Postquam homines sibi persuaserunt, omnia quae fiunt propter ipsos fieri; id in unaquaque re praecipuum iudicare debuerunt quod ipsis utilissimum, et illa omnia praestantissima aestimare, a quibus optime afficiebantur. Unde has formare debuerunt notiones, quibus rerum naturas explicarent scilicet bonum, malum, ordinem, confusionem, calidum, frigidum, pulchritudinem et deformitatem etc.; et quia se liberos existimant, inde hae notiones ortae sunt, scilicent laus et vituperium, peccatum et meritum.After men persuaded themselves, that everything which is created is created for their sake, they were bound to consider as the chief quality in everything that which is most useful to themselves, and to account those things the best of all which have the most beneficial effect on mankind. Further, they were bound to form abstract notions for the explanation of the nature of things, such as goodness, badness, order, confusion, warmth, cold, beauty, deformity, and so on; and from the belief that they are free agents arose the further notions praise and blame, sin and merit.
Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics, Part I: "Concerning God," Appendix, translated by R.H.M. Elwes (1883), color added.
וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים נַעֲשֶׂה אָדָם בְּצַלְמֵנוּ כִּדְמוּתֵנוּ
וְיִרְדּוּ בִדְגַת הַיָּם וּבְעוֺף הַשֶּׁמַיִם וּבַבְּהֵמָה וּבְכָל־הָאָרֶץ
וּבְכָל־הָרֶמֵשׂ הָרֹמֵשׂ עַל־הָאָרֶץ׃καὶ εἶπεν ὁ Θεός· ποιήσωμεν ἄνθρωπον κατ᾽ εἰκόνα ἡμετέραν καὶ καθ᾽ ὁμοίωσιν, καὶ ἀρχέτωσαν τῶν ἰχθύων τῆς θαλάσσης καὶ τῶν πετεινῶν τοῦ οὐρανοῦ καὶ τῶν κτηνῶν καὶ πάσης τῆς γῆς καὶ πάντων τῶν ἐρπετῶν τῶν ἐρπόντων ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς.
Et ait: Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram; et praesit piscibus maris, et volatilibus caeli, et bestiis, universaeque terrae, omnique reptili, quod movetur in terra.
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
Genesis 1:26. According to this passage, men persuaded themselves of nothing but were told by God that everything indeed exists for their sake. Spinoza obviously does not accept the provenance or authority of Scripture.
καὶ εἴτε μηδεμία αἴσθησίς ἐστιν, ἀλλ᾽ οἷον ὕπνος, ἐπειδάν τις καθεύδων μηδ᾽ ὄναρ μηδὲν ὁρᾷ, θαυμάσιον κέρδος ἂν εἴη ὁ θάνατος... εἰ οὖν τοιοῦτον ὁ θάνατός ἐστιν, κέρδος ἔγωγε λέγω· καὶ γὰρ οὐδὲν πλείων ὁ πᾶς χρόνος φαίνεται οὕτω δὴ εἶναι ἢ μία νύξ.
And if it [i.e. death] is complete lack of perception, like a sleep in which the sleeper beholds no dream, death would be a wonderful advantage... If death is like this, I say it is an advantage: for all time would thus appear to be no more than a single night.
Socrates, Plato's Apology of Socrates, 40c-e, Plato, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus [translated by Harold North Fowler, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1914, pp.140-143]; translation modified, with comparison to translation by G.M.A. Grube, Plato, Five Dialogues, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo [Hackett Publishing Company, 1981, p.43].
5.631 Das denkende, vorstellende, Subjekt gibt es nicht.
[The thinking, representing subject does not exist.]
5.631 There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921/22, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961, 1972, Translation by D.F. Pears & B.F. McGuinness, pp.116-117, more literal translation in brackets.
Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung.
The world is my representation.Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Band 1, §1 [Reclam, 1987, p.3], The World as Will and Representation, Volume I [Dover Publications, 1966, E.F.J. Payne translation, p.3].
Bonum et ens sunt idem secundum rem.
The Good and Being are really the same thing.St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 5, Article 1.
In these pages, I have reconsidered a couple of matters in terms of a "Deuteronomy," Δευτερονόμιον, Latin Deuteronomium, i.e. a "Repetition of the Law." I have done this with the system of Kant-Friesian metaphysics and with Kant's theory of geometry. Here I want to focus on mind and consciousness, which otherwise have been treated in other metaphysical essays, such as the ones on the soul and on cause and purpose.
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| Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, "ὁ Τηλεπατητικὸς above the Sea of Fog," 1818, by Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), Hamburger Kunsthalle |
The existence that each of us possesses, as individuals, is a bubble of consciousness. We know that this exists individually because every day it winks out in sleep, and we come to consider that in death it may well wink out permanently. This is, alternatively, frightening and reassuring.
Frightening because it means that we may be simply erased from existence; reassuring, perhaps, because we will not be around to worry about it, and also because we may have grown weary of the cares, crimes, miseries, and follies of the world, and we won't need to worry about them either. As Socrates vividly says above, all of eternity would then be like no more than a single night. Of course, Hamlet then worries, "To sleep -- perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub!"
The Greek terminology here is of interest. The Greeks wrote a lot about νοῦς, "mind," but more in terms of epistemology than of metaphysics. In Aristotle we see νοῦς as a way of knowing first principles, but we don't see it as an ontological entity, unless that is Aristotle's God, "thought thinking itself," νόησις νοήσεως, "thinking of thinking" [Metaphysics, XII, ix, 35]. Similarly, Plato's "Divided Line," sorting the levels of knowledge, puts νόησις at the top.
Other treatments are lofty but vague. Indeed, Plato has Socrates tell us that he read Anaxagoras, because he had heard that Anaxagoras has Mind -- "infinite and self-ruled," ἄπειρον καὶ αὐτοκρατές, according to Simplicius -- causing creation. But he found the theory disappointing, since Anaxagoras didn't say much about mind that really sounded like mind.
No one, however, could be as disappointed as with the treatment of mind by Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976), which is no more than a reductionistic, positivistic, and behavioristic dismissal of mind as anything special, either metaphysically or epistemologically. Neither Aristotle nor Anaxagoras, let alone Socrates, would find anything edifying or satisfying there. Yet Ryle then had the חֻצְפָּה, chutzpah, to actually found a journal, Mind, to promote his nihilism.
