Items Posted by Jim Kalb
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Sun Mar 6 10:29:30 2005
Date: Sun, 6 Mar 2005 10:29:30 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: la
Subject: Re: The neoconservatives and T.S. Eliot
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Bottum says Eliot's looking for the wrong thing, something that by
comparison with the right thing is self-centered and trivial. I always
took the passage as an example of the via negativa, which among other
things is recognition that whatever you explicitly intend to look for
will in fact be the wrong thing by comparison to the reality toward
which you need to orient yourself. So it seems to me the criticism
misses the mark.
jk
On Sun, Mar 06, 2005 at 09:46:47AM -0500, la wrote:
>
> I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope wait without love
> For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
> But the faith and love and hope are all in the waiting.
> Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
> So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
> "This," Bottum concluded, "is not faith's difficult search for understanding, but understanding's impossible search for faith. And all that remains for the poet is a delicate, esthetic, self-conscious almost-spirituality - a detached and wistful watching of himself, watching himself, watching."
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Sun Mar 6 18:07:39 2005
Date: Sun, 6 Mar 2005 18:07:39 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: i
Subject: Re: Waiting for the asteroid
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> An American fascism could assimilate restorationist impulses and package
> them in an archeofuturist cultural form.
What do you mean by "fascism"? I understand it as an attempt to make up
for the dissipation of the transcendent as a socially recognized reality
by by positing something, the State or the People or America or
whatever, as a sort of willed transcendent. But then maybe that's an
idiosyncratic understanding.
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Sun Mar 6 20:03:01 2005
Date: Sun, 6 Mar 2005 20:03:01 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: i
Subject: Re: Waiting for the asteroid
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Well yes, all social order ultimately requires force. Still, force can
only be ancillary. For the most part social order has to involve
voluntary acceptance and cooperation based on what people understand as
right.
So it seems that the project of coercively reconstructing a hegemonic
infrastructure has certain limitations. For starters, it's not likely to
work unless the reconstructors themselves view the proposed hegemonic
infrastructure as standing for truths with a validity independent and
far more fundamental than the needs of reconstruction. And that view of
the hegemonic infrastructure has to be reasonable from the standpoint of
the people. So if the reconstruction that's needed is extensive the
"coercive" part has to be subordinate to the "conversion" part.
Recognizing the transcendent is more fundamental than willing it.
Otherwise it's not the transcendent. So far as I know there's no such
thing as a Straussian elite cleverly and successfully inculcating
understandings of the sacred recognized by the elite as hogwash. It
seems to me that historical fascism failed because it viewed will and
struggle as primary. That means it viewed its own transcendent as
fabricated rather than self-existent and so independent of pragmatic
success. It was an attempt to create a social order that pulls itself up
by its own bootstraps by really trying hard and making the process as
dramatic as possible.
jk
On Sun, Mar 06, 2005 at 04:10:35PM -0800, i wrote:
> I define fascism as the coercive reconstruction of the hegemonic infrastructure.
>
> There is an element of "willed transcendent" in it, but every healthy community has to will the transcendent to some extent, or live off accumulated past will.
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Mon Mar 7 09:49:27 2005
Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2005 09:49:27 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: eg
Subject: Re: A Pagan Heresy in Mexico
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Indeed interesting. The SM cult takes lifesyle inclusiveness to a new
level with the criminal lifestyle. Someone should tell Frank Griswold
about that one. I especially like the "death to my enemies" votive
candles.
jk
> Here's an interesting Reuters story reprinted in the Wash. Times about
> Santa Muerte (Saint Death) whose cult is becoming very popular in Mexico.
>
> http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20050304-112812-8799r.htm
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Mon Mar 7 13:10:53 2005
Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2005 13:10:53 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: eg
Subject: Re: A Pagan Heresy in Mexico
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The Pope has many virtues but he's never been interested in his basic
job as pope, governing the Church. The go-with-the-flow approach the
Church adopted at Vatican II hasn't been prospering, and some of the
cardinals have noticed. So maybe the next pope.
jk
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Tue Mar 8 06:18:36 2005
Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2005 06:18:36 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: i
Subject: Re: Waiting for the asteroid
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There's nothing specifically Cartesian about the idea that in the
beginning was the Word rather than the Deed, or that contemplation is
higher than action, or that the function of the king is to discern and
establish the justice implicit in the nature of things. The idea that
putting the Word before the Deed requires a complete plan based on
complete knowledge is based on the idea that the Word can be relevant to
us only if we can fully possess and specify it here and now, and to the
extent it transcends us it simply doesn't exist for us.
jk
On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 07:27:08PM -0800, i wrote:
> I reject the Cartesian model that we must have a complete plan, based on complete knowledge, before we can act.
