You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Philosophy’ tag.
(Photo: Brittanica)
How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany’s greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack? Overrated in his prime, bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now, the pretentious old Black Forest babbler makes one wonder whether there’s a university-press equivalent of wolfsbane, guaranteed to keep philosophical frauds at a distance.
To be sure, every philosophy reference book credits Heidegger with one or another headscratcher achievement. One lauds him for his “revival of ontology” …Another cites his helpful boost to phenomenology by directing our focus to that well-known entity, Dasein, or “Human Being”… A third praises his opposition to nihilism, an odd compliment for a conservative, nationalist thinker whose antihumanistic apotheosis of ruler over ruled helped grease the path of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.
Next month Yale University Press will issue an English-language translation of Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy, by Emmanuel Faye, an associate professor at the University of Paris at Nanterre. It’s the latest, most comprehensive archival assault on the ostensibly magisterial thinker who informed Freiburg students in his infamous 1933 rectoral address of Nazism’s “inner truth and greatness,” declaring that “the Führer, and he alone, is the present and future of German reality, and its law.”
Carlin Romano
The Chronicle of Higher Education
From a review of Susan Nieman’s “Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists”:
It is very hard to write well about ethics, and especially so in a way that engages and interests that elusive phantom of writers’ imaginations, the general reader…like its predecessor, “Moral Clarity” is a sustained defense of a particular set of values, and of a moral vocabulary that enables us to express them. Neiman sees these values as neglected or threatened all along the political spectrum. They received their strongest defenses in the moral thought of the Enlightenment, in David Hume and Adam Smith, but more particularly in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. So the book is not only a moral polemic, but a powerful argument in support of the resources that these Enlightenment figures left us. Neiman, an American who is currently the director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin, boldly asserts that when Marxism, postmodernism, theory and fundamentalism challenge the Enlightenment they invariably come off second best. I agree, and I wish more people did so.
Neiman’s Enlightenment is not the hyperbolic ideology detected by some critics. It is not the unthinking worship of science, the materialistic, technological ideology that upset the Romantics and continues to upset their followers. It is not an unthinking confidence in the human capacity for knowledge, and still less in human perfectibility and unending progress. On the other hand, neither is it merely an expression of liberty, a resistance to unearned authority and the discovery of tolerance, which, she argues, provides too pallid an ideology to tempt people away from the superstitions and fundamentalisms that promise them more. It is rather an attitude encapsulated in four virtues: happiness, reason, reverence and hope. The moral clarity of her title is therefore not the ability to calculate answers to the practical conundrums that life sets us. It is rather the ability to see life in ways infused with these categories: to cherish happiness, to respect reason, to revere dignity and to hope for a better future.
It may seem surprising that we could need reminding of these things, but a foray into an airport bookstore, or a trip around any gallery of contemporary art, would show how far our culture would have to move before it gets back to being comfortable with them. To take just one significant example that Neiman highlights, the current value placed on being a “victim,” and the glorification of victims as heroes, should be seen as a denial of human freedom and dignity, a denial of happiness and a barrier against hope.
Although her philosophical heroes are associated with the secular character of the Enlightenment, Neiman is deeply respectful of religious traditions and religious writings, and rightly dismissive of the kind of brash atheism that confidently insists there is no good in them. On the other hand, following Plato, she does not see ethics as the distinct preserve of the faithful. Instead, she writes, “religion is rather a way of trying to give shape and structure to the moral concepts that are embedded in our lives.” Her most profound engagement with a religious text is with the Book of Job, the confrontation with natural evil and injustice that conditioned almost all the subsequent contortions of theology.
Philosophically, one of the deepest discussions in the book is Neiman’s appropriation of Kant’s doctrine of freedom. This is a notoriously treacherous area, but Neiman correctly aligns it with the human capacity for noticing or inventing (it does not necessarily matter which) possibilities for action. As well as whatever is the case, we have what might be the case, or what we could make come about, as well as what ought to be the case. Freedom, in the sphere of action, is therefore associated with a refusal to accept that what is the case limits and constrains our possibility for doing the other thing, surprising the psychologist, as it were. If the biological scientist comes along and tells us that we are all selfish, we do not need to conduct surveys and build laboratories to disprove it. We just need to remember that it is open to us to tip the waitress although we will never see her again, or to refuse to comply with the unjust demand to condemn the innocent who is accused of some crime, even if it would benefit us to agree. If the biological scientist says that it is against human nature to do these things, we have it in our hands to refute him on the spot. If on the other hand he retreats to saying that doing them is just a disguise for selfishness, first, it is not clear that he is doing science anymore, and second, we can properly reply that if so it is the disguise, and not our supposed true nature, that matters to the waitress or the innocent who is accused. Theories about how moral education works are not nearly as important as we tend to think, provided we can keep our confidence that such education can work. The problem with our contemporary “scientism” about human nature is that too often it half convinces us that it cannot, and thus, Neiman says, helps dissolve both reverence and hope.