Ryle's dismissal is what people like John Searle have reacted against, albeit with not a lot that is more satisfying. Mind as an epiphenomen, obviously of materialism, is well entrenched. We get this particularly sour and chilling brush off from Searle:
But nowadays, as far as I can tell, no one believes in the existence of immortal spiritual substances except on religious grounds. To my knowledge, there are no purely philosophical or scientific motivations for accepting the existence of immortal mental substances. [The Rediscovery of the Mind, the MIT Press, 1992, p.27]
Searle obviously has no respect for the Thomists who are still around, which means he won't bother sparing the time for any version of Aristotelian metaphysics. That may be justified, but the possibility of "mental substances" in Kantian metaphysics is something Searle should acknowledge; and if he doesn't, then we are left to assume that he is simply a materialist, long after Democritean simplicity has any more credibility than Aristotle.
Consciousness is not something the Greeks really wrote about. Indeed, it is not all that clear they even had a word for it. The word "consciousness" itself is from Latin terms, cum, "with," and scio, "know," that admits of various interpretations, and have. In Greek, we can use συναίσθησις, which similarly combines συν, "with," and αἴσθησις, "perception, feeling." As in Latin, this also admitted of various meanings, but among them was "awareness, self-consciousness." Close enough.
With consciousness, we are in possession of perception, in its various forms, can engage in thought and memory, be aware of the internal sensations of our bodies (proprioception), and possess emotional states, which affect the body but originate in mental conditions. All this is, on reflection, attributed to a self, namely "me."
In Buddhism, these phenomena can be dissociated into five separate "aggregates," each a skandha, स्कन्ध. How those could ever be considered a single entity, or subsist in a single consciousness, was a challenge to Buddhism and still a puzzle to Hume. Buddhism didn't worry about it, since the purpose of Buddhist metaphysics is to dispense with the concept of "substance," in order to break attachments. Since the purpose was thus edifying, Buddhist philosophers were willing to live with the difficulty of explaining personal identity. The less we worry about it, the better.
The paradox of mental plurality and unity was then explained by Kant as the result of the process of mental "synthesis," which unites them according to rules. Synthesis creates consciousness itself, and it is an activity of mind that, of course, largely or entirely closes down in sleep, while the brain otherwise remains active. Indeed, Kant's theory was the first explanation of sleep in the history of philosophy.
As far as I can tell, it was only John Locke who ever noticed that the theory of mind in Descartes precluded the possibility of sleep -- "'Tis doubted whether I thought all last night, or no..." -- since "thought" was the defining essence of soul, which would not exist without it. Since the Empiricists always saw the mind as passive with respect to perception, not even Locke himself could explain the loss of consciousness in sleep. Now we know that the brain is active, not just in the processing of consciousness, but in sleep as well, engaged in some kind of bookkeeping or clean-up. Without it, various pathologies, including hallucinations, can occur.
And now we know that people with some brain damage, as from a stroke or wound, may not be able to see parts of the visual field in consciousness, but they may nevertheless turn out to "know" what is there in an unconscious but accessible way, without being aware that or how they know it. This tells us that the mind is like an iceberg, with only a small portion above the surface in consciousness. This may comfort the materialists, but it shouldn't. They may be out of their reckoning. My "self" has roots in the unconscious, but it is still me. Descartes might have at least reflected, "Where are all my memories when I am not remembering them?" Or what access I have to remember them.
Nevertheless, as we see above, Wittgenstein said, "The thinking, representing subject does not exist," placing him, or at least the "early" him, in the reductionistic and nihilistic camp of Gilbert Ryle -- not at all surprising for the time. Such an abolition of the very form of our personal existence, while perhaps appealing to Wittgenstein as a way to escape from the prison of his own unhappy, demon-haunted mind, remains popular, of course, among Hegelians and Marxists, in their totalitarian political project, but also with people like Roger Scruton, who really should have known better, but whose "conservatism" may have been too much like Hegel's own loyalty to Prussia.
Consciousness is a paradoxical state. While subjective, and vulnerable to any insults that may be inflicted on body and brain, it contains a representation of the world itself, and is our connection to it. The world vanishes as our consciousness vanishes in sleep. Thus, Schopenhauer said, "The world is my representation."
Yet we sense that the world will remain there even as our own consciousness may degrade, go away, or disappear entirely. The paradox of this seems to have been first properly appreciated by Descartes, who found he could doubt the very existence of the world. He was then stuck with an unanswerable dilemma and a dualistic metaphysics that was, at its best, incoherent.
The simplest solutions to Descartes were, of course, to abolish either mind or matter. The former is with us in the comfortable nihilism of modern materialism, which exists uneasily with the revealing paradoxes of modern physics, while the latter has been selectively popular as, in Kant's terminology, "idealism," whether subjectively, with George Berkeley, where only souls exists, or with Hegel, as individual minds dissolve into a kind of Overmind, which is more or less little better than Aristotle's God, a God that knows individual existence no more than the Hegelian totalitarian state does. Indeed, it is the State that is more like God in Hegelian philosophy, and for his morally deformed modern acolytes. Modern Hegelians may shy away from the metaphysical "Overmind" of the "Absolute Idea" (aiming to turn Hegel into Wittgenstein), but they continue to disdain individual existence, which is essential for their politics of Nietzschean power.
Curiously, in among the physics upon which Searle relies for his materialism, there is the 
anti-Realism of Niels Bohr (1885-1962) himself, in which "unobserved things have no properties whatsoever" and simply do not even yet exist. Thus, the modern versions of Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), who pounded the table to refute Bishop Berkeley, are touching an Alice-in-Wonderland mashup of "spooky action at a distance" and nebulous clouds of probabilities that not only offended Einstein's Realism but whose ontology floats off into the vaguest conceptual indeterminacy. This suits the nihilism of the moment, but it is a dishonest evasion of the perplexities that arise from Bohr's quantum mechanics and its metaphysics, the "Copenhagen Interpretation."
The disinclination of Anaytic philosophy to address metaphysical issues ends up meaning that the most naive and ill-informed kinds of metaphysics are insensibly assumed. John Searle's metaphysics probably does not need to address the bizarre state of physics because he doesn't think he needs to worry about metaphysics at all. Democritus remains good enough. If Searle is honest about this, it bespeaks a shocking lack of curiosity, if not a failure of conscientious skepticism.
An alternative to what we might call the Cartesian trilemma -- dualism, materialism, or idealism -- can be found in Spinoza, where thought and extension, the essences of the two substances in Descartes, are both simply attributes of a single substance, which is God. This is a dualism layered onto a monism, where the substance itself is invisible beneath thought and extension.
