The Human Conditon

Yin: We are the stuff that dreams are made of. Puffs of air buffeted by the wind, fading into night.

Yang: We orbit along the event horizon of the black hole for some time, getting a little closer to crossing it each second. We eventually do cross it and it’s always there. And sometimes we can’t help but stare.

My Problem?

I see good and evil. The good is beautiful, the evil ugly. (One knows it when one sees it?) Good is not the problem of course, but evil and the people that do it. A friend who doesn’t have this problem finds our whole species a sometimes entertaining mistake. But for me, seeing evil makes me angry and unavoidably sad. We humans are all deeply interconnected, in time and space with each other, the earth and all creation. To not see this is dumb. The human race could be a wonderful thing if there weren’t so many people, especially powerful people, doing dumb things.

Not all people doing dumb things are evil. They may simply be misguided, not aware of their own self-interest.

The evil ones are the rich and powerful who intentionally do harm to others as they seek what they mistakenly see as their self interest. They are selfish and dumb. As humankind has “conquered the world,” the powerful have monopolized the means of production of everything, including the way many of their victims think. That our political systems have bent to the rich and powerful makes evil – and it’s hard to avoid saying this – seem triumphant. As a boomer in his 8th decade – one who dreamed of changing the world, making it beautiful – this is deeply disappointing. This is my problem. And as I see it, also the problem of the American version of constitutional democracy left us by those Confounding Fathers.

Continuing Notes on Sabine's "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 31

For episode 30, see here

The Theory of the Nation-State: The Moderns

XXXI. Marx and Dialectical Materialism
 A. Marx transformed Hegel's struggle of nature into a struggle of
     classes thereby taking away nationalism, conservatism and
     its counter-revolutionary character and becoming a powerful
     form of revolutionary radicalism. 
       1. Marx accepted dialectic as a logical method.
       2. For both the driving force of social change is the struggle
           for power.
 B. Marx perceived the importance of the rise to political self-
     consciousness of the industrial working class. 
 C. Saw the French Revolution and the resulting rise of natural
     rights in politics and economics as a prelude to social 
     revolution. 
 D. Marx and Hegel provided cause greater than oneself as the
     only reward to individual.  
 E. History (with a big "H") takes the place of God for Marxist
     revolutionist because Historical necessity provides cause and
     effect, desirability and moral obligation.
 F. Marx studies Hegel at the University of Berlin under materialist
     Hegelian, Ludwig Feuerbach.
 G. Economic materialism sees that social development depends
     upon the evolution of the forces of economic production.
 H. Marx tended to equate "materialism" with "scientific." 
       1. Also implied radical rejection of religion.
       2. Materialism and dialectics suggested a new and far-reaching
           revolution by giving materialism an ethical dimension:
           economics as the root of social inequality.
 I. Marx's belief that socialist society would extend political liberty
    never depended on analysis of socialism but only on a priori
    belief that in a developing society, nothing of worth would be lost.
 J. Understood through the dialectic, economic determinism did not
    mean cause and effect but through economic factors operating
    as semi-personalized agents of creative energies.
 K. The individual counts mainly through his membership in his
     class because his ideas reflect the ideas generated by class.
 L. Marx's theory of cultural development:
       1. A succession of stages each of which is dominated by a
           typical system of production and exchange of goods.
           i. The system of production forces generates its own
              characteristic and appropriate ideology including;
           ii. law, politics, morals, religion, art and philosophy
       2. Whole process is dialectical with its motive force supplied
           by internal tensions created by the disparities between a
           newly evolving system of production and the persisting
           ideology of the old.
       3. The forces of production are always primary as compared
           to the secondary, ideological consequences.
       4. Dialectical development is an internal process of unfolding
           or of vitalistic realization.
 M. Marx and Friedrich Engels rejected the idealist interpretation of
      dialectic as self-development of thought, saw instead the self-
      development of nature itself reflected in thought.

"The notion that ideology may in some cases affect what figures in a
society as a standard of truth has, however, produced the rather large
body of theory now known as sociology of knowledge."

 N. "Ideology," "economic determinism," and "class struggle" are
     core theoretical concepts of Marx's social philosophy from
     which two divergent political strategies emerged:
       1. Evolutionary party socialism.
       2. Revolutionary communism.  

