Something About Kierkegaard

Continued from here.

A note on Kierkegaard. In his time, the nation of Denmark believed itself to be Christian because each and every citizen could state confidently that he had been instructed on the dogmas of the Christian faith and that he believed them to be true. The primary focus of Kierkegaard's mission was to unsettle the Danes from this notion by making a stark distinction in his authorship between knowing something intellectually and religiously-ethically incorporating that knowledge into one's heart and soul. As far as Christianity was concerned, the former did nothing, was nothing. The latter, however, meant not only a changed heart but a changed life - a new birth, if you will.

 In this mission, Kierkegaard was explicitly working on the assumption that for a changed life to occur as Christianity demanded, work must be done by each individual person within their subjective personality, work that only they could do. Rote following of commands, dogma of the Church, or Kierkegaard's own authority as an eminent thinker in Danish society, would not activate this potential in his readers. So he highlighted in both the structure and arguments of his books and in the plan of his whole authorship to withhold satisfaction from normal reader expectations, so that each reader would begin to do that deep, mysterious human agency thing that was needed.

Whether he was successful or not, whether he was altogether too artful in his production, is for the literary and philosophical critics to say.  But it is not true in the slightest to find in him support for the post-modernist presumption that all talk of faith or morality is groundless or nonsense. Contra Conant, the Postscript was not a work dedicated to branding high philosophical speculation about faith and morals as nonsense; to the contrary, it mapped a road of rationality to its pinnacle of perfection in a Paradox, and said, "No further." In doing so, Kierkegaard was not denigrating rationality or the truths of human reason, but bounding it all within its proper sphere where it is most effective. In this, he was in solidarity with the tradition of Kant, Aquinas, Augustine, Aristotle, and Plato.

Crooked Timber

Okay, Whit, I give. You want to talk philosophy, then let's talk.

Christianity (in)famously describes us all as the crooked timber of humanity.

There is a wealth of philosophy in that phrase. But the aspect I want to highlight is the anthropic angle. This crooked timber idea is not a singular concept because it presumes in the saying something else: what a straight timber would look like. There is no getting away from this, a very common, ordinary observation is built or rests on … something else.

This is a duplexity in human agency that is not a byproduct of something else, an unintended consequence or epiphenomenon, but something absolutely fundamental: the bifurcation within the psyche of how we view the world from our singular peculiar viewpoint. Such a standpoint is utterly unique in the life of Planet Earth - an organism that fashions (in Richard Rorty's paradigm) conceptual mirrors of a world, but mirrors that always reflect two things - that which is and that which has been or will be or ought to be - and somehow make them seamlessly into a single conception about what is going on.

I am reminded for some reason of the mystery of music. We hear notes on a scale, but we don't really hear just the individual notes as they are played because that would be a schizophrenic cacophony. We hear a musical composition, a musical event, because each note has a context within the ones that went before and the anticipation of the ones that will come after. In other words, each note is a duplexity (or multiplexity), both itself in tonal purity and all its brothers and sisters that preceded and will proceed from it.

And we do this naturally; historical anthropology tells us that music is a primeval impulse that has always been a part of us  - almost as if it preexisted  the first homo sapiens.  And if received wisdom can possibly be true, music may even have been that which created us unto what we are and might become.

What we are and might become - there is the duplexity again. We are both, crooked and straight, and which e'er path we tread depends not on me but Thee.

Tracking the Wild Rino

With the continued carping from the Republican back benchers, the NeverTrumps, it seems like a moment to clarify who is and who is not a republican in name only - a Rino.

Rino's have been a Republican bane for upwards of 40 years now, weeping and moaning and gnashing their teeth at other Republicans at whatever inopportune moment they can find. They appear to have originated in the northeast of these United States, and that remains their natural habitat, but have spread across the fruited plains into almost every political jurisdiction in the land. Over the years there have been confirmed sightings in Florida, Ohio, and also Arizona, and now Utah has drawn this grumpled beast to its jurisdiction.

And many other places as well. Wherever they are, they never boast significant numbers, but are hard to ignore because of the characteristic incessant, loud, grating noises they make.

So, what exactly makes a Rino rino-like? …

Objectively Subjective

In the Introduction to Authorship and Authority in Kierkegaard's Writings (2018 Bloomsbury Academic), the editor Joseph Westfall says this:

[James] Conant - following the early Wittgenstein, and relying heavily upon both Witgenstein's and Keirkegaard/Climacus's uses of revocation in these particular works - argues that language, as an instrument for the communication of objective concepts, cannot accommodate meaningful (i.e., "sensical") discussion of those aspects of human existence capable of being approached or apprehended only subjectively, such as faith or morality. Because subjective moods and passions cannot be objectively communicated, and because language is a medium suited only to the communication of objectivity, all language about things like faith and morality ultimately must be shipwrecked on silence, whether by ceasing communication altogether (as in the famous final line of the Tractatus) or in nonsense (as, Conant argues, in Climacus's "objective" account of faith or of truth "as subjectivity").