The cleverness of this is lost on many recent enthusiasts for Spinoza, who don't take Spiniza's God seriously and simply regard the excommunicated Jew as a materialist. This requires ignoring, not just God, but large parts of Spinoza's metaphysics, for instance that thought and extension are only two of the infinite number of attributes that actually belong to God but of which we are unaware.
More faithful to Spinoza was Einstein, whose regard for Spinoza's God was conspicuous but who shared Spinoza's principles that God is impersonal and unconcerned about the doings and fates of individual human beings. Such a God is neither jealous, angry, nor loving and thus is unrelated to the scriptures, traditions, or theology of religions like Judaism, Christianity, or ʾIslām. Einstein liked to talk about God, but it was not the God of Abraham, Isaac, or Moses, let alone Jesus or Muḥammad.
Apart from all that, the formal equivalent of Spinoza's metaphyics turns up in Kant. Now, instead of the invisible God, we have the visible phenomena of experience. This is the visible world, and it means that we are directly acquainted with the real objects of experience, the ontôs ónta, 
ὀντῶς ὄντα ("beingly beings"), of Greek metaphysics, in what Kant called Empirical Realism.
The Cartesian objection, of course, is that phenomena are only representations, related to the genuinely real objects by causality. But look where it got him. Similarly, phenomena to Hume are only "ideas" in the mind, with external reality entirely closed, hidden, and unknown to us. We will never know what is really "out there." That makes me feel so much better.
Kant avoids this muddle by essentially turning the Cartesian world inside out. What was merely a relationship between matter and soul is now the axis mundi of both knowledge ("empirical") and reality ("realism"). The substances of Descartes, which became the divine attributes of Spinoza, are now perspectives of transcendence on phenomena. Thus, while Kant says that phenomena are the result of the mental activity of synthesis, the existence of phenomenal objects is not produced by this activity. Nor, for that matter, is our existence produced by such activity. If phenomena are ontologically immanent, then existence is transcendent.
While Kant distingished "inner sense" from the external sensibility of perception, the contrasting conditions of internal and external existence are underdeveloped in his thought. We get more to work with in Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl, but it is still not quite enough. With their conception of intentionality we have a way forward, even though they were still thinking of this in subjective terms, to the point that Husserl famously "suspended judgment" -- the Pyrrhonian epochḗ, ἐποχή -- on whether external objects even exist. But when Schopenhauer says, "The world is my representation," this means that our perception is of external objects and their existence. Ignore this, and you can get hurt.
What we find with intentionality is that my existence is the existence of phenomena internally as representation. But then intentionality spontaneously projects the content of representation onto external objects, much as Schopenhauer already described the process. This leaves our own existence as a privative, transparent emptiness, much as Sartre describes the "transcendence of the ego."
On the other hand, external existence is "hidden" behind the projected phenomenal content, just as described by Heidegger, in his distinction between "Being," εῖναι, eînai ("to be" in Greek, the infinitive) and "beings," τὰ ὄντα, tà ónta ("the beings" in Greek, a participle).
Sartre and Heidegger, of course, are themselves morally defective persons, with Heidegger, as Rector of Freiberg University, betraying Husserl because of his Jewish background, and Sartre engratiating himself with the German occupation of France by invoking his debt to Heidegger, and then becoming a stooge for Stalin. This left Albert Camus (1913-1960) permanently suspicious of Sartre, as did Sartre's indifference to the colonial and Jewish Pieds-noirs of Algeria.
Apart from the metaphysical points cited, neither man represents edifying philosophy or contributes anything of value to the Kantian or Friesian Schools. Yet as disciples of Husserl's Phenomenology, they cannot be ignored -- and examinations of their personal morality, and the attitudes of their apologists (philosophically, morally, and politically), are instructive in their own right -- especially as their modern disciplines now often emerge as raging anti-Semites, in the veritable footsteps of Heidegger himself.
The internal and external worlds that we find in the dualism of intentionality are very different. The external perspective involves blind, deterministic causality. Kant already assigned these terms to the phenomenal world. What we can add to this is the character of the perfect aspect, by which the fixity of conditions is the ground for efficient causality, under the form of natural laws.
As we know from the practice of science, and see in the tradition of Spinoza, there are no purposes or final causes involved with any of this. This was always the challenge of theories of natural evolution, to explain how blind causes can produce organisms and organs that look purposeful -- I just saw a documentary talking about the "design" of the avian feathered wing. But no Darwinist believes in actual "design" -- and the Creationists trying to legitimize "intelligent design" are faced with multiple paradoxes familiar from traditional theology -- which we see in the Antinomies of Transcendence.
With causes, we are driven to action by things of which we are simply unaware. The choices we think we are making in consciousness are simply confabulations. What is unconscious rules the mind. As a determinist, Schopenhauer believed something like this himself; but its conspicuous appearance in modern thought is found in Freud -- and in Marx.
On the other hand, what we find in the internal world is rather different. We make choices, and we believe we are aware of the conditions of these choices. This is called "free will," which materialists are still at pains to refute. What goes along with this is the appearance of matters of value in this world. We perceive beauty in the world, and we make our choices in terms of what seems good. No one has ever investigated this more carefully than Socrates, always asking people why they were doing what they were doing.
Materialists are at a loss to explain these things, except in entirely subjective terms, or with sophistry. When it comes to their political opinions, they may be quite willing to judge others, especially capitalists, using their own subjective "values." Or they try to use Marxism, which is ostensively value free, despite using moral concepts like "alienation" -- but that is the paradox of Marxism, whose adherents are as intensively moralistic, intolerant, and "judgmental" as any fundamentalist Christian. Or even more so [note].
The nature of the good and the beautiful, and of all value, is one of the largest blind spots in all of modern philosophy, or in all philosophy back to Plato. One of the most challenging observations in this respect is actually due to Hume, who famously argued that matters of value and obligation, the famous "ought," cannot be logically derived from mere matters of fact, where only "is," indicatives, occur.
This continues to bedevil academic philosophers, whose confusion stretches from the conclusion that objective value therefore doesn't exist, despite the evidence of history upon which Hume himself relies, to the confused claims that imperatives actually can be deduced from indicatives. Since Hume's argument applies simple rules of deductive logic, those who don't understand or accept it do no more than embarrass themselves.