Next week: Communism
     
 

Notes on "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 26

For episode 25, see here

The Theory of the Nation State: The Moderns

XXVI. Jean Jacques Rousseau and Rediscovery of Community
 A. Great gap between Rousseau and his contemporaries.
 B. Was a deeply divided personality, noble vs base, ideal vs real.

     "More than most men, Rousseau projected the contradictions and maladjustments of his own nature upon the society about him and sought an anodyne for his own painful sensitivity. (Sabine, 577)"

 C. Used contrast between the natural and the actual not as appeal to reason 
      but to attack reason.
 D. Against intelligence, growth of knowledge and Enlightenment progress,
      he set amiable and benevolent sentiments, good will and reverence.

     "What gives value to life is the common emotions, perhaps one may say instincts, in respect to which men differ hardly at all and which he imagined to exist in a purer and less perverted form in the simple uneducated man than in the enlightened and sophisticated."

 E. Based his values on "realities" of everyday life.
 F. Intelligence and science are dangerous because they undermine 
     reverence and faith.
 G. Pulled philosophy away from union with science and implanted 
      distrust of intelligence.
 H. Rejected systematic individualism and self-interest as virtue.
 I.  Took from Plato a general outlook.
       1. Political subjection is essentially ethical and only secondarily a
           matter of law and power.
       2. Community itself is chief moralizing agent and represents the
           highest moral value.
       3. Therefore fundamental moral category is citizen not man.
 J. Saw rights not as against community but within it.
       1. Natural egoist is fiction, some kind of community is inevitable,
           society is purely instinctive.
       2. Community has corporate personality, a general will.
       3. Government is agent for this will (could be radical or conservative).
       4. General will is the source of law and morals.
 K. The General Will
       1. Saw city-state as the best example of venue for the general will.
       2. Contract useful device even though government has no
           independent power; citizens exist as members of society,
           individuals have no rights except as members of the community.
       3. General will is the collective good of the community which is not
           the same as the private interest of its members.
       4. Men become equal within a society not because (per Hobbes)
           their physical power is substantially equal.
       5. Absolute authority of general will vis-a-vis indefeasible individual
           rights.
       6. When one is forced to obey general will, one is being forced to
           be free because one doesn't know his own good.
 L. Rousseau originated romantic cult of the group contrary to rationalist's
      cult of the individual.  
 M. In adapting the model of citizenship within the city-state to modern
      modern nation-state, Rousseau helped to recast it in such a form
      that national sentiment could appropriate it.
 N. Rousseau's impact
       1. Idealizing moral feeling of the common man led to Kant
       2. Full significance of idealizing collective will and participation in the
           common led to the idealism of Hegel.
       3. Descartes split reason from custom, Rousseau tacitly set it aside,
           Hegel tried to reunite them.
       4. Burke supplied missing content to "general will" by giving
           corporate life of England (custom and tradition) a conscious reality.

Next week:  Convention and Tradition -- Hume and Burke










 
 


 
 




 

Notes on "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 19

For episode 18, see here

The Theory of the Nation State

XIX The Modernized Theory of Natural Law
 A. Political philosophy released from association with theology in early 17th
      Century.
       1. Possible because gradual recession of religious conflict,
       2. Gradual secularization of issues of political theory,
       3. Secularization of intellectual interests bought on by the spread of
           scholarship to antiquity,
       4. Progress in mathematics and physical sciences.
 B. Althusius -- Calvinist, anti-royalist
       1. Separated jurisprudence and politics in reaction to Bodin
       2. Based natural society on contract
           i. contract explained relations between ruler and ruled (contract of
            government)
           ii. also explained existence of any group whatever (social contract)
       3. State is built up from series of contracts of lesser social groups 
           down to the individual level
       4. Sovereignty resided in the people as corporate body and could not
           be alien to it
       5. Government holds power for the sovereign
 C. Grotius -- Natural Law
       1. On the state, less clear than Althusius
       2. Importance was on conception of law regulating relations between
           states
       3. Sought to base common (natural) law in pre-Christian thought
       4. Argued against view of natural justice as motivated by
           self-interest and therefore merely a social convention
           i. appeal to utility is ambiguous since man is inherently social
           ii. maintenance of society is a major utility
           iii. peaceful social order is intrinsic good and conditions required
             for it just as binding as those which serve private ends
           iv. certain conditions or values must obtain if society is to persist
             and are thus necessary to man's nature
           v. these natural conditions are the basis of positive law of states
           vi. natural law no more arbitrary than arithmetic
       5. His attempt to rigorously ground reason part of move toward 
           "demonstrative" systems of philosophy
       6. Natural law seen as basis for social and philosophical geometries

Descartes' method (427): "resolve every problem into its simplest elements; proceed by the smallest steps so that each advance may be apparent and compelling; take nothing for granted that is not perfectly clear and distinct."