To those of you not in the circle of Wittgenstein's fame, the final line of the Tractatus is "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Except, of course, when the unspeakable steps forth you may speak to tell others to be silent. Other than that, Ludwig would ask you to keep your mouth shut.

Actually, don't get me wrong, no one has more admiration for Wittgenstein than I do. Both his early and late philosophies are manifestly brilliant, and there is much to be learned from him. But the notions Conant explicates have seeped into the intellectual culture over the last century and spawned a vast network of philosophical and "academic" studies known as post-modernism, resulting in a fatuousness not seen since Socrates had to stay up late a couple of nights to help Philebus and Thrasymachus. And like many before him, Conant simply misunderstands Kierkegaard (and Wittgenstein). I must respond.

Things like 'faith and morality' denote actions in the real, empirical, material world, and as such I certainly agree with Conant that they call for something other than speech. But this is an obvious observation, bordering on the banal. The chief modern exponent of this view can reliably be traced to John Wayne, who often said, "Talk is cheap." Before him you can go all the way back to the blessed St. James in his Epistle written somewhere in the first century, A.D., wherein he proclaimed that faith without works - action - was dead.

So these 'subjective … aspects of human existence' most certainly do not involve speechifying of any kind, and in that sense are sub specie silence. One may talk while practicing faith, but such is irrelevant to the essence of the practice; the practice at its core is a non-verbal action - even when the act of faith is to encourage others in a sermon to have faith - and therefore Conant can safely describe these things as demanding silence.

So far, I am with him all the way. Where I cannot go … Continue

The Importance of Metaphysics

And now for something completely different.

Ilya Somin tells us that

... the enormous diversity of both originalist and living-constitutionalist legal thought is a sign that constitutional theory remains a relatively immature field of study. We have far less agreement among experts than in more developed academic disciplines - not just 'hard' sciences like physics, but even social sciences such as economics or political science.

I imagine you think that now I will get down into the weeds of constitutional theory. But I intend to cast my net a little wider than that, by asking: what is it about the 'hard' sciences that yields more agreement among the experts? I would venture that it is the core consensus about not just appropriate objects of study, but also standard approaches, methods, and procedures - and, I would insist, a common metaphysic. For behind or above or below a hard science is a fundamental theory, an abstract construct, that is for that science the ultimate criteria of what in its field of study is the really real objective reality, and what is mere myth, illusion, or wishful thinking.

This ultimate form, framework, parameter of a science is nothing more than an assumed - not proven - really Real reality (as in, "we mean it this time") above or behind its objects, which in turn provides a substrate of a construct or foundation to the phenomena. This is a metaphysics, pure and simple, the agreed upon encompassing sphere for all activity within any given science. Any experiment or theory that posits a 'reality' outside of the assumed metaphysic quite simply is excluded as being unscientific ab initio. An astrologer will never be permitted in the doors of astronomy because his premises are outside the parameters of honest astronomical discussion. A proponent of intelligent design will not be allowed to debate Darwinian or Neo-Darwinian evolution because he invokes a reality that is not … Darwinian.

But a metaphysics is not just an exclusionary principle, it is the criteria for a positive advance in rational thought. For without these unproven allegiances to a certain fundamental framework of the Real, there is no science possible in the modern sense.

J'Accuse!

In trying to unravel the roiling cauldron of charge and counter-charge that was the Kavanaugh confirmation 'process,' I came across this helpful advice on the difference between an accusation and calumny from none other than that famous amoralist, Machiavelli.

Machiavelli distinguishes between “accusation” and “calumny” in order to demonstrate that “as much as accusations are useful to republics, so much are calumnies pernicious.” The difference is that accusations are public, subject to critique and refutation, and a mendacious or even inaccurate accuser pays a price. Calumnies, by contrast, “have need neither of witnesses nor any other specific corroboration to prove them, so that everyone can be calumniated by everyone; but everyone cannot be accused, since accusations have need of true corroboration and of circumstances that show the truth of the accusation.”

From <http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/> 

Inasmuch as the Left has gone all in on the principle that 'every woman must be believed,' including, as in the case of Christine Blasey Ford, those that have neither witnesses nor any other specific corroborations to prove what they say, then they clearly are in favor of calumnies as an effective methodology going forward.

Which puts them, morally speaking, quite far downwind from Machiavelli.

