The American Christian spectrum of churches is in grave danger, as is global Christianity, despite its remaining hold in many areas of globalizing modernity. The secular tide is inexorable, and yet the American case seems an exception as a hideous right-wing brand or brands seems to be on the increase. Sociologists by and large, as far as I can tell, seem to be documenting otherwise, but whatever the case the long-range of history suggests the growing tide of ‘secularism’, and the progressive passing away of Christianity, however regressive the American case might be. It is doubtful to me that the right could do more than a temporary come back followed by renewed waning. One good reason among others is the sheer poverty of the evangelical abortion of religion, with theory and the right to own arms mixed up a toxic brew that can do little but create theological cripples. Continue reading ” The Christian fraud: an exit strategy?”
Tag: Kant
The mystery of Schopenhauer, one of the greatest philosophers in history
Update: I will have to pass for the nonce on the rest of this interesting essay with a useful set of books. The gulf between hoary transcendental idealism and William James is a challenge to a new kind of synthesis.
This is an interesting essay about which I might comment separately but I would take issue with the strange judgment of Schopenhauer as long-winded: he is one of the greatest stylists in the history of philosophy: His work clarified the work of Kant who has to be the one who is long-winded and posed a challenge to Hegel as muddled-headed and who is far beyond the realm of the engaging but shallow William James. The US has no philosophers who come anywhere near this. I would not otherwise pass judgment save to note that Hegel and Marx are notorious for their strange styles, where Schopenhauer is breezy yet profound about the core of transcendental idealism (poorly so named) with its direct assault on the riddle of consciousness, mind and the categories of perception. He took on perhaps the greatest challenge to clarity you could imagine and beautifully did the almost impossible. Unfortunately he was a conservative but with no influence thus on his basic and brilliant clarification of the greatest advance in philosophy since Plato achieved by Kant. He did not explicate Kant’s ethics however, his stance being somehow up in the air. Schopenhauer was the rival pole in the Hegel constellation and his ruthless critique remains important given the way Hegel, some think, cheapened Kant with his elimination of the noumenal to the handclap of the peanut gallery of American philosophy. Who can judge such figures? Schopenhauer was immensely influential in the later nineteenth century but is less considered now. That is unfortunate but his legacy endures because sooner or later the study of philosophy must exist in a Platonic universe. Marxists will protest this but consider the way Marx wrecked his great achievement with the cheap metaphysics of scientism. Hegel is also unsafe to dismiss save in relation to Kant. Marx rightly vented his fury at conservatives, but in the process triggered a futile debate over idealism.
“The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.”[1] This is William James at the beginning of the 20th century. He was ruminating on the relationship between language and perception because he was trying to figure out how to convince people accustomed to a large amount of metaphysics in their lives that “pure experience” was much better. Radical Empiricism was his answer to long-winded perorations like Schopenhauer’s The World As Will. There is no need to posit an abstract entity beneath the world that we perceive. The directly apprehended universe is substantial enough. It does not need extraneous support.
Source: Control Over Capitalism or Techno-Feudalism Means Getting Control Over Language – CounterPunch.org
nature, teleology, the eonic model, illusions of theism/atheism…//Habermas on the Kantian Vision of Perpetual Peace
One must recommend a study of the eonic effect and model and its solution to the challenge of Kant to find/consider a ‘philosophy of history with a cosmopolitan purpose’ through a ‘hidden purpose of nature’ next to the issue of an ‘agreement between politics and nature’.
The texts of Decoding World History and World History and the Eonic Effect are available online (cf. the post Online texts/downloads)
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The issue of ‘god’ is a red herring here and in the larger eonic sequence we see the nexus of ‘god/theism’ is itself a stage in the progression of natural epochs. The issue of god is actually easy: we can have directionality in history without recourse to any idea of ‘god’, an idea whose incoherence swamps its actual usage. Kant himself warns against teleological metaphysics as a proof of the existence of god.