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Tue Mar 8 06:25:59 2005
Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2005 06:25:59 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: i
Subject: Re: Waiting for the asteroid
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Race is already maleable since I could have children by a Chinese woman
or adopt a Hottentot child. Certainly it seems that it will be possible
to get rid of genetic defects with genetic engineering. The issue I
suppose is whether it will be possible to produce a super designer race
that's better than any race that actually exists. That seems to me less
clear. Artificial societies and languages haven't turned out well
although before they were tried lots of people thought they were the
obviously rational coming thing. Why should artificial races do better?
jk
> OK. What are traditionalists going to do when genetic engineering make race maleable in another generation? It almost certainly will be.
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Tue Mar 8 09:49:43 2005
Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2005 09:49:43 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: pg
Subject: Re: Waiting for the asteroid
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Agreed it wasn't intended to express anything demonic. I interpreted it
as intended to express the modern anti-transcendent condition and the
corresponding transition from contemplation to activity suggested by
Faust's abandonment of bookishness (which included, as he says, "leider
Theologie"). i's fascism, to the extent I understand it, appears to me
an example of the same thing.
My own view, to speak in grandiose terms, is that the Deed can't
possibly precede the Word. The Deed is mindless brute fact and can't
interpet itself or point anywhere except by reference to an
authoritative scheme of meaning. So contemplation is necessarily
superior to action. As I understand fascism it can't work.
jk
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Tue Mar 8 21:34:00 2005
Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2005 21:34:00 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: i
Subject: Re: Waiting for the asteroid
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Agreed they must accompany each other, at least for us. It seems to me
though that logos has to be understood as the more basic and
authoritative part of the assemblage. And your description of the
positing of a community strikes me as the description of a skeptical
outsider. It wouldn't be the description of those involved unless one of
them happened to be a demigod acting as lawgiver.
jk
> Word and action go together. And some deeds are intellectual anyway, as in the positing of a community by an act of imaginative cultural creation from the materials of the usable past.
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Wed Mar 9 08:13:12 2005
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2005 08:13:12 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: la
Subject: Re: Ilana Mercer: The International Highway to Hell
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Kipling's Ex-Clerk (from Epitaphs of the War):
Pity not! The Army gave
Freedom to a timid slave:
In which Freedom did he find
Strength of body, will and mind:
By which strength he came to prove
Mirth, Companionship and Love:
For which Love to Death he went:
In which Death he lies content.
jk
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Wed Mar 9 11:55:11 2005
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2005 11:55:11 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: ci
Subject: Re: Waiting for the asteroid
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I was talking about intentions. From the standpoint of intention it
could just have been error. And I wanted to talk about it from the
standpoint of truth and falsity, correct and incorrect analysis.
jk
> So why isn't it demonic when Faust says, in the beginning was the Deed. He
> is usurping the Word altogether.
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Fri Mar 11 15:43:49 2005
Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 15:43:49 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: la
Bcc: jbk@kalb.ath.cx
Subject: Re: I still don't really understand
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Liberalism is the abolition of the transcendent. The abolition of the
transcendent abolishes all realities other than our own feelings and
actions. Other things are beyond us at least to some degree, and
whatever is beyond us is to that extent nothing for us.
That means that our only possible guides are (1) desire, (2) technical
ability to bring about what we desire, and (3) content-free formal
conceptions like equality. Those guides are wholly adequate, because (1)
value simply amounts to desire, (2) things have no reality for us other
than their effect on our experiences and our ability to manipulate them
for the sake of the experiences we desire, (3) our only resource for
bringing desire and the conditions of its satisfaction into a
comprehensive system, and thus establishing an overall morality and a
rationally justified social order, is formal logic.
So the abolition of the transcendent -- liberalism -- logically leads to
a conception of society as a vast machine that treats absolutely
everything as a resource for the rational equal satisfaction of desire.
Another way of putting it: life, death, sex, religion and so on by their
nature touch on things that go beyond us. It follows that to the extent
one accepts the abolition of the transcendent he can't understand them
and will try to pretend they aren't there or treat them as if they were
something other than what they are. Contract and bureaucratic
administration are the ways we aggregate desires and integrate them with
the practical realities of bringing about the satisfaction of desire. It
follows that to the liberal they constitute the whole of social life.