Quite simply, I think if you cannot achieve the simple moral sensibility of a man like Machiavelli, then you might need to do some soul searching - that is, assuming you haven't already lost your soul altogether.

The Meaning of Meaning

I stumbled on this interesting exchange the other day - a bit late, but it touches on an issue near and dear to my heart. It is between Alan Dershowitz and Antonin Scalia. Justice Scalia is dead, you say? Quite right, but it seems that early in Justice Scalia's term on  the Supreme Court, members of Mr. Dershowitz Constitutional Law class felt he, as their teacher, was a bit lopsided in his criticism of Justice Scalia's Supreme Court opinions, so they issued an invitation to the Justice to come debate Mr. Dershowitz. Nino, as Justice Scalia was nicknamed, promptly accepted. Would  that I was a fly on the wall of  that confrontation, but in lieu thereof, we have Mr. Dershowitz' report:

"So, in my classroom debate with the justice, I challenged him with the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ended racial segregation of public schools in the Southern states. As a matter of indisputable historic fact, following the Civil War the “people” who “adopted” the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment had to take into account what would surely be the continued segregation of public schools, and not only in the Deep South …

I asked Justice Scalia, whether if had he been on the court in 1954, he could have joined the unanimous court without violating his principle of originalism. He was both candid and self-effacing in his response, saying that no theory of constitutional interpretation — including originalism — was perfect. But he still insisted that originalism was “better” and “safer” than any other theory, because it precluded honest judges from substituting their own philosophies for those of the founding generation. In his own provocative words: “Show Scalia the original meaning, and he is prevented from imposing his nasty, conservative views upon the people. He is handcuffed. And if he tries to dissemble, he will be caught out.”

I feel sure that the Justice had a bit more to say than that about the subject, but that is all Mr. Dershowitz gives us, which is not to say Mr. D was being unfair to Nino. His review is uniformly affectionate, and he is trying to give the flavor of his relationship with Scalia in light of the significant differences they had on Constitutional interpretation.

But it raises my own  thoughts on Scalia's theory of Constitutional interpretation of originalism, and what a proper response to Mr. Dershowitz should be. For there is no doubt in my mind that originalism is the only proper interpretative theory for a purported Constitutional Republic. If the original meaning of the foundational document of a Republic is not determinative of its ongoing application, then the whole idea of a Constitution becomes essentially meaningless. You might just as well set up any small group of people and give them generic principles like 'justice' and 'fairness' and then wait for them to tell you what to do next. As we have seen, that is the net result of the 'living constitution' interpretive school which we have suffered under these many years.

But Brown v. Board of Education did conclude in a good result. Would originalism have precluded that result? And if so, what does that mean for constitutional interpretation?

Continue .....

Justice Takes a Holiday

Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave us the raison d'etre of his term as AG the other day. Here it is in pertinent part.

While I am attorney general, the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations … I demand the highest standards, and where they are not met, I take action …

Lots of people have responded with the egregious list of actions taken by General Sessions' own special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, not least of which was stacking his staff with some top-tier members of the Friends of Hillary Fan Club. But what does he make of the more recent actions of his attorneys in the Southern District of New York?  They obtained a guilty plea from one Michael Cohen, taxi cab magnate and general incorrigible, that he had violated the most sacred laws of this Republic, the federal election laws. And he did so with a script written verbatim by Jeff Sessions' Department of Justice (SDNY branch). And, wonder of wonders, Mr. Cohen's words contain information extraneous to his guilt, and those words just happen to repeat verbatim Democrat and Major Media talking points that Donald Trump violated election laws, too.

In the words of Bloomberg's Noah Feldman, 

In essence, by making Cohen say he acted at Trump’s direction, the Southern District declared war on the president.

In a normal case like this, in what context would the prosecution require that the defendant implicate others in his crime? Obviously, when they had further principals they wanted to prosecute. But in the first place, Mueller and others in the Sessions Justice Department have repeatedly assured the President that he is not a target in any of these investigations.  In the second place, the President cannot be a target of the Justice Department because, you know, the Constitution.

Impeachment is the method provided for any criminal conduct by the President, and as the indispensable Andy McCarthy has repeatedly told us, Impeachment is a political process, not legal.  If the Justice Department does not indulge in 'political considerations' as insisted by Jeff Sessions, then it has no role whatsoever in Impeachment.

But manifestly, the prosecutors of the Southern District of New York are engaged in laying the groundwork via forcing a particular plea out of Michael Cohen for an Impeachment of the President. And now, apparently, they are taking up with the New York AG an investigation into the Trump organization. What a coincidence! The Trump organization has been in business for more than 50 years, during which it has been very high-profile in the most high-profile city in the world, and our Justice Department decides it needs a little investigating - within a couple of years after its principal becomes President. Could this possibly be … a political decision? You decide.