 D. Natural Law was introduction of normative element into law and politics.
 E. Contained possible ambiguities not immediately apparent.
       1. Differences between factual truth and logical implication
       2. Ambiguity between logical and moral necessity
       3. Critical analysis of these awaited Hume
 F. Unity of system based on some general agreement on what was
       important to insist on:
       1. Obligation to consent
           i. meant there were two parts to political theory -- contract and state
             of nature
           ii. this implied two contract, one as basis of the community and one 
             between the community and governing officials
       2. Human well-being required enlightened intelligence
       3. Middle class notion of individual human nature
       4. Society seen as mode for man not the other way around
       5. Relations in society less real than the individuals in themselves

Next week:  England: Preparation for Civil War
             


 

Interlude: Ex nihilo nihil fit

Wisdom is the highest goal of man; our knowledge as such is obscure, but it is illumined by searching.

Xenophanes in Bruno Snell’s The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought

Some 2500 years ago, having moved beyond the anthropomorphic religion of Homeric Greece, the Greek Pre-Socratic thinkers began seeking to understand reality through reason and observation. They were doing science in the sense of trying to explain the fundamental facts of existence according to logical standards and the kinds of observational tools then available. They sought to explain two basic elements of reality, that anything exists and the process by which things change.

Heraclitus saw only change: “Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.... It is in changing that things find repose.” For him, the universe was uncreated, it always existed, coming apart and back together again. He saw fire – the most visible form of energy – as the principle force of change, as could be seen in the cool becoming hot and the wet, dry.

Parmenides and the Eleatic School made central the logical claim that nothing can come from nothing. Parmenides, like Heraclitus, saw no reason to explain existence as “to be is possible and not-to-be is impossible.” The Eleatics saw the universe as unique, uncreated, unchanging and unbound. They argued that if the universe was bound in space or time, that would mean that it was not unique. If it was not unique, it could not be the universe. The Eleatics denied the existence of change. Zeno used various paradoxes of logic to argue, for example, that things cannot move as “if anything is moving, it must be moving either in the place in which it is or in a place in which it is not” and neither is possible.

Despite the Eleatics, the fact that things appear to change needed explanation. Empedocles accepted the monist view of reality: the universe is singular and unbounded. He pictured it as a circle containing the All. But while the underlying reality is unchanging, the four basic elements – fire, air, water and earth – produce change by combining and separating driven by the opposing forces of Love (philia) and Strife. Anaxagoras developed this approach further by positing a universe made up of an infinite number of particles of all possible qualities while “in everything there is a portion of everything else.” In the original cosmos, all these fundamental particles already existed but were mixed and therefore left the total without quality. Mind (nous) set them in motion and caused them to be separated into what now exists.

In their answers to the questions of why anything exists and how things change, the pre-Socratics said everything that we can logically say. The cosmology of Empedocles and Anaxagoras could be read as an early premonition of our modern version. Our understanding of reality includes seemingly unchanging fundamental particles and forces making up the changing observable. Love and Strife can be read as Gravity and Dark Energy, one pulling matter together and the other pushing it apart. More generally, the essential dynamic of everything that exists – natural and human – can be seen as either a coming together or a coming apart.

It was while reading Empedocles that I went back to reconsider the modern theory of the creation of the universe from the Big Bang. The Big Bang theory essentially explains nothing. Literally. It does not and cannot explain where whatever it was that went “bang” came from. Ex nihilo nihil fit, nothing can come from nothing. Further following the Eleatics, it is not possible to understand the universe as expanding since that would require space to expand into. Modern cosmology seeks to sidestep this by positing that space itself expands as the surface of a balloon expands as it’s pumped up. (Where does it expand into?) Or perhaps our universe is one of many in some higher dimensional multi-verse. (And in what space and from where does that come?) Obviously, these too explain nothing.

