark in light of being a historian of philosophy--it was a course in political philosophy. At the time, I never thought about it, but when I explore Heidegger's writings, the theme of his Nazism always arises in me. Yet, it's not in the typical "where-is-the-Nazism-in-Heidegger's-philosophy" routine. Instead, my worry is more directed at myself. For I have a belief that can surface in odd ways, and it worries me to no end sometimes that I will end up like Heidegger.

I have an idea of America that is grandoise, reverent and special to my heart. While I do not think the United States is the best country on earth currently, I believe it very well could be. We have the resources, technology and know-how to do so much good in the world. At the turn of the 21st century, President Bill Clinton gave an interview in which he said the challenge facing America in the 21st century is how America uses its power. As an ethicist, I find myself examining political decisions about our foreign policy (in larger scope than the War on Terror). After examination, I have conluded two general beliefs:

1) The American political tradition and its values constitute the best ideal formation of government and Constitution yet known.

2) Given 1) and the fact that human beings are willing to sacrifice their lives for ideals, it follows that I tentatively approve that 1) entails my approval of policies that use violence in order to protect and enforce the benefit of 1)

Given these two beliefs, it logically follows that I approve of war as long as that war protects 1). Now, I don't know how the War on Terror in Iraq protects 1), but certainly the Taliban's unwillingness to cooperate with the force we were ready to bring upon them for sheltering our enemies has justification in light of 1). Thus, I approve of America's campaign in Afghanistan years ago, and fail to see Iraq's contemporary relevance in service of 1).

I have not mentioned reasons why I support 1), and that could be the subject of an entire post. Among some of these features of esteem, I feel that the separation of powers and prevention of tyranny of one branch of government over others to be a great innovation. Secondly, a continual living constitution protecting minorities from the tyranny of the majority is the second greatest reason. A fully defensible Bill of Rights outlines and protects freedom and equality. These ideals when universalized to excluded populations find sanctuary in the United States, as long as the rule of law and order are preserved in the United States. With all the money and resources, the United States could, if it so chose, develop the sciences in ways that no other nation could. The list is exhaustive for reasons to favor the United States over other countries.

However, the worry comes back. My love for my home country, no matter if Canada treats me well, shines through. I wish for a better America, and if the chance to revitalize the idea and create anew arose, then I would in a heartbeat go back home to usher in a new America. However, I wonder how much Heidegger is in me at the love for America. Ultimately, compatible with 1) and 2) is a belief in the righteous quest for America to spread its values and ways of life to other parts of the globe. If it is even remotely defensible that the current political organizations of states has as its best version the United States, then the role of the United States -- like Rome -- would be to make other people Roman so to speak. This is entirely defensible if America's way of doing things is the best in principle. Now, I don't think I am as naive as Heidegger, but the danger to put my loves first uncritically stands to reason. I favor violence as a means to make the world safer for the best country on earth, and when I say that out loud, I endorse it.

Leiter on Foucault

In a recent post on Leiter's blog, he shares a paper on Foucault he published on SSRN.
I wish to contest a portion of Leiter's text. Rather than specifically arguing for his assertion against Foucault's genealogical method (what I call his socio-historic analyses of various social institutions). On this apparent fatal weakness, Leiter simply asserts:

Yet it is now surely a familiar point in post-Kuhnian philosophy of science that the influence of social and historical factors might be compatible with the epistemically special standing of the sciences as long as we can show that epistemically reliable factors are still central to explaining the claims of those sciences.29 And that possibility is potentially fatal to Foucault's critique. (p. 16)

Mr. Leiter, this is a point you cannot get for free. What I feel you are missing is central to a proper understanding of Foucault, namely, that the sciences are historical activities by human agents. It is not that social and historical factors are alien, and the sciences can be seen as independently from these factors. Instead, science moves in history and culture. It is a human praxis. All that you have done is assert science's independence by philosophical name-dropping, nothing more. Surely, such independence, if won, would be fatal to Foucault's project. On this, there is no doubt. However, the burden of this independence is the very pretension Foucault resists because it is hard to deny the human agency in history and culture.

Moreover, reliability is just a substitute for independent-making feature of science Foucault is analyzing. Let us take an example. Suppose we want to criticize modern day chemistry as implicitly assuming that it is a good thing to master the forces of nature. A historical analysis of the origins of chemistry might tie chemistry to the unlocking of God's secrets in alchemy. Regardless of the reliability of, say, Avogadro's constant for calculating molar masses, the implicit norm of controlling nature is still a feature of the science. The reliability of Avogadro's constant does not negate the cultural and historical norm of controlling nature. Reliability doesn't seem to add anything.