The eonic model shows clearly that world history shows directionality and next to that and in tandem a parallel processor that, for example, shows atheist and theist religions emerge in parallel. Directionality suggests teleology which can only be inferred as a hypothesis of history up to our present. Any model must reconcile free agency and a teleological future, not actually hard to do. (there are multiple possibilities: nature can project purpose and its agents can realize that in practice and/or fail to do so, and/or in discrete continuous model of teleology simply deviate against direction into chaos: looking at the unexpected onset of world wars one suspects the last option)
Continue reading “nature, teleology, the eonic model, illusions of theism/atheism…//Habermas on the Kantian Vision of Perpetual Peace “
[Reading Guide] Materialism and Empirio-criticism
Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism has to be the most useless bum steer as philosophic idiocy in the endgame failure of Marxism sliding into Bolshevist monomania as Marx ‘materialist’ obsession. No leftist/socialist should let himself be browbeaten by this useless bilge, remaining wary of that which it critiques. But the Neo-Kantian contribution to the left was in fact a critical contribution, almost a last-ditch intervention to try and counter the slide in Marxist philosophic idiocy. There were many true revolutionaries who were ‘neo-Kantians’, no reactionaries at all, and to take Lenin’s view of the matter is to end stuck in a useless debate. Kantian ethical socialism would in fact make a far superior foundation for the left than the barren historical materialism as a pseudo-science so prone to embrace by psychopaths who like Marx’s value-free ‘science’ as a blank check for mayhem and that was the curse of Marx at the dawn of Newtonian reductionism, and the emergence of scientism. Newtonian physics is a slick wonder but its legacy as the support for materialism was ambiguous, as Kant immediately realized. Kant’s austere critique of metaphysics was severe and set Hegel into the charge of the light brigade against it and Marx’s overreaction to Hegel was a giant wobble that derailed Marxist socialism. It was one of those cases where schoolboys exonerate themselves: ‘he made me do it’.
The problem with historical materialism was that it banished all ethical issues, a disaster in the making. There is nothing in socialism that requires deciding between idealism and materialism and a socialist culture once established might well find itself still debating the question.
The marxism.com gang/website is stuck in the Marx cult, and should be taken over by the Red Fortyeight Group.
We are proud to provide the following reading guide for Lenin’s classic philosophical text, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Published in 1909, during the period of black reaction following the defeat of the 1905 Russian Revolution, the book mounts an uncompromising defence of philosophical materialism.
Source: [Reading Guide] Materialism and Empirio-criticism | History & Theory
My Challenge to Two Atheists Who Deny Free Will | Mind Matters
The question of free will is addressed best in a Kantian context, and the direction of physics and/or religion never seems to provide answers, for good Kantian reasons. And yet Kant’s answer is the best, in a way. Basically, the ethical will makes no sense in a causal system, and that’s that. Here in these essays the question is entangled with theism/atheism, but there is no reason an atheist can’t believe in free will. This essay goes into the issue of dimension, which may well show the answer, although there is no reason why adding more dimensions will as such resolve anything. In Kant, and Schopenhauer, we have the question of transcendenal ideaslim, and in Schopenhauer a hybrid answer: the causal phenomenon of mind is matched with the ‘thing in itself’ and in Schopenhauer the connection to the Will in Nature, which is not the same as the ‘will’ in ‘free will’.
In Decoding World History and/or The Last Revolution we take the stance that free agents are the case and this is a strong indication of free will. We cannot eliminate the factor of choice in man, and while that is not proof of free will as such it most obviously indicates that we cannot think in causal terms as we bifurcate reality with our choices and decisions.
Free will has no physical cause? At least four categories of events in nature have no physical cause. Free will denial isn’t science, just atheism in a lab coat
Source: My Challenge to Two Atheists Who Deny Free Will | Mind Matters
covid pandemic: yankee doodle imperial genocide comes home…//A Hegelian Case for Vaccine Mandates
Fascinating article, and I can’t comment on the spot. A dark cloud floats overhead, however: everyone who uses Hegel gets confused, the worst case being Marx who tried to escape Hegel. My motto is, back to Kant, speaking for a foundational basis for a sane political socialism…But…with Hegel, always but… Noone notices Kant’s far subtler ‘dialectic’ in his triads all over the place, starting with his three critiques…
The issue of mandates gyrates in a void (here’s the link to the stoplight metaphor of Chomsky: https://azangru.livejournal.com/1485129.html): after so much secular humanism, we have no real philosophy of freedom as figures like Kant who laid a foundation is deepsixed by two super mediocrities, Hegel and Marx. Hegel was however a strange fish, and our eonic model instantly highlights his mysterious place in history. The same could be said of Marx, etc… After all the confusion, the libertarians apply the coup de grace: total rightist sabotage.
Hegel, of course, was a rightist. How many know his take on the politics of abolition, after all the triadic talk talk about freedom. Marx rightly saw red with this Prussian Dennis the Menace.
Let me note my prejudice against Hegel: few who read him study Schopenhauer who in a monumental wrathful contempt accused Hegel of confusing an entire generation of thinkers.