That the universe exists, that we exist, must mean that something always existed. That the universe seems to be expanding may be better understood as an unchanging totality without boundaries of time or space. Everything that exists – in the “past, present or future” actually exists at once, whole. Stephen Hawking once hinted at this by noting that the universe could be understood as one big wave function, a singluar All. That the universe appears to be expanding under the influence of dark energy and will eventually decompose into its constituent particles may simply be the state of this All. It is we – individual living beings – that move through reality that experience change and time.

This leaves the question of why there should be something rather than nothing in the first place unexplained except by the very fact that we exist. I don’t know where any of this leads except to wonder.

Notes on "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 18

For episode 17, see here

The Theory of the Nation State

XVIII. Jean Bodin
 A. His work Republic took the idea of sovereign power out of the shadow of
      theology.
 B. Sought to put the king above religious conflict, as a center of national
       unity. 
 C. Mix of old and new philosophy
 D. Took method and form, such as it was, from Aristotle.
 E. Saw basis of society in pater familias who acted with others outside the
      family as citizens.
       1. Property was natural right of the family
       2. State could not alienate property because it was not the proprietor
 F. Mark of sovereign power is distinguishing characteristic of the state.
       1. Citizens are such only by their subjection to the rule of a common
           sovereign
       2. Sovereign is the source of law
       3. Sovereign is undivided, no mixed state but only forms of government
       4. State consists in the possession of sovereign power
       5. Government is apparatus through which power is exercised
       6. All lesser bodies were subordinate to the state and any authority they
           might have is delegated by the state
       7. Sovereignty is perpetual, humanly unlimited and with unconditional
           right to make, interpret and execute the law
 G. Sovereign limited by will of God and natural right
 H. F7 and G (above) lead to possible conflict
 I. Confusion arose from:
       1. View that sovereign was bound by God
       2. Fidelity to the constitutional law of France
       3. View of inviolability of private property

Next week: The Modernized Theory of Natural Law

Notes on "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 17

For episode 16, see here

The Theory of the National State

XVII: Royalist and Anti-Royalist Theories
 A. Religious wars brought two sides of philosophy to fore,
     especially in France, people's right of defense vs divine right.
 B. Protestant attack om absolutism
       1. Constitutional argument based on medieval practices
           showing absolute monarchy to be an innovation
       2. Attempt to show philosophically that monarchy was
           contrary to universal rules of right supposed to underlie
           all government
       3. Vindiciae contra tyrannos was chief work of the French
           Protestants
           i. saw ruler as servant of the community, one that could do
             whatever its own life required
           ii. established two contracts, one of the people and king with
             God and another between the people and the king
           iii. king may be disobeyed when he goes against the 
              commands of God because people share the covenant
              with God and if they didn't take action would become
              co-conspirators
           iv. the second covenant justifies resistance to tyranny
              in secular government
           v. form of contract based largely on utilitarian agreement to
              render obedience to king to gain the benefit of protection
              of life and property
           vi. limits on the king based on his subjection to law
           vii. resistance was an expression of religion, a corporate right
               expressed through magistrates rather than by individuals
       4. Anti-royalists assumed law of nature and as defense of ancient
           liberties 
 C. Jesuits and the Pope
       1. Militant force of counter-Reformof the Roman Church
       2. Sought to reinstate spiritual leadership of Pope
       3. Kings power was from the people, only the Pope's authority
           came from God
           i. thus the king could not demand absolute obedience from
            subjects and;
           ii. Pope still could control the secular realm on spiritual
            matters
       4. Juan de Mariana saw the state of nature giving way to 
           civil society and saw the growth of government as a
           natural process and contended that the community
           controlled the rulers whom its needs created
       5. Francisco Suarez defended spiritual authority of the Pope
           but saw power of society to rule itself and its members as
           inherent property of social groups
 D. The Divine Right of Kings
       1. The attack on absolutism led to falling back on longstanding
           belief on the divinity of civil society
       2. Defense of a national establishment
       3. Rested on notion that authority had religious origin and
           sanction based on faith rather than on reason
       4. Saw law as residing 'in the breast of the king"
       5. James I defended monarchy's freedom from interference
       6. Pushed analogy of king as father to his children

Next week:  Jean Bodin