Leiter takes issue with the suspicion Foucault's strategy casts on the special status of the human sciences. For Leiter, suspicion isn't argument, and the lack of substantive proposal is a shortcoming of the genealogical analysis of science through historical and cultural factors.

On the epistemic standing of the current human sciences, all Foucault leaves us with is a suspicion, rather than an argument. Suspicion is, as we have already argued,
epistemically important, but it needs to be supplemented with a critique of the truth of the claims at issue. p. 17

This isn't charitable at all. For Foucault, an interpretation is the argument. It is the whole genealogical aspect of exposing what is implicit through the genealogical method. Perhaps, Foucault is wrong, but meeting Foucault on the grounds of suspicious hermeneutics would, I think, involve showing why Foucault's interpretation is wrong. It seems that Leiter first accepts what Foucault's project is, but fails to meet it head on. Given his editorial supervision of a recent Continental Philosophy anthology, it is reasonable to think Leiter would know what is meant by the hermeneutics of suspicion. He should genuinely show Foucault as committed either to the wrong method completely (challenging this genealogical appropriation of one type of reading of Nietzsche), or committed to offering a different hermeneutics about science (he marginally approaches this with the comments on pedophilia towards the end, but it still remains highly underdeveloped). On the latter, he has nothing to say and on the former he merely asserts a potential fatal shortcoming without really arguing for it, as I have shown above.

Contrary to the tone of this post, I am only aggravated with Leiter. His tone of the essay ends fairly; I only question how he got there in the first place. Certainly, there are features of Foucault that need spelled out by his supporters. However, if we are to take your comments about his work seriously (as demonstrated by a decent exposition on Foucault) than the essential claims of weakness require bolstering of the same type you demand from Foucault's supporters.

Reflections on God and Freedom: A Kantian Answer to Religion and Politics

In the Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky famously declared if God is dead, “then all is permitted.” This is the most famous sentiment for both existential theorists countenancing mankind's existence as contingent and free; on the reverse, Christians underwriting religious conservatism see the liberal challenge of free-thinking atheists as undermining the possibility of a moral world order. For them, while God cannot be dead, endorsing such a view undermines a moral world order necessary for the salvation of humankind. Christians believe that this world will be the eventual fulfillment Christian prophecy, and when that prophecy comes to pass, the stronger the moral world order, the better all our chances are on being on the receiving end of God's promise for salvation. Therefore, one finds politically motivated Christians lining the partisan politics of the Republican Party on major ethical issues from abortion to the death penalty along these lines.

At the outset, I want to be clear. By freedom, I mean not just the politically-loaded term best summarized by Thomas Hobbes as the “absence of external impediments.” External impediments are contrivances of human activity, e.g. imprisonment or depriving of other rights in general. I mean the capacity of individuals to be free in relation to the order of nature itself. Thus, I am not simply talking about those conceptions of freedom of political and moral magnitude. These senses of freedom derive from a larger picture of metaphysical freedom meant here. However, it is also important to mention that this metaphysical sense of freedom is experienced morally.

Orthodox Evangelical Christians advocate that God created mankind and that he gave them free-will. They move from the concept God first to then justify freedom. Within the bounds of this freedom, God suggested a moral code, a way of living that is scripturally-based in what we ought to do. In this view, we are free to transgress against God, and the morality he commands of us. I disagree. I feel that paying attention to the relation of the concepts of God and freedom can shed some light on the overall political motives of the religious right. Ultimately, I argue the reversal of the priority in agreement with Kant. Freedom makes possible our belief in God. This has ramifications for the political story that infuses much of the Evangelical worldview. Like Islam prescribing what ought to be the case in all areas of human life, Evangelical Christians desire what ought to be the case, and such evaluative judgments are undergirded by a religious conceptual story---the concepts of God and freedom. If freedom depends on God, then God can make moral demands on us since he is also the source of the capacity to recognize those moral demands. A person may believe in God is thereby made good on this view.

Reversing the order of freedom to God implies that a person who believes in God is not made good. Instead, a good man must believe in God. In so doing, an awareness of our freedom is needed to make the decision to believe. Any knowing of God must come from our awareness of our freedom, and this is what is meant to subordinate God to the concept of freedom. Kant argues this on purely moral grounds. Our freedom to believe in God secures us from the skepticism that good deeds will have bad outcomes. For the fulfillment of our moral duties requires a belief in the fact that good deeds will have good outcomes. Otherwise, the fulfillment of our duty would severely conflict with the order of things if it is true that good deeds led to the suffering of the innocent and the victimizing of good people.