But Hegel raises the issue of triadic logic. I have no idea if he got it right, but …
Maybe the Chinese got it right! Look at the case of the US…a rogue stating sinking into mass murder as its imperial genocide comes home…
The take on (MLK) King’s use of Hegel is fascinating and after our critique of non-violence in the latest version of The Last Revolution, one finds the use of triads here, remarkable.
I was pleased to see that Douglais Lain hosted Richard Wolff on a recent podcast in order so he could discuss his opposition to vaccine mandates. Wolff
Source: A Hegelian Case for Vaccine Mandates – CounterPunch.org
L&FP, 48k: Dallas Willard on the key self-referentiality in the Relativist thesis that there are no generally knowable, objective moral truths
There is a lot of material here, but the manner of dealing with complex social issues at this site of the Christian right as usual evokes a strange inadequacy of these often cogent critics of Darwinism. I have not read this book and will try to do so but the material as is can lead to some commentary. Modern academics who are ‘philosophers’ preen their feathers a lot but are they even philosophers at all in the wake of figures like Kant whose contribution of ethics was a world-historical breakthrough? And yet Kant is actually ignored by this continuation comprising, Nietzsche, pragmatism, analytic philosophy and existentialism and/or postmodernism. I call that decline. And the people complaining are themselves in part responsible for ethical lacunae in modern culture. Kant produced a classic breakthrough by demonstrating a way to deriving ethical action sui generis without theological trappings. These conservatives dislike Kant because the questions of ‘god’ (and soul) become ‘metaphysical’.
But the seeming decline of ethical thinking seems real enough: the era of scientism and reductionist physicalism, soon confusing the Marx legacy, the completely confusing trickster Nietzsche, the onset of Darwinism and its crypto social darwinism and this in the context of Darwin’s racism, and genocidal selectionism, …It is small wonder the disappearance of morality seems the case. But a closer look also shows the way that ‘moral knowledge’, like learning a language in the very young, has a more elusive built in component, highly limited and emerging if at all in childhood, adolescence, then more strongly in young adults. There is an evolutionary mystery here and while this ethical core is obscure it serves to carry the individual fingers-crossed through a cultural confusion zone with many aspects, not least the tremendously dangerous ‘moral reversal’ of capitalist ideology from Adam Smith to Ayn Rand. The critics at this rightist site would never mention Kant, would never critique capitalism, and would continue the futile and archaic fictions of the Old and New Testaments. The liberation of the modern world from Mosaic mythology deserves its hopefully temporary vacuum effect. And the growing depravity of political culture in the flood tide of mediocre politicians converted to Machiavelli and adepts at the murder incorporated of the covert agencies and their trained spy game vices. How can anyone rise to ethical behavior if the psychopaths who have turned government in a criminal syndicate yet play the pious christian as public relations. The general public here is remarkable for having survived all of this, more or less.
Modern science cannot produce a theory of the will, although Kant managed the trick easily in his various antinomial discourses.
There is another angle here, of sufistic or buddhistic crypto-psychopathy dressed up as esoteric wisdom and/or gnostic christianity. Figures like Gurdjieff and Alesiter Crowley have corrupted the whole effort of New Age groups to produce a modern/ancient ethical spirituality. The path to being a demon with a sufi or Nietzschean angle seems to perverted a slew of ex-yogis who deem themselves beyond good and evil.
Human life has an inescapable moral dimension. That is, it essentially involves choices with reference to what is good and evil, right and wrong, duty and failure to do what ought to be done. Any human community, whatever its scope, will exhibit patterns of such choices, more or less recognized as such by its fully formed members. Those patterns usually guide first responses to any question concerning what is to be done, and they provide a framework for further reflection on the appropriateness of actions, character traits, and social arrangements.He soon adds:Throughout history it has been knowledge—real or presumed—that was invoked to provide a place to stand in opposing, correcting, and refining moral and immoral traditions and practices. That stands out in Plato and in later Greek thinkers, as well as in the biblical experience, life, and literature—Jewish, and then the Christian. Biblical teaching (contrary to much contemporary misunderstanding) places a relentless emphasis upon knowledge of God and of what is good, as the basis for criticism and correction of human practices. For Plato and Aristotle, as well as for the Stoics and Epicurean teachers, it was putative knowledge of “the good” and of the human soul that served as foundation for their understanding of good and evil in human life and institutions, and of what should and should not be done . . . .
1848+: The End(s) of History 