With the duality between fact and value, it should not be surprising that the best theories are going to involve an ontological dualism, as in Plato or Kant. What that means may remain obscure, until we take seriously the principle stated by Aquinas: Bonum et ens sunt idem secundum rem, "The Good and Being are actually the same thing." Yet this remains obscure in its own right. How can Being and the Good be the same thing? The dualisms or Plato or Kant may themselves contradict that.
Thus, what I have argued (here and here) is that the existence we ourselves possess, the existence in consciousness, is not itself being per se. We are dissociated from simple being by intentionality. My existence is the transparent, privative, emptiness of internal transcendence. As such, it is empty, corresponding to the similar practical emptiness of external existence, which is hidden behind phenomena. Because of intentionality, we have "lost" our Being.
This is conspicuous in the way that Hegel and Heidegger both address Being, whose emptiness seems no different from Not Being. Thus, Hegel's Dialectic steps from Being, to Not Being, to the synthesis of the two, which is Becoming, i.e. the character of phenomena -- collapsing being and value together into the judicial positivism characteristic of Hegelian philosophy.
In turn, Heidegger looks to the "uncovering" of Being, the ἀλήθεια, "truth," a process that is terrible, δεινός, and violent, and which, for 
Heidegger, revealed the Nazi Party. This may be a clue that Heidegger did not have a good theory -- while academic philosophers stumble in their dishonesty and desperation to conceal what this means. Their nihilism is so valuable to them.
Rejecting Hegel and Heidegger, the proper take is that Being does not need uncovering because, as value, as the presence of what I call "positive transcendence," it is already visible within our internal existence. In our intentional dissociation from Being as such, it nevertheless continues to cast a kind of shadow into our internal existence. We have not "lost" our Being entirely; it lingers in a ghostly way, despite, at the same time, being obviously present to everyone.
That presence is the appearance of matters of value, which reflect the inner independent character of Being, which is positive transcendence. Being and the Good are the same because the Good is the way the Being remains within our intentional existence. Not Being, which looms over Existentialism and its twisted values, the essence of Heidegger's nihilism and his Nazism, is not there -- as Parmenides might have warned us. Heidegger's own interpretation of the Christian "Fall," which alienates us from Being, is a Fall away from what Plato would have regarded as obvious: the beauty all around us. The loss of value in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Existentialism is a gratuitious, self-inflicted wound -- whose payoff is, and has actually been, terror and horror.
Curiously, author Anne Rice (1941-2021) has one of her characters say, "...in the realm of the invisible there is no right and wrong... ideas of right and wrong originate with biological beings and they seduce the spirit world." [Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis, Anchor Books, 2016, p.62], when exactly the opposite is true, as anyone might think since at least Plato, and certainly from any reading of St. Paul, as we see above.
Rice seems to have blown hot and cold about Catholicism, especially in her old age; so one might wonder if she really believed, or understood the significance of, the stated principle, according to which God, like Spinoza's God, would be unconcerned about right and wrong. No theistic religion would agree with that, certainly not Catholicism. "Biological beings," as no more than that, are inevitably Nietzschean predators, or prey. Rice's own objections to Catholicism seem to have centered on its not measuring up to the political correctness of trendy moral enthusiasms of the moment.
The presence of value from the transcendent is indeed the most vividly presented by Plato, who appreciates that beauty, of all the forms of value, is directly available to the senses, and moving and entrancing to every sort of person -- although here we see that Plato doesn't even consider the power of music, except as a threat to morality, even though its beauty may reach more people at more times than even visible beauty can do, especially with modern technology. Just turn on the radio:
Now beauty [κάλλος], as we said, shone bright among those visions, and in this world below we apprehend it through the clearest of our senses, clear and resplendent. For sight [ὄψις] is the keenest of the physical senses [αἰσθήσεις, singular αἴσθησις], though wisdom [φρόνησις] is not seen by it -- how terrible [δεινός] would be our love [ἔρως] for it, if such a clear image [εἴδωλον] of wisdom were granted as would come through sight -- and the same is true of the other beloved [ἐραστά, singular ἐραστόν] objects; but beauty alone has this privilege [μοῖρα], to be most clearly shown [ἐκφανέστατον] and most lovely [ἐρασμιώτατον] of them all.Phaedrus, 250D, R. Hackford, Plato's Phaedrus, Library of the Liberal Arts, 1952, p. 93, translation modified; Greek text, the Loeb Classical Library, Euthryphro Apology Crito Phaedo Phaedrus, Harvard University Press, 1914-1966, p.485.
More neglected than music is erotic beauty, despite Plato's own approach that the attraction of beauty may begin with the beauty of a lover. However, since this is stated in terms of the beauty of boys, the issue may get somewhat sidetracked.
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| Hermann Fenner-Behmer (1866-1913), The Bookworm, 1910, detail; complete painting in popup; I often found my first wife in exactly this pose and undress, reading. |
Nevertheless, the whole matter, along with any aesthetic realism, may seem to be under the radar for other philosophers. Even worse, Feminism can be hostile to the beauty of women as the sexist "objectification" of women, although this falls under a more general political anaesthesia and anhedonia. In any case, erotic beauty has a tough time in academic and public discourse.
Ironically, it is often scientists who wax the most eloquent about beauty, even recommending physical theories just because of their "beauty," despite science containing nothing that would count as a metaphysic of beauty, except perhaps for mathematics, which treats of abstract objects whose physical reality, or even objective reality, is a matter of intense dispute -- totally precluding metaphysical questions about beauty. And while most actual mathematicians, and many physicists, are in fact Platonists, philosophers tend to be not only dismissive, but even contemptuous, of this, despite having no real clue how mathematicians access their intuitions and practice their discipline -- Heaven help them understand the Continuum Hypothesis.
Indeed, this is the evidence to which we should attend. If the external reality of physical existence contains beauty, there is nothing in physical laws alone to account for it, and the materialist can supply nothing beyond "the eye of the beholder" to account for the aesthetic judgments of the scientist, let alone the mathematician, who may seem like an extraterrestrial in his sentiments, as, after a fashion, he is.
Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) was invited to the meetings of the Vienna Circle, yet he was too diffident, if not intimidated, to ever tell the Logical Positivists that he agree with pretty much nothing they were asserting -- doctrines, like "verificationism," that really weren't even coherent. He was a Platonist, whose own grasp on ordinary realities endangered him as he foolishly lingered in Nazi occupied Vienna and seems to have led to his death from starvation -- once his protectors, like Einstein (d.1955) and his wife Adele (1899-1981), were no longer available -- Adele having fallen sick and was in the hospital for months.