In other words, like its predecessor, “Moral Clarity” is a sustained defense of a particular set of values, and of a moral vocabulary that enables us to express them. Neiman sees these values as neglected or threatened all along the political spectrum. They received their strongest defenses in the moral thought of the Enlightenment, in David Hume and Adam Smith, but more particularly in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. So the book is not only a moral polemic, but a powerful argument in support of the resources that these Enlightenment figures left us. Neiman, an American who is currently the director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin, boldly asserts that when Marxism, postmodernism, theory and fundamentalism challenge the Enlightenment they invariably come off second best. I agree, and I wish more people did so.
Neiman’s Enlightenment is not the hyperbolic ideology detected by some critics. It is not the unthinking worship of science, the materialistic, technological ideology that upset the Romantics and continues to upset their followers. It is not an unthinking confidence in the human capacity for knowledge, and still less in human perfectibility and unending progress. On the other hand, neither is it merely an expression of liberty, a resistance to unearned authority and the discovery of tolerance, which, she argues, provides too pallid an ideology to tempt people away from the superstitions and fundamentalisms that promise them more. It is rather an attitude encapsulated in four virtues: happiness, reason, reverence and hope. The moral clarity of her title is therefore not the ability to calculate answers to the practical conundrums that life sets us. It is rather the ability to see life in ways infused with these categories: to cherish happiness, to respect reason, to revere dignity and to hope for a better future.
It may seem surprising that we could need reminding of these things, but a foray into an airport bookstore, or a trip around any gallery of contemporary art, would show how far our culture would have to move before it gets back to being comfortable with them. To take just one significant example that Neiman highlights, the current value placed on being a “victim,” and the glorification of victims as heroes, should be seen as a denial of human freedom and dignity, a denial of happiness and a barrier against hope.
Although her philosophical heroes are associated with the secular character of the Enlightenment, Neiman is deeply respectful of religious traditions and religious writings, and rightly dismissive of the kind of brash atheism that confidently insists there is no good in them. On the other hand, following Plato, she does not see ethics as the distinct preserve of the faithful. Instead, she writes, “religion is rather a way of trying to give shape and structure to the moral concepts that are embedded in our lives.” Her most profound engagement with a religious text is with the Book of Job, the confrontation with natural evil and injustice that conditioned almost all the subsequent contortions of theology.
Philosophically, one of the deepest discussions in the book is Neiman’s appropriation of Kant’s doctrine of freedom. This is a notoriously treacherous area, but Neiman correctly aligns it with the human capacity for noticing or inventing (it does not necessarily matter which) possibilities for action. As well as whatever is the case, we have what might be the case, or what we could make come about, as well as what ought to be the case. Freedom, in the sphere of action, is therefore associated with a refusal to accept that what is the case limits and constrains our possibility for doing the other thing, surprising the psychologist, as it were. If the biological scientist comes along and tells us that we are all selfish, we do not need to conduct surveys and build laboratories to disprove it. We just need to remember that it is open to us to tip the waitress although we will never see her again, or to refuse to comply with the unjust demand to condemn the innocent who is accused of some crime, even if it would benefit us to agree. If the biological scientist says that it is against human nature to do these things, we have it in our hands to refute him on the spot. If on the other hand he retreats to saying that doing them is just a disguise for selfishness, first, it is not clear that he is doing science anymore, and second, we can properly reply that if so it is the disguise, and not our supposed true nature, that matters to the waitress or the innocent who is accused. Theories about how moral education works are not nearly as important as we tend to think, provided we can keep our confidence that such education can work. The problem with our contemporary “scientism” about human nature is that too often it half convinces us that it cannot, and thus, Neiman says, helps dissolve both reverence and hope.
Simon Blackburn
New York Times
I find cooking to be very calming, even in the rush of it all for business. I think about the combinations of ingredients and the anticipated delight of the diner. From my own philosophical experience, I try to be aware of the good, the true and the beautiful in all endeavors – including cooking. A lot to ask from an item to be consumed but I hope that I’m paying attention. I want to be aware of that first sip of good tea, coffee or wine and note that I should pay attention because this is good. It likely seems like fuzzy philosophy but being open to the ineffable is being open to delight. Or is that a tautology? In any case, I don’t see cooking as a vacation from philosophy but the action can put me in a state of mind where thinking is clearer. In some ways, having the mise en place kind of discipline is very Kantian in that there is a great deal of freedom arising through the discipline. I can’t have chaos in the kitchen, and I clean as I go. I hope that because of that discipline that I can make culinary ideological leaps as well…Although there is great freedom offered in Nietzsche and great process can be learned from Kant, neither would likely be much good in a kitchen – not to trivialize. It’s somewhere between the chaos and the control.
Karen Peters, by way of Elatia Harris
3 Quarks Daily
Slow Painting 