Issuing from the belief that good deeds lead to good outcomes implies another belief, the end of our short chain of concepts, namely, God. The fact that we believe that good deeds result in good outcomes implies a moral order ensured by God. The moral order is of a different world than the one observed currently. Not believing in the moral world order would admit of despair, and be contrary to our experience of life in general. Thus, Kant can be seen as advocating God qua moral being, and at the very least of the Enlightenment construal, a governor of the world order. On this account, Kant does not think these beliefs about God as a guarantor of a moral world order capable of rational demonstration. Instead, they are “postulates of practical reason.” Since they are not capable of rational proof, Kant is seen as “making room for faith” based solely practical grounds, not theoretical grounds.

As stated above, this reversal of freedom to God has political ramifications, the first being that morality is not dependent on God with respect to its content. Kant can be seen as subjugating all principles to freedom, including God. In this way, morality is a construction and agreement of practical reason, and morality is given an extension, or a lifting up by God. God guarantees the freedom of practical reason to proceed onward by elevating the contingency of human action to the absolute necessity, its categorically bindingness. If God dictated the moral law to us, then we would be no longer free beings, and this removes the capacity of religion to heteronomously impose itself as the standard of right and wrong. Thus, this reversal incapacitates the moral punditry of Evangelicals who wrongly move from the concept God to constraining the bounds of freedom. In addition, a pluralist conception of religion is possible here if the religion in question can integrate this reversal. Moreover, not transgressing the boundary of freedom provides us with a working principle to evaluate religions in a pluralistic climate.

Secondly, by keeping religion in check with reason, the charitable work of religion does with respect to morality can be gleaned as morally valuable, and the faith that engenders such morally valuable actions can be publicly endorsed. On the first, consider a recent conversation I had with a worker of humantrafficking.org. This person told me that much of the work of human-trafficked people and refugee populations in Long Island is done by Catholic Relief Services. Certainly, CRS has its own Catholic mission, but a Kantian perspective allows us to see their work as morally worthy, despite any misgivings we might have of the religious ontology that motivates moral action. In regards to the second feature, many liberals advocate a type of secularism that pits religious citizens against themselves publicly. Such citizens are told to keep their religion to themselves, and their public life is half-alienated between whom they truly are from whom they must present themselves as being. The alienation felt makes people inconsistent within their lives. Such alienation need not endure if the view of religion is kept within the bounds of reason as discussed here. In this way, religion can be made consistent with Kant's “God of freedom” without succumbing to the public alienation one receives in a purely secularized realm of public affairs.

Finally, the political order and institutions have no divine mandate of rational demonstration. Reason is not a tool of faith, nor is faith a tool for theoretical reason since Kant's anti-metaphysical commitments reign in the employment of theoretical reason to never reason beyond the boundaries of experience. Instead, the good will – practical reason – is the ultimate ground on which both the metaphysical impulse of theoretical reason and power of faith turn. For Kant, human life is the center stage of wonder and the moral law. Hence, no scientific proponent of theoretical reason, nor any faith can impose itself as an institution that deprives me of my dignity, my autonomy. I am free, and that is what matters. No matter the directon of political justification, whether liberal technocratic tyranny or conservative religious zealot, no one can override my freedom. Moreover, to act morally is to always presuppose that I act under the capacity of freedom.

A Feminist Commitment

Here's a "Hell Yeah" shout out to Linda Alcoff and Sarah Miraglia for an excellent well put essay on why Palin is not a feminist.

Alcoff and Miraglia essay link

Google Analytics

For a while now, I have been tracking the astounding number of visits I get from people all over the world that come to my blog. I really do want interaction and if you are even not that versed in philosophy, offering up some thought-provoking comment is welcomed. Please introduce yourself. Respond to a post, and know that all thoughts are welcome in that very spirit that drove Socrates to chat it up with friends and strangers alike.

Best,

Vancouver Philosopher.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Dangerous Knowledge Documentary

n my department's list of courses, PHIL 100 is our basic Knowledge and Reality, an introduction into epistemology and metaphysics. On an introductory level, this means Descartes as the often cited introduction to the modern period, and the problems of knowledge conceptually involve some logic and problems of mind inaugurated by Descartes. In this course, they also teach Godel's incompleteness theorem and Turing's "Turing Machine." I've always thought this was a subject way beyond first-year students, and is a completely unfair way to distinguish the few from the rest. Now, I've found a really good documentary on these ideas that gives them a historical context. If you want to watch it, here's the link:

http://www.tv-links.cc/documentary/dangerous-knowledge.htm#

My training in philosophy passes over the importance of Godel and Turing completely. These thinkers are largely mathematicians and physicists, tackling problems I haven't even been trained to encounter. What I am linking here is a documentary that brings down to a level of comprehension as far as the consequences of their ideas, not the content of their ideas. I wanted to offer some thoughts on the documentary since the very same climate that undermined what I would call the classical narratives of order find expression in Nietzsche around the same time of these thinkers. Moreover, thinkers like Marx and Freud in their own way are also developing problems that are critical of these same orders of meaning. For Marx, it is overturning an entire system of economic power, and for Freud, he overturns the idea that we are conscious deliberators in control of our lives showing that what moves human concsiousness are unconscious drives. It is mostly with Nietzsche, the death of God, that concerns me. It is a cultural event with standing significance, mapped on to the heart of what Cantor and company are facing in the documentary.

At this time, old ideas are "slipping away." The very idea of an ordered and regulated cosmos guarantees certainty not only in the realm of predictable natural events. The same guarantee applies to an ordered moral universe. Aquinas and Augustine build a view of the world that sees order applying to both nature and morality. Reason is the power and faculty that discerns the ordered principles set forth by God. Thus, moral truth is ensured by design, and human reason in its finitude is empowered to find these out or intuit them. For the most part, morality is construed as overriding and impartial. It constrains our own wants and desires as well as applying to everyone in the same way. The story of morality, even in its secular form for Nietzsche, is given in the story of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In this way, Nietzsche's critique of morality is launched by encountering the very tradition incipient with it. He does not parse morality qua Kant or morality qua utilitarianism. The same impartiality and overridingness features of morality are birthed from the dominant tradition of the West.

Two things are important now. Not only was Nietzsche an atheist, the metaphysical thesis stating God does not exist, but also he was an anti-theist arguing that belief in God is detrimental to the believer. This comes through on the moral consequence of Christianity, the heart of the attack on God is seen as coming from morality itself. To believe in God makes one at odds with oneself. Morality is often more than not a hindrance to the pursuit of excellence in us. In religion, people are made to interpret the natural impulses of life as either something to be ashamed/repressed, or as something that one becomes alienated against. This honesty and approach to natural impulses of life are sources of value for Nietzsche. Repressing these life-affirming values represses the excellence in our humanity, and this is stated for many reasons, reasons that I won't address here. The productive work of Nietzsche's criticism is to allow for the expression of our excellence. Yet, once the moral guarantor of order is taken out of the picture, nihilism is a consequence, and while Nietzsche pronounced the cultural event of the death of God, so, too, does he wish to overcome the consequent nihilism (a huge misrepresentation of the story often left untouched by his critics, including Christian seminarians).

Like others in the documentary, Nietzsche plays on the precipice. There is much debate about what constitutes a proper interpretation of Nietzsche's provocative aphoristic writing style, yet I feel compelled to draw a further analogy to the documentary about his precipice playing. The most confusing thing about Nietzsche is that his substantive project looks to invent new myths -- the Ubermenschen for instance -- at the expense of overcoming older ones (Christianity). This looks almost religious in a way, yet I think the myth invention, if it can be called that, is at least a perspective endorsed by Nietzsche. For him, truth was perspectival, relative to the discipline or the knower in question, and through mutual contact, these perspectives would dialogue with each other somehow arriving at the truth. Yet, this is never spelled out how it is done, but only expressed as a hope. Like Godel, he thought the incompleteness theorem could be overcame somehow. Nietzsche regarded nihilism as a negative feature, and would dangerously disrupt our well-being. Like many in the documentary, he stares directly into the abyss of this disorder only to find madness at the end of his life.

The purpose of this short post is to suggest that Nietzsche views the same disorder in morality. In addition, I am showing that like others, he desires a type of unity in morality unraveled by shedding older conceptions of morality called into question. This is meant to contextualize the 30 second bit about the death of God in the film, as well as to add my own two cents to the documentary. Moreover, I think this documentary should be viewed by Jonah Goldberg. A best-friend and I have anticipated this intellectually chic work entitled Liberal Fascism. I wanted to see exactly how Goldberg, as a conservative, would interpret people like Nietzsche and Foucault. Goldberg picks up that these people question the status-quo, but I think he misses how inextricably complicated the end of the 19th century is or how nuanced Nietzsche's work is. I felt this documentary actually situates the academic climate quite nicely and perhaps, the story of order slipping away from science, art, literature and philosophy is the reason why so much of what I do in Continental philosophy is filled with what one professor at a conference called "gloppiness" to me. I hope you enjoy it. I know I did.