We might in fact wonder how the internal world of our existence is so different from the external world revealed by our experience, even as the external world appears clothed in the beauty, grace, sublimity, and wonder that are meaningless in purely physical terms. Nietzsche, who accepted the subjectivity of value, and who saw all value as dying with the illusion of any kind of divine Presence, nevertheless saw all human activity as essentially aesthetic, while ignoring the metaphysic of beauty, and also of morality, that he had insensibly inherited from Schopenhuauer, who believed no more in a personal God than Nietzsche did. Nietzsche otherwise had no metaphysical system of his own and owed too much to Schopenhauer to bother with a real critique. This incoherence, like the internal contradictions of Marxism, really makes Nietzsche's thought self-refuting. Nietzsche, of course, always a bit of a joker, didn't worry about things like that.
The puzzle of the ontological relationship of internal to external existence I address as ontological undecidability. While the conclusion is that there is no deciding between them, the ultimate challenge is what this means to personal existence. Bluntly, we want to know, "Do I survive death?" This is then about the application of the concept of "substance," which in Kantian terms is the concept of something that is durable, separable, and identical. Traditionally, substances have these attributes because there is an underlying reality, a ὑποκείμενον (of which substantia is the literal translation), that bears and accounts for them. That would be, for us, pace John Searle, the soul.
But such a thing, not visible to physical inspection, would be a transcendent object, while in Kantian metaphysics such a thing, among things-in-themselves, is not amenable to a consistent theory. It will generate Antinomies -- whose opposite pole we find in the Buddhist denial of a substantial self, the famous अनात्मन्, Anātman, doctrine. Indeed, while Aquinas derived his theory of the soul from Aristotle's metaphysics, Aristotle himself did not believe that the soul was immortal. Aquinas had to arbitrarily add that feature.
Less arbitrary may be the argument of Parmenides that Being cannot become Not-Being. While that might be dismissed as silly philosophy from the early days of the Pre-Socratics, it actually survives as the conservation of mass and the other conservation laws of modern physics, a very long way from the early Pre-Socratics. However, its application to internal existence, or to the soul, would require another step, although that is just what we find in the Bhagavad Gita:
नासतोविद्यतेभावो नाभावोविद्यतेसतः
Nāsato vidyáte bhāvo, nābhāvo vidyáte sataḥ.
The unreal never is; the real never is not.
[2:16, Juan Mascaró translation, Penguin Books, 1962, p.49].
This is part of Krishna's argument that Arjuna's relatives and teacher cannot really die, even if he seems to kill them in battle. Therefore, he should do his duty and not worry about it.
Unfortunately, this does not really get us beyond Parmenides, as Krishna does not deal with the duality of internal and external. The materialist is fine with the real, namely matter and energy, being indestructible. But the soul, well, there is just no such thing. Ask John Searle.
Thus, we are left in the lurch about the status of our internal existence and any possible existence of a substantial soul among things-in-themselves. Elsewhere I have considered the clues to the soul found in considerations of personal identity, for which formal identifications seem insufficient. But this may not be persuasive.
We need something to break the tie between internal and external, and this may not be of rational content. That will not be as satifying to many as rational argument, but it may also address an aspect of things that turns out more important for other reasons.
I fear that for things like this, I always appeal to Heraclitus of Ephesus:
ὁ ἄναξ οὗ τὸ μαντεῖόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς
οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σημαίνει.The lord whose oracle is in Delphi
neither speaks nor conceals but gives a sign.[Plutarch, De Pythiae oraculis 21, 404 E, The Presocratic Philosophers, G.S. Kirk & J.E. Raven, Cambridge, 1964, p.211]
The obscurity of Delphic pronouncements, as well as of the philosophy of Heraclitus himself, is well remembered; and the nature of "signs" themselves, σήματα or σημεῖα, has been given little to no philosophical consideration, indeed hardly more than faith itself. How can a philosopher take faith seriously when, by definition, it is believing something without rational evidence? And when we find philosophers, like Kant, calling something "faith," when he has actually substituted reason itself for any traditional meaning for faith? It is no less than an absurd sophistry, which makes no attempt to save the phenomena of religion.
But, in the best Kanian sense, a sign is the "third thing" that lies between and connects reason and faith. Many a modern person, who seeks religion but finds a great many different faiths, may search in vain for a way to choose one over another. Grounds for choice may be moral or aesthetic, but then the moral critique of religions is enthusiasticlly pursued by atheists, introducing grave doubts about the moral suitability of any. Aesthetic appeal would seem to trivialize religion as a matter of taste, although we might wonder if the Ahndung of Jakob Fries amounts to no more than that. In turn, Leonard Nelson does rely on morality, which means the rejection of all historial religions and the absurd construction of politics as a substitute for religion. I say "absurd," even though those who have turned politics in a religion, often of a totalitarian sort, are conspicuous in modern life.
Thus, a "sign" must have a qualium and a valence beyond the moral and the aesthetic, namely as the numinous, if not the miraculous. For this, we need Rudolf Otto, beyond Fries and Nelson. But such a sign can take many, many forms. A simple one is hearing voices, as occurred from Job, to St. Paul, to Muḥammad, to Jon Voight. When that happens, you can be told things. A curious kind of sign, however, is what Socrates receives. He heard a voice, φωνή, too, but it never told him anything. All it did was stop him from doing what he was doing. Why he should stop was something he had to figure out for himself. So the voice is never quoted.
Meanwhile, most of us don't hear voices, or have any other kind of sign. Were it the voice of Christ, we would then perhaps have grounds for believing his promise of eternal life. Otherwise, we are left with the tie, or worse, between internal and external existence. I have considered reasons for this. For the purposes of life, our "need to know" does not really extend into the hereafter. If we know what is good and beautiful, that is all we need to know to live a good life. If we want to know a larger significance, what this was all for, it demands more than reason.
Furthermore, while Kant postulated God as the guarantor of eternal reward for goodness, this contradicted his own moral principle that the motive for moral behavior is simply consciousness of duty, not the promise of reward. That is the difference between morality and prudence. If you do good and avoid evil out of fear of hell and the hope of heaven, this is less worthy than if you act in such a way for its own sake. Otherwise, you are simply playing the odds, like any gambler. But virtue is not gambling. This seems to mean that there is a moral reason why the hereafter is unknown.