Example: for the liberal there's no God, just a subjective sense of
sacredness and whatever practices that inspires. ECUSA, a liberal
institution, is therefore wholly determined by whatever is agreed on at
General Convention (contract) plus whatever the religious bureaucracy
comes up with.
jk
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Sat Mar 12 12:14:25 2005
Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2005 12:14:25 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: mf
Subject: Re: Transcendence and technocracy
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Can it really be a straw man when (as you say) after all this time, when
liberalism is fully victorious and has presumably attained its immanent
telos, it's true in effect? If a proposition is true in effect it seems
I should be able to use it in a valid analysis.
Most ordinary people it seems to me are mostly either practical atheists
or confused. If you mediate the transcendent though freedom and equality
-- if you treat is as simply a feeling some people have that's no better
and no worse than any other feeling -- you deprive it of transcendence.
I can't distinguish that from abolishing it. And historical liberalism
-- liberalism as a system of attitudes, beliefs, institutions etc.
actually existing at some particular time in the past -- is of course
different from liberalism as the principle that determines how conflicts
within such a system shall be decided or liberalism as the purified
system that arises when liberal principles are repeatedly applied to
resolve social disputes over a period of several centuries. I was
talking about the last, which is pretty much today's advanced
liberalism. I felt justified in doing that because it's what we have and
because it seems to me implicit in liberal principle as such.
The most question I think is why freedom and equality have become the
ultimate political standards. Those are wholly formal goods. Why would
those things be chosen as the ultimate standards unless men had decided
that substantive transcendent standards are unavailable?
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Sat Mar 12 20:09:41 2005
Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2005 20:09:41 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: la
Subject: Re: Transcendence and technocracy
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Effects are not irrelevant to essences. By their fruits shall ye know
them. Truth is that upon which inquiry converges. If the liberal
tradition converges on something that in retrospect is understood by
liberals as the obvious and necessary fruition and goal of liberalism,
then that's good reason for thinking that thing was always implicit in
liberalism.
>> Most ordinary people it seems to me are mostly either practical atheists
>> or confused.
> I personally know very few practical atheists, although I know lots of
> universalists and indifferentists. You might counter that a universalist
> is an atheist in disguise, but he doesn't think so.
The point of speaking of "practical atheism" is that the practical
atheist doesn't understand it as such.
>> If you mediate the transcendent though freedom and equality
>> -- if you treat is as simply a feeling some people have that's no better
>> and no worse than any other feeling -- you deprive it of transcendence.
>> I can't distinguish that from abolishing it.
>The distinction is between cause and effect, and most ordinary liberals
>do not see that adopting freedom and equal rights as the political
>ground rules leads to a de-facto abolition of the transcendent. It has
>been a background understanding of your writing for as long as I've
>known you, but it was not at all obvious to me before then.
Don't understand. Why is the obvious the same as the true?
>> The most question I think is why freedom and equality have become the
>> ultimate political standards. Those are wholly formal goods. Why would
>> those things be chosen as the ultimate standards unless men had decided
>> that substantive transcendent standards are unavailable?
>I am sure there are a number of reasons we could analyze, but one of
>them is surely the belief that taking transcendent standards seriously
>as such and in themselves, unmediated by freedom and equal rights, leads
>to despotism and tyranny. It isn't that transcendent standards are
>unavailable but that the King will abuse them and enslave everyone for
>his own selfish purposes in their name unless their exercise is always
>mediated through the liberal institutions of freedom and equal rights.
>(Replace "the king" with whatever oppressor applies at the moment, of
>course). Liberalism is basically the post-reformation replacement for
>the pre-reformation papacy.
If you believe that to recognize a principle as valid is to believe that
one fully possesses the meaning and application of the principle, and
can specify and enforce exactly what it requires, then what you say
makes some sense. But one would not believe such a thing unless one had
already abandoned the idea of the transcendent, which idea implies that
the things one recognizes as valid and toward which one must orient
oneself are not altogether within one's grasp.
Totalitarianism, and also fear of totalitarianism, are consequences of
the abolition of the transcendent. Basically, the point is that the
transcendent outranks the king just as it outranks everyone else. If
there's no transcendent then you still need a practical substitute and
either the king's will or one's own will or obsessions are the obvious
substitutes that come to mind.