So, what action is General Sessions prepared to take?

Playing the Angles

Jeff Sessions recently sang the praises of our "Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement," and the latest unpredictable outrage sprang forth from the most predictable sources. Senator Brian Schatz (D-Crazytown) tweeted "For the chief law enforcement officer to use a dog whistle like that is appalling."

For you non-canines, 'dog whistle' refers to race-baiting rhetoric, of which the phrase 'dog whistle' is a prime example. Whenever the left accuses someone of dog whistling, they are dog whistling to their base that its time to become outraged over race. 

To be clear, Senator Schatz main problem is reading English. Apparently, he thinks the phrase means "White American heritage." That could be a correct reading if we are talking demographically, e.g. Anglo American as opposed to Hispanic American. But we are not; the context here is law enforcement, and in this context it refers to a tradition of law unique to English speaking peoples descended from the English/British system of laws. As such, it does not mean 'white' at all, it really means "English," which last time I looked was a language and a generic identifier of a country, not a color.

It is as if he heard Bing Crosby dog whistling away when he sang about a white Christmas. But the Binger wasn't referring to a white people's Christmas, but to a snow covered landscape during the Christmas season. 'White people's Christmas' is not the same thing as 'snow covered Christmas,' and 'white people's heritage of law' is not the same thing as 'Anglo-American heritage of law.'

Which is to say, different things are different, and it ill becomes a Senator of the United States to make mistakes like this in so public a manner. In truth, if Senator Schatz had bothered to retain even a modicum of education from his younger years, he might have been able to make the case that Jeff Sessions was dog whistling Germans. Anglo is originally derived from the Germanic tribes known as the Angles who invaded and conquered England about the 5th Century. 

But if that is what Jeff Sessions was doing then he would almost be as silly a fool as Senator Schatz. The Angles got beat up badly by the Vikings and then squashed by the Normans in 1066, and have had a difficult time putting together any kind of power base ever since. I'm afraid Jeff Sessions by now would be whistling to a kennel nearly as empty as the vast void between the ears of Mr. Schatz.

I think we have  plumbed the depths of this particular bit of idiocy. Lord, please give us a sufficient respite before the next outbreak.

In Like Flynn

The news cycle flies along at its typical breathtaking pace. Mannafort becomes Weinstein becomes Rob Porter becomes Kim Yo-jong becomes Bannon becomes .....

Can we take a moment to slow down the power point slide show and finish up on what used to be termed current news? Let's roll the tape back and bring Lieutenant General Michael Flynn into some focus.

Corruption at the highest levels of government, that is what we saw when our tax payer supported Super Lawyers, Robert Mueller, et al., our very own Special Prosecutors, obtained a plea deal on December 1, 2017. General Michael Flynn admitted he lied, which is not just a social faux pas or evidence of a character flaw, but a felony when done in an FBI interview. Although many who support Mr. Mueller would decry posting the 10 Commandments outside a Federal Courthouse, they have no problem with elevating within the Courthouse the 9th Commandment to a major crime.

Except, the corruption is not with poor Michael Flynn, but with the Special Prosecutors themselves. Let's take a look at some salient facts:

1. The 'lying' Michael Flynn did was not in any interaction he had with Mueller or his team. It was done way back in January of last year when the General voluntary sat down with the FBI to 'splain a few things.

2. At the time, what the FBI wanted to know was what Flynn had said to the Russian Ambassador. This was curious in that the FBI had FISA taps of the conversations and thus already knew exactly what Mr. Flynn had said. And they also knew that what he talked about was not criminal in any way, that in fact it was pursuant to his normal and necessary duties as the prospective head of Trump's NSA. The implication that rises here is that the FBI was hoping to catch him in a lie so they could enforce the 9th Commandment upon him with a God-like vengeance. This feels to me like unethical behavior by  the FBI bordering on abuse of power, but hey, I'm just a private citizen of this Republic, so what do I know?

3. In any case, what Mueller's indictment does not mention is that the FBI determined after the interview with Mr. Flynn that his account of his Russian conversations was substantially true, and that any errors or omissions did not rise to intentional dishonesty. Thus, Mr. Mueller brings his indictment based on his own determination of Mr. Flynn's responses, superseding the agents who were actually present at the interview. I ask: who is better situated to assess the credibility of a person, the one who is face to face with him or the one who is reviewing a transcript months later? A silly question, I know. Our very Special Prosecutors obviously possess super powers of detection of credibility, and it's not clear why we (me and you, dear reader) have any business questioning the matter.