Even Plato argued that the just and righteous person will be happier than one who is not. This is questionable, and, even if reasonable, uncertain enough that it seems insufficient as the basis for a life. And when the Stoics held that virtue is its own reward, it is not clear that such a formulation really helps very much. The just and righteous person should cling to virtue because it is worthy, not because of any conceivable benefit, even one of personal satisfaction. After all, if it just makes me feel good, then the hedonist can claim vindication -- we're just aiming at our pleasure.
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason [Lewis White Beck translation, A Liberal Arts Press Book, Bobbs-Merrill, 1956, p.166]; Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, A 289 [Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Herausgaben von Wilhelm Weischedel, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, Erste Auflage, 1974, 1956, p.300].
So we may not need to break the tie; but the strangeness of our situation, and of our world, warrants reflection. It is especially noteworthy that our bubble of consciousness, within which appear the anomalies of freedom, purpose, and value, does not present us with a passive diorama. These are all terms of action -- although value extends from the requirements of goodness to the beauty of the world -- Kant's "starry heavens above" down to the "moral law within." This does not seem accidental.
Indeed, the more we learn about the universe through science, the less its has to do with us and whatever we could do about it. The universe is a place of incredible distances, vast explosions, and blistering energy, with almost everything seeming to hurtle towards catastrophy. This is not comforting, as it looks very much like the Existential dread of Nietzsche's hopeless "Eternal Recurrence," or the endless cycles of Indian cosmology -- but then the goal of Indian religious practice is to escape the latter through Salvation. There is no salvation in Nietzsche's nihilism, merely the cruel and arrogant Übermensch, who keeps women as pets and enjoys the suffering of others.
We might note how often the vasteness of the universe is used to belittle human life. Compared to the galaxies and quasars, we are less than (a lot less than) a grain of sand on the beach, in danger of annihilation at any moment. Sometimes, the more scientists wax eloquent about the universe, the less value they attribute to life itself, despite the revelation of its rarity and uniqueness. One might think that the very purpose of the excerise is to dismiss human meaning in favor of what is impersonal and meaningless -- until, of course, the beauty of the universe is asserted, despite the subjectivity of beauty simultaneously affirmed. We, whose lives are meaningless, nevertheless attribute to everything else a meaning that only we can give to it. I'm confused.
Another aspect of that are disquisitions on the ignorance and folly of the Ancients, and especially of Mediaeval religion. They didn't know about modern physics and cosmology, so of course they were ignorant bigots. However, the Ancient and Mediaeval worlds perform an essential service for us. A world without science allows free reign for the terms of internal existence. And the results, indeed, are not unambiguous. The gods are capricious, but, as Socrates says, every good thing we have is owing to them -- although Socrates did not want to believe that the gods were as capricious as in the myths. Nevertheless, it was always a world of personal meaning, and the beauty produced in human art generally was concerned with religion. The nihilists want to reduce the For the topic here, of greatest interest is our fate in the hereafter. After all, Solon, I think, is supposed to have said that we can't say anyone was really happy until after their death -- too much can go wrong in the meanwhile. And on that ultimate topic human cultures have varied accounts. The grimmest versions we find in the stories of the Sumerian and Homeric afterlifes. The promise is little better than Nietzschean nihilism. The dead are miserable and even insensible. Gilgamesh, after his friend dies, with a vision of the underworld, seeks for immortality. He fails, despite his own semi-divine status. Meanwhile, Achilles, similarly semi-divine, who trades his life for fame, realizes, after a blood sacrifice revives him a bit, that the trade was not worth it. He would rather be a nobody just to be alive.
But we get other visions. Chinese belief, in a matter-of-fact kind of way, sees the afterlife as little different from the present life, bureaucrats and all, to the extent that living families arrange marriages between dead relatives -- and have an annual living/dead family picnic at Ch'ing Ming. We find a different tone in Egyptian religion, where the promise of a happy afterlife occurs, but it is not a sure thing. The dead are judged (as in Buddhism), and the living must make provisons for them. At the very least, the living are urged to speak the name of the dead and invoke them in prayer. This is in curious contrast to other cultures, where speaking of the dead requires careful ritual controls, or ought not be done at all, lest the improper presence of the spirits of the dead disrupt the life of the living.
The Egyptian approach catches on. In the Greek Mystery Cults, like the Eleusinian Mysteries, a happy afterlife, in explicit contrast to Homer, is contingent on initiation. This rebounds back to Egypt, if it didn't actually originate there, in the cult of Isis and Osiris, where the latter was brought back from the dead, mainly through the efforts of Isis, fighting the opposition of their brother Seth all the way. Exported to Rome, the cult of Isis joins the growing ranks of actual Mystery Religions, which end up including Mithraism, imported from Iran, and Christianity, spreading from Judaism and adapted more to gentile tastes.
We see various currents in Christian theology about the afterlife. Since Jesus promises life, one might conclude that otherwise the dead descend to Homeric misery and insensibility. The Christian promise is thus conformable to the Eleusinian. However, the idea becomes more popular that the Underworld is a place of punishment, to which the damned are consigned, because of their sin. Thus, the Christian promise is as much redemption from sin as salvation from death. This is then complicated by the circumstance that many people are morally good, whether they have even heard about Christianity or not -- so Dante introduced a kind of earthy paradise into Hell, for the "virtuous pagans," and even for the Sultān Saladin, despsite his being an infidel who inflicted catastrophic defeats on Christians. No modern Jihadist earns or warrants the respect in which Saladin was held by the Crusaders or other Christians. On the other hand, the traditional Christian principle was that Original Sin can only be eradicated by Baptism and Christian belief, meaning that non-believers are properly damned, whatever their apparent moral status.
Thus, the variety of visions of the afterlife sounds like nothing more than Kant's Antinomies, that we cannot expect a logically coherent system of transcendent objects -- remembering that the universe itself is a transcendent object and not an object of a "possible experience." The key move, of course, was Cartesian Dualism essentially being turned inside-out by both Spinoza and Kant. We might call this the great "Antistrophe," Ἀντιστροφή, the "turning about," of modern metaphysics. Yet it is ignored by everyone relying on the Cartesian Trilemma: It has to be either Dualism, Idealism, or Materialism.