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Mon Mar 14 06:15:59 2005
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2005 06:15:59 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: la
Subject: Re: Transcendence and technocracy
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> On the other hand, there is truth in what Matt is saying, that for
> many liberals, the transcendent is still alive in some form.
> So I guess the answer is, yes, the transcendent has been abolished--in
> some fundamental sense. We need to clarify what sense that is. And the
> transcendent still exists--in some sense. We have to clarify what that
> is.
I distinguish among:
1. Liberalism as a large number of actually-existing systems, whether of
human society or personal belief (e.g., classical liberalism, Eleanor
Roosevelt's outlook on things).
2. Liberalism as the principle of decision viewed as trumps, so that if
there's a dispute that principle eventually determines what the answer
will be.
3. Liberalism as the social order implied by (2), toward which the
actually-existing systems (1) will increasingly approximate over time.
The trancendent doesn't exist in (2) or (3) but it's necessarily present
in (1) because nothing can actually exist without the transcendent.
> I think it is the belief that what free and equal individuals will
> should prevail in politics.
But liberalism is not the same as democracy. Within liberalism there are
authoritative principles that trump the political choices of free and
equal individuals. In classical liberalism those included e.g. property
rights. In contemporary liberalism they include e.g. sexual autonomy
including the right to abortion. The concern is not simply negative.
Classical liberal states actively promoted prosperity in various ways,
they built roads and harbors and established patent offices and whatnot,
and contemporary liberal states fund abortion and train schoolchildren
in sexual autonomy. So liberalism is never simply procedural. It always
protects and promotes the characteristic way of acting of a particular
type of man. In the classical case it's the acquisitive man, in the
contemporary case the hedonistic man. That man's interests trump popular
will. So it seems that the evil guarded against is the possibillity that
the laws might give something else precedence.
To say that liberalism is really the liberalism of fear, that it's
really a system intended to make certain evils impossible, is not to say
it doesn't have an implicit understanding of what's good for man. You
can't understand evil without understanding good.
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Tue Mar 15 16:41:11 2005
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 16:41:11 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: la
Subject: Re: Educators Differ on Why Boys Lag in Reading
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That's a point.
Young people seem less adventurous and inquitive today generally. At
least that's my impression. One thing I've connected it to is all the
electronics. Why explore the world when you have videogames.
jk
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Wed Mar 16 10:22:33 2005
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2005 10:22:33 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: la
Subject: Re: Educators Differ on Why Boys Lag in Reading
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The issue deserves some sort of survey. General lack of interest in
reading is one example, the rise of sci-fi etc. would be another, the
disintegration of literary studies would be a third. There's no larger
reality we're all already part of that literature can be about.
jk
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Wed Mar 16 11:04:15 2005
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2005 11:04:15 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: k
Subject: Re: Why advancing democracy in Mideast may further isolate Israel
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On Wed, Mar 16, 2005 at 10:36:07AM -0500, k wrote:
> They both talked about what Afghanistan was like before the civil war
> started up in the mid 1970s. To hear them, it was paradise on Earth. A
> bit primitive in places, maybe, but basically a nice place to live.
It wasn't bad. It was quite poor, of course, but there didn't seem to be
a lot of extreme deprivation or oppression. There also wasn't much
extreme wealth, so no-one could flaunt it. If you talked to a random
Afghan about the place he was from he'd describe it as heaven on earth
-- good air, water, fruit and whatnot, not at all like some other place
he had been.
The people had a lot of dignity, in the end backed perhaps by the
Hobbesian thought that all men are equal because any man can kill any
other man. When someone entered an Afghan office for any purpose he'd
shake hands all round, it was just the custom. In the market you'd never
hear abusive language, the max was "go get lost" and that was unusual
and usually involved with bad-mannered children. In Iran you'd hear
references to someone's unusual connection with his sister, expressed in
extremely concrete language.
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Thu Mar 17 13:56:44 2005
Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2005 13:56:44 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: la
Subject: Re: Sculpture in Denver park, pro-multicultural and anti-white male--must be seen to be believed
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Somehow I can't help but think that there's something more general than
the peculiarities of liberal Christianity here. It seems that if there
is no creator God whose creations are justified by the fact that he
created them then all finite existence is an act of injustice. After
all, just by being finite it leaves things out and just by existing when
it could have been otherwise it suppresses other possibilities and so
commits violence. Without the footing in ultimate reality provided by
the concept of Creation the world seems to become an illusion, as in
some oriental speculations. On that view to exist would be to assert the
reality of the illusion.
jk
On Thu, Mar 17, 2005 at 12:06:02PM -0500, la wrote:
> You've made a key concession. Suicidal liberalism is Christianity with
> God removed. So don't blame Christianity. Blame the modern Western
> rebellion against God.