So, to wrap this up, what we have is a decorated General who was performing his lawful duties as a civil servant of the government, who has become the target of large political - not criminal - forces swirling around Washington that for reasons of their own sought to entrap him in some sort of crime so that he would do ..... what?

They certainly haven't gone to all this trouble to get General Flynn; he's just a Washington player like thousands of others and he was fired from the Trump Administration about 30 seconds into his tenure. For me, there is only one obvious answer: they want leverage to force him to support their narrative that Trump and his campaign colluded with the Russians to subvert the American election. If so, then they will be forcing him to lie because Michael Flynn - and Mannafort and Jared Kushner and all the rest - have already voluntarily testified that there was no collusion with the Russians, and the FBI, CIA, NSA, numerous Congressional Committees, and our very Special Super Powerful Best in Class Prosecutors have to date found no evidence of collusion.

Would that our betters on the Federal Courts would allow us to post the Ten Commandments at the door of the Special Prosecutors offices - I think they could use some brushing up on that 9th Commandment right now.

Gobbledygook

It is of the essence of the modern to invent specialty languages for an academic discipline. This is traceable, I think, to the collapse of the sacred as a source of authority in contemporary times. Without God, beings like we are need to create our own sphere of authority, something that is unassailable by any outside the chosen few, and that is in turn held sacrosanct by that same chosen. What better way to safeguard the inner sanctum than inventing a private language that only the elect can understand?

But science and academic endeavors in general are a public enterprise, by definition. So, this tendency of the academy to obscure themselves behind a vale of technical terms should be resisted. I think the most straightforward way to do it is to insist that any discipline, no matter how technical its orientation, ought to be able to - and shall - explain its tenets, hypothesis, and conclusions in non-technical terms. If it can't - or won't - then it is bogus, and should be summarily dismissed from the academy.

I note here that this is a significant movement within the science of economics at the moment. For too long, economics has gravitated into a mathematical world of abstraction, and many are calling for economics to return to the more prose-based approach of Adam Smith. Similar concerns are also being raised in physics.

Herewith an example from architecture in a discussion about Italian stones:

 … there remains the large group of stones and that of granites (characterised by varied typologies and geographic distributions) for possible stereotomic uses … 

'Stereotomic?' Now there's a technical term I defy anyone to grasp from the context. Do architects really speak this way? Or more to the point, do they actually think in these terms? Well, yes they do, because this is actually a legitimate term. We know this because the author quickly moves to explain it:

 …  i.e. for structural purposes or at least strongly contributing to the formation of architectural envelopes.

Oh, it is the use of stone as a structural element, as opposed to its use as a façade or for other decorative purposes. This is quite clear and straightforward, so we can, I think, permit the architects their own verbiage.

Now, here is an example regarding the science of Sociology, from an oral argument last year in the Supreme Court, the gerrymandering case of Gill v. Whitford. Via Ed Whelan in The Corner of National Review Online, Justice Roberts:

Mr. Smith, I’m going … to lay out for you … what is the main problem for me and give you an opportunity to address it….

[I]f you’re the intelligent man on the street and the Court issues a decision, and let’s say, okay, the Democrats win, and that person will say: “Well, why did the Democrats win?” And the answer is going to be because EG was greater than 7 percent, where EG is the sigma of party X wasted votes minus the sigma of party Y wasted votes over the sigma of party X votes plus party Y votes. And the intelligent man on the street is going to say that’s a bunch of baloney. It must be because the Supreme Court preferred the Democrats over the Republicans.

Justice Roberts goes on to call this Sociological gobbledygook. And for a very good reason: it is a veritable gaggle of private Sociological speak. But what does it mean? Tellingly, as Ed Whelan notes, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, the president of the American Sociological Association, in his letter to the Chief Justice complaining about the Justice's take on Sociology, did not even consider explaining in ordinary language what the terms meant. Instead, he read Justice Robert's comments as a condemnation of Sociology as a science, and proceeded to deliver several layers of snark.

The key point here is not that Eduardo cannot explain his terminology in normal language, it is that he refuses to do so. It's like the way the Catholic Church resisted the translation of the Latin Vulgate Bible into the common languages of the people. They had many reasons for this, but surely one concern was that once common translations are allowed, people would not need a Priest to interpret the Bible. Some do, but many don't, or so says the Protestant Reformation, and so says I vis a vis our own secular priests in the academy.

My case is made. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and the other priests of sacrosanct private languages need to be summarily dismissed from the academy. Get them to a Nunnery - or a Monastery, as the case may be - where they may collectively worship their mysterious gods in the privacy they desire.