This "Antistrophe" is not the same thing as Kant's famous "Copernican Revolution." That switched the passivity of Empiricist perception into the activity of synthesis in the mind:
Either the object alone must make the representation possible, or the representation alone must make the object possible. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A92-93, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith, St. Martin's Press, 1929, 1965, p.125 Clearly, if the representation makes the object possible, then the object is going to exist within the representation and we are directly acquainted with it. But representation is only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for the object, whose existence depends on external reality. Those who drop things-in-themselves from the mix, like Hegel, lose that qualification. So the "Antistrophe" is a step or two beyond the basic "Copernican Revolution."
But the result of the "Antistrophe" is not quite the same between Spinoza and Kant. The substance of Spinoza's God is concealed by his attributes, the two we know, extension and thought. Thus, modern fans of Spinoza are free to see this as the materialism that they prefer anyway, ignoring everything else in Spinoza's theory. Yet they do not need to misrepresent the impersonal and indifferent nature of that God, who gives not a fig about any of us or our fates. Spinoza's remedy was to shed the self, morally and metaphysically, and seek intoxicating mystical transport into the One. This can get called, paradoxically, "rational mysticism."
Kant's move, on the other hand, folds the duality of inner and outer under the center, This was alarming to Kant, who desperately wanted to pare it back down to the "Postulates of Practical Reason" and to something more congenial to his rationalistic and moralistic pseudo-"faith" -- resolutely ignoring actual religions, the ones he even knew about, except for some sort of stripped down, probably Unitarian, Christianity. Yet if Kant took the Antinomies more seriously, and was not desperate to get something more comfortable, this could be left with room enough for religions unfamiliar to him -- or even just for Hinduism, which contains its own Antinomies.
Thus, neither Spinoza or Kant had any actual Faith, beyond their rationalism, and the very idea of ritual and religious practice was close to literally beneath their contempt. Yet even Kant was more sensible than Spinoza of "what we can hope," in that Kant at least thought that morality implies immortality, however specious his arguments, while in Spinoza individual existence, as in Hegel, evaporates like the morning dew -- what materialists were hoping for all along.
Unlike Kant and Spinoza is the sense here that transcendent existence embodies matters of value, as in Platonism. Kant has a fragment of that, since the Moral Law is our real clue to things-in-themselves, but this is only an aspect and an abstract fragment of Platonic Being.
Heidegger comes close to this, but with grave and significant differences. Thus, Heidegger's Being is hidden and must "uncover" itself (in its own sweet time) in events of violence and terror, such as effected by the Third Reich. But Platonic Being is, in its own way, already present, both in our own "recollection" and in the way in which phenomenal objects exhibit their own character by "participating" in the Forms.
At the extreme, however, is religion, where the holy, although as much an imperative as morality in the transcendent, imposes no rational system in the immanent reality of phenomena -- heresy is not a moral wrong, although it has long been thought to be among sufficiently fanatical believers -- people are still killed, often by mobs, for "blasphemy" in Pakistan.
Perhaps the irony, then, is that it is religious value that holds the most meaning for life, followed by beauty, and most distantly with justice and morality. Indeed, while Beethoven was willing to soldier on, in deafness, for the beauty of music, and others dedicate their lives to justice, there is inevitably an emptiness to these things. Justice, for instance, is never permanently effected; and particular wrongs that energize the resolute are always followed by further wrongs, or just the general evils of life, which are unavoidable. And the resolute sometimes find, or may be unaware, that they were mistaken about the injustice they pursued, so that they contributed to evils rather than remedied them. Hence, every "workers' paradise" has turned into hell on earth.
The shadow of Being, however, as value, does not tell us of the objects among things-in-themselves, the unconditioned realities that could be the soul or God or eschatologial destinies. Such things, after all, which cannot be contained within phenomena, are what religions supply in their doctrine, doctrines that we cannot verify except by faith and by signs. Things we should not know, lest righteousness be turned into prudence.
Videmus nunc per speculum in enigmate, For now we see through a glass, darkly; 1 Corinthians 13:12 There is nothing in the history of philosophy to adequately address the requirements of Plato's theory without reproducing his mechanism of reincarnation, etc.; and the "participation" business was always rather mysterious. Even Neoplatonism, which took care of Participation with the "declension of Being," substituted a mystical intuitionism for Platonic Recollection, paying more attention to Aristotelian epistemology than to Platonic. Nothing in the history of philosophy, that is, until Jakob Fries. Intuitionism remains the default epistemology for those in some kind of tradition comparable to Rationalism, such as Phenomenology.
The key is the theory of "non-intuitive immediate knowledge," which is unique. This was well appreciated and revived by Leonard Nelson, but then forgotten in turn by Nelson's own students, after his untimely death. The surrender of Nelson's students to the emptiness and nihilism of Analytic philosophy culminated in Grete Henry-Hermann's absurd praise of Behavior Study. The effort of Nelson's students in the 1970's to revive interest in him and Friesian philosophy thus actually self-destructed, born down by the weight of its own confusion and banality.
But non-intuitive immediate knowledge directly addressed Plato and Nelson's understanding of Socratic Method, which implies that the interlocutor of Socrates already knows the answers to questions, without intitially being aware of that. Plato's Recollection accounted for that, but nothing else had since then until Fries.
This adds to the issue here about consciousness. Knowledge that we possess but of which we are unaware is present in consciousness in a unique way. Plato's theory addressed it through the idea of memory, which we certainly possess but of which we are, in detail, generally unaware. When we do want to remember something, we know what that is like, and it is not always an easy or straightforward process. One might think, "What was the name of that actress, the one who dreamt of Manderley?" It may be like placing an order at a restaurant. Sooner or later, it ought to show up. Or the waiter might come back and say, "We're out of that" -- a service not provided by our memory, whose silence must often speak for itself. But even how we place the order is obscure. I recently was trying to remember something, and couldn't -- but then I woke up the next morning and immediately remembered it. Somebody was busy overnight [note].
This was a serious clue about the mind, something totally ignored by Descartes and other Rationalists -- let alone by all of Ancient and Mediaeval philosophy -- and not well explained by the Empiricists either, whose theory of the mind was almost entirely of something passive. Yet the activity of accessing a memory, which manifestly can take some time, bespeaks mechanisms wholly hidden from introspection. The full force of the mystery may not have been made obvious until Freud, whose own idea of the "preconscious," das Vorbewußte, was of something available to conscious access but that is nevertheless still unconscious. Descartes would have been dumbstruck. Yet we are aware of our powers of memory, and what might be remembered, in an obscure way.