If artist works are a product of genius, as Kant described, then an artist is someone who has the subjective genius to transcend all time with their work of art. They push past all convention to the point that they break all established rules of composition with their genius. Geniuses present works of the imagination that 'prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e., no [determinate] concept, can be adequate, so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it’ (CJ 314). Thus, the genius transcends our experience of the world with their imagination so much that their work stands the test of time. It has no meaning since it is beyond convention. Yet, I disagree wholeheartedly with this idea.

For me, art works are of cognitive import. They say something, and in the contemporary century, art objects critique the situatedness of their artists. While some works venture to explore, most contemporary artists of good repute use their art to critique, often producing visually disturbing shock value pieces. I know as a philosopher you would hope I am not guilty of assertion, but taking on Aristotelian mimesis from Gadamer without knowing arguments beyond a defense of hermeneutics is a gap that needs more justification. I think I will continue this post and add more to it a little later.

Reflections after McIntyre

I went down to Washington State to the small town of Bellingham. There I sat with a copy of McIntyre's book After Virtue. I completed reading the prologue and preface and found some disagreement and a little agreement. In reading his thoughts, I came to the following conclusions:

Defending liberalism along traditional lines is unsatisfactory. Liberal individualism is an excessive disregard for any common moral language that ties values together since it promotes a problematic view of human beings. The atomism of liberal individualism construes human beings apart from the nurturing and social aspects of community that are needed for morality to exist. Values acquire a salience only in terms of our communal relations.

Moreover, I am having a hard time with liberal excesses of freedom without regard for the type of people we are becoming when we do what liberalism affords as a freedom and a right. Many of our reasons for approving liberal agendas anymore come from the fact that the government should not sanction or restrict a behavior. Government need only ensure through its presence and authority that such restrictions never take shape, yet liberal pundits who argue this are only the inverse of what I find objectionable in conservatives.

Like their counterparts, conservatives restrict too quickly what they view as excesses, and they promote an agenda of restrictive deficiency with respect to our social freedoms. Government only need enforce the deficiencies--there is a space to which government need never venture, preferring to promote social structures as they have always been to the point they are unmalleable and unmanageable. In this way, conservatism is never concerned with what is right as much as it is blindly committed to what benefits the existing power relations.

In both approaches to governance, there is a failure with respect to the national conversation on moral issues. As a moral philosopher, I am concerned with doing the right via what type of people we become. Unless our ultimate ends are fixed together, morality can never take shape. We can never become a better society until people realize that in order for morality to involve others, we must first start with ourselves valuing others. I agree, along with McIntyre, this is why morality has lost its efficacious power to override interests of those that choose against what is moral. In our society, we have lost what the moral ends of our society should be. They were clearer in a Greek polis.

Of course, I am less pessimistic than McIntyre about moral philosophy's independence to deliver the goods on the conversation about what moral ends the United States should strive. The self-appointed function of moral philosophers to be the voice of reason amongst a few comes off first as hubris, yet if others are not going to share the burden of reflection, then any reflective individual -- either philosopher or not -- must burden themselves with the challenge of addressing questions neglected by a national consciousness. There are moral problems that require solving and there are answers. These answers must shape public policy to promote the necessary moral ends for the improvement of the United States at large. In this, yes, you may say that I am a perfectionist, opposed to the Rawlsian procedural secularist who sees that the state should only promote public principles to which everyone may assent. Instead, I see moral matters and community integrally related to such an extent that Rawls' proceduralism purges the meaning of morality if he looks to moral agents as each separately assenting by their own reason. Such an interpretation of agency promotes the unrealistic atomism of individuals. We are more communally-centered than such a conception allows for. Thus, for these reasons, I see morality as an objective evaluation of those ends to which we direct our action, and a necessary component of moral philosophy must center not on the level of action, but instead, we must analyze where we are headed as a people. In this way, I accept more than McIntyre. I see moral philosophy as empowered and capable of answering morally true questions.

A Favorite Davidson Passage

I like this passage by Donald Davidson:

"...however feeble or faulty our attempts to relate these various basic concepts to each other, these attempts fare better and teach us more, than our efforts to produce correct and revealing definitions of basic concepts...For the most part, the concepts philosophers single out for attention, like truth, knowledge, belief, action, cause, the good and the right, are the most elementary concepts we have, without which (I am inclined to say) we would have no concepts at all. Why then should we expect to be able to reduce these concepts definitionally to other concepts that are simpler?"

Donald Davidson, "The Structure and Content of Truth," Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990), p. 267.

Graduation

It has been a while, and I have nothing really philosophical to offer the silent audience of my blog. I will tell you, however, that I have great news. I am graduating. After two years of slugging away at my MA, I have one more milestone to add to my life. I defend my professional paper in a course-based MA this coming Friday, July 25th, 2008. One more to go?