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Fri Mar 18 12:29:11 2005
Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2005 12:29:11 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: la
Subject: Re: Shiavo
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I haven't followed the ins and outs of the case. I'm not sure though
that interpretations of motive would play much of a role in proceedings.
My guess is that it's fairly mechanical: the court believes some expert
who says she's PVS as defined in Florida law, and then her properly
appointed guardian can decide what happens based on his understanding of
her best interests and wishes. "Right of privacy" means "people other
than the designated decider don't get involved in the substance," and
that seems to be the category "right to die" cases are filed under.
Obviously when the decision is made to pull the plug it's generally to
the financial advantage of the family members most closely connected so
that can't be a disqualification even if someone else in the family
comes in and says the guardian's a jerk.
jk
On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 11:46:30AM -0500, la wrote:
> But if his motives are so blatantly questionable, why have the
> authorities supported him?
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Fri Mar 18 15:31:50 2005
Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2005 15:31:50 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: la
Subject: Re: Sculpture in Denver park, pro-multicultural and anti-white male--must be seen to be believed
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But his logos Was impersonal and I don't think it actually created
anything. It seems you need a personal creator God, one that does
particular things by choice, for particular existents to have a solid
justification for existing. Otherwise their partiality and suppression
of other equally good possibilities means that in justice they have to
be swept away.
jk
On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 03:03:55PM -0500, la wrote:
>
> Heraclitus said existence was a form of injustice, didn't he?
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Sun Mar 20 20:06:53 2005
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2005 20:06:53 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: la
Subject: Re: Levin's questionable attack on "judicial activism"
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No special comment. My guess knowing nothing about the book is that
Levin takes off after actual cases in recent times in which the Court
has made up its own constitution and then tries to strengthen his case
by claiming that all the Bad Racist Decisions of the past were examples
of the same thing. The latter is a standard rhetorical maneuver among
mainstream conservatives.
I agree that "judicial activism" isn't that illuminating a phrase. I
suppose it's intended to describe cases in which courts do something new
and make use of legal authorities in unintended ways to bring about
things they like as a policy matter. Maybe "judicial legislation" would
be better. I have no objection to Scalia's terms.
jk
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Mon Mar 21 13:37:05 2005
Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2005 13:37:05 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: la
Subject: Re: Is the human belief in God and eternal life a merely human wish, or a reflection of reality?
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My big comment is that all the smart guys today say they reject
correspondence theories of truth. And people who philosophize about
science like to avoid ontological commitments and say that the point of
hypothesizing theoretical entities like neutrons or the Big Bang is to
organize observations and enable prediction through model construction
that has no intrinsic connection to any intelligibility outside the
model and its usefulness. In short, all the smart guys try very hard to
defer ultimate issues endlessly. That way they don't have to get
involved in weird stuff they don't fully understand and can't control.
Materialistic atheism is 19th century.
It seems to me what you want to say probably doesn't require saying
"science is about ultimate reality and it's something we do in response
to our needs so the fact something responds to our needs doesn't mean
it's not about ultimate reality." You may just want to say "talking
about God has the same status as talking about neutrons or for that
matter in the end (since our understanding of ourselves depends on our
understanding of other things) talking about ourselves and our own
thoughts and desires."
jk
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Tue Mar 22 11:52:46 2005
Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 11:52:46 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: bc
Subject: Re: Times denounces special Schiavo law
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1. I thought one of the big issues was whether she is actually in a PVS
as defined by Florida law. Looking at the videos that seems an absurd
claim.
2. I thought the Florida legislature passed some special law ("Terri's
Law") a year or so ago that was supposed to save Mrs. Schiavo but the
Fla courts said it was no good because it was an attempt to change a
particular court ruling. It's also not obvious the court is really
applying the legislative definition of PVS. So it's not clear why the
Times says Congress is riding roughshod over the Fla legislature. (I
should say I really haven't looked into the legal issues though.)
3. There's lots of private legislation. When I used to have to read new
tax legislation I always wished there were a key so you could tell who
specifically they were talking about in the complicated descriptions of
who it was who would benefit from this or that special transition rule.
I'm sure this particular kind of private legislation is quite unusual
though.
4. Agreed nonetheless that this is no way to make law. Still, maybe
legal oddities that don't seem likely to be carried forward and made
general principles can be justified for dealing with an outrageous
situation if it's outrageous enough.
jk
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Fri Mar 25 17:33:34 2005
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2005 17:33:34 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: la
Subject: Re: The Transcendental Box
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It's hard to tell where things stand in the discussion. i says that
everyone has to posit some values. Is that the same as saying that
everyone must treat some values as inherently true? If so it seems i
is saying that no one can be a nihilist in l's sense. If not, an
account of what it is to posit something as a value without viewing it
as inherently good would help. Do people say "I know that there's no
prior reason to think there's anything inherently good about having as
large a collection of empty peanut butter jars as possible, but I'm
going to posit that as a value, and my positing it will convert it into
something I'll be able to use to determine e.g. what actions are
justified and what aren't."
jk
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Fri Mar 25 19:19:26 2005
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2005 19:19:26 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: la
Subject: Re: The Transcendental Box
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It's hard to know how to sort this out. Why talk about "values" at all
unless they are different at least in concept from what someone happens
to want and choose? When i says "no man can fail to posit value in
some manner" does he simply mean that no man can avoid having
preferences or making choices? But if more is meant what is the
additional factor that (it appears) goes beyond the man's preferences
and choices but falls short of what the man sees as objectively good?
Rawls's views I think are complicated or at least involve obfuscation
so I don't want to deal with them as an example on this point.
jk
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Fri Mar 25 19:38:02 2005
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2005 19:38:02 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: eg
Subject: Re: Michael Walker, Scorpion, and the New Right
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I've got a piece on Walker, the Scorpion and the ENR at
http://www.amren.com/0309issue/0309issue.html#article1
He's somewhat of a pagan-symp I think but not actually a pagan. He
puzzles over things, likes the idea of action, and is a big Nietzsche
fan. You or somebody else will have to figure out what if anything
Benoist believes in the end about paganism or anything else.
The basic complaint is that Christianity is egalitarian and
universalizing so it has to be done away with in favor of something
this-worldly and truly particularistic that re-enchants the world around
us. They think ancient paganism did all that because there were multiple
local ethnic or civic gods and they would like somehow to have an
updated and probably much more philosophical version of that.
I don't really take any of it seriously although they say some
interesting things from time to time. There's some stuff on the ENR at
http://foster.20megsfree.com/index_en.htm
jk
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Fri Mar 25 21:17:04 2005
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2005 21:17:04 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: la
Subject: Re: The Transcendental Box
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An amoeba has preferences, so it seems he must mean more than that. I
suppose he might be using "choice" to refer to something with a
conceptual element, so "value" might mean something like "general
principle of action." Then your point would be that someone might choose
or posit a general principle of action arbitrarily, or simply because he
found he happened to like that particular principle.
Neither makes much sense to me. Does anyone ever actually pick a totally
arbitrary principle and then follow it? Why bother following it? And as
to doing X because it accords with principle Y and at the time of acting
one happens to like principle Y, I don't see why it constitutes having a
principle at all. How is it different in any way that matters from doing
X simply because it's X and one likes X?
It's silly for me to puzzle like this, though. i will have to speak
for himself on the point whether the positing of values he thinks is
necessary includes viewing them as having some sort of objective
validity not dependent on the positing.
jk
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Sat Mar 26 09:46:54 2005
Date: Sat, 26 Mar 2005 09:46:54 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: la
Subject: Re: The Transcendental Box
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I think you're right about the complexity. About your hypothetical "if
you dig it go for it" guy I suppose I'd say that even if he just digs it
because he digs it he's still proposing an objective principle, the
principle that what one digs is the best guide for what one does. He's
not just reporting "I happen to dig the principle of people doing what
they dig," he's proposing the principle as an objectively valid norm.
jk
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
From kalb@aya.yale.edu Sat Mar 26 10:42:38 2005
Date: Sat, 26 Mar 2005 10:42:38 -0500
From: Jim Kalb
To: i
Subject: Re: The Transcendental Box
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An interesting thought, but who are the practitioners? i doesn't think
Nietzsche was one. Negative theologians and mystics contemplate the
negative to make room for the absolutely positive. Kafka's
Hungerkuenstler and Samuel Beckett's characters are literary conceits.
There are also various Buddhists but I don't know anything about them.
jk
> The discipline of nothingness is actually a high discipline.
--
Jim Kalb
Turnabout: http://jkalb.org
Do let me know if you have comments of any kind.
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