But memory works very differently from what we actually see in Socratic Method and with non-intuitive immediate knowledge. The Platonic knowledge is actually present, but we access and use it insensibly. The obvious analogy is with a natural language, whose grammar we employ immediately, spontaneously, and competently, often without the slightest idea of what it is like. Even grammarians had little sense of how odd this is, at least until Noam Chomsky pointed out that the rules of speech actually being used are often very different from traditional grammatical notions about them. I have considered the complexity of just forming regular plurals in English elsewhere.
Recent discussion is that the conscious mind is really no more than a confabulation, with all the real activities of the brain accomplished unconsciously and then merely displayed, some small amount of time later. This goes way beyond merely rejecting free will. We are not just puppets, but self-deceived and self-deluded puppets. Not coincidentally, this returns us to a feature of Behaviorism, where consciousness can be dispensed with altogether, without loss. All the real activities of the mind are unconscious.
A reaction against Behaviorism, of course, got called "humanistic psychology," because the humanity had previously been lost. But if we were puppets, the temptation for the Illuminati is then for themselves to be the puppet masters -- an ambition already evident in censorship instructions from government to Big Tech companies, like Twitter and Google. It is illegal for government to outsource violations of civil rights. The law is clear, but we have not yet seen serious enforcement from the courts, where biased judges have acted to protect government lawlessness. In fact, with the defection of a "conservative" justice, the Supreme Court refused to enforce the First Amendment, and established precedent, with a sophistry about the "standing" of the plaintiffs, including State Attorney Generals. Thus we see, as so often, Jefferson's worry that the Supreme Court, as part of the Federal Government, will promote the power of the Federal Government.
Orwell's classic 1984, which "Progressives" once thought was achieved in the reactionary Reagan Administration, is now their dearest amibition in a kind of digital GULAG, where the masses will mindlessly vote as conditioned. Looks like it is working. Chicago just voted out a bad mayor in order to vote in a worse one. Residents and businesses are fleeing. The abandoned and miserable condition of Detroit beckons.
Where Franklin said that we have a Republic "if you can keep it," between faithless judges and foolish voters, we have little chance of keeping it. In fact, I think we have already lost the Republic, as least as this was conceived by the Founders, and Franklin. Two sophistries of the New Deal Court destroyed the Constitution. One was a suggestion of Hamilton that the "General Welfare" clause meant that the Federal Government could spend money on anything. Jefferson said this would render the Constitution "nugatory."
But the New Deal Court accepted this principle, and the power of giving or withholding money has given the Federal Government control over almost anything. At the same time, the principle that the "Interstate Commerce Clause" gives the Federal Government the power to regular anything that "affects" Interstate Commerce means that, indeed, the Federal Government can regulate anything, since almost anything, like sneezing, can be said to "affect" Interstate Commerce in some way, even if the arguments are the most transparent sophistries. Thus, the fundamental principle of a government of limited an enumerated powers is destroyed and replaced by absolute power. Not coincidentally, politicians then become millionaires by years of "public service."
[4] Caritas patiens est, benigna est. Caritas non aemulatur, non agit perperam, non inflatur, [5] non est ambitiosa, non quaerit quae sua sunt, non irritatur, non cogitat malum, [6] non gaudet super iniquitate, congaudet autem veritati: [7] omnia suffert, omnia credit, omnia sperat, omnia sustinet.
[4] Love is patient, love is kind; love is not jealous, or boastful, or proud; [5] love is not arrogant or rude, does not insist on its own way, is not irritable or resentful; [6] it does not rejoice at injustice, but rejoices in the truth; [7] love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 1 Corinthians 13, see The Four Loves
The materialists think that unconscious mental processes mean that it is all in the brain. But they overlook the circumstance that the brain exists among phenomena, and its transcendent counterpart is among things-in-themselves. Thus, all the phenomena of internal existence, from free will to the pleasure of the first orgasm, tell us just as much about the transcendent as does neuropathology. This is where Spinoza's metaphysics (for those who understand it) works about as well as Kant's, with the addition of the non-intuitive Friesian factor.
Perhaps we are back to the same dilemma. Among things-in-themselves deterministic causes are at war, as far as we can tell, with freedom and beauty. But if freedom is an illusion, this means that Nature has played a very nasty trick on us. Life is meaningful only because of illusions. Evolution has formed us with a false experience of meaning, while the world is actually a meaningless Existential Void. In this, would Nature be a malicious deceiver, like the Deceiving Demon of Descartes, or would Nature be doing us a favor by giving us a confabulation of value?
I suppose we can imagine an evolutionary argument, based on survival alone, that a species will be more successful if individuals are happy in their survival, and do not merely endure it. Our life with love and beauty is just a way of tricking us into reproduction and caring. Schopenhauer might like that. Nature's ultimate con game.
A problem with that may be that some of the most discontent people turn out to be the most materially successful. Generations of American children since World War II, raised in ease and plenty, become nihilists in their adulthood and buy into ideologies advocating slavery and mass murder in order to make things "better." The experience of Communism now fades from memory and is not honestly taught by the leftist ideologues of "education." Cuban exiles find their children coming back from college loving Fidel, from whom their family desperately fled in terror.
Oddly enough, we might consider whether Communism would make things better, confronting people with what real evil is, from which they had always been protected. Meanwhile, we have the equivalent of the Hitler Youth battling "fascism," i.e. things like Free Speech, which no Fascist regime ever allowed. So we see how "education" now inculcates ignorance, incoherence, and violence, while condemning knowledge and logic (and mathematics, science, etc.) as "white supremacy." The absurdity of this is protected when debate is suppressed.
At the same time, lives of empty "materialism" may drive one to the next question about meaning, not just that life may be happy and meaningful in itself, but that it has a larger signficance, that it is all for something more. How would an Evolutionary argument work for that? People often begin worrying about the afterlife in their old age, usually beyond their childbearing years, and in ways for which childbearing is irrelevant -- as in traditional Hinduism, couples surrender possessions to their children and become Forest Dwellers. Indeed, what would be an Evolutionary argument for celibate monasticism? Yet there are major religons for which renouncing the world is a major element, from Hinduism, to Christianity, to Jainism and Buddhism. Monks and nuns find a satisfaction in this life, but it is paradoxically not by valuing the things of this life.
In Marxism, dying for the Revolution is supposed to selflessly help others enjoy the advantages of Communism. But Marx was never clear about what the meaning of life would be under the "freedom" of Communism, without worry for the necessities of life. The autism of individual creativity has always been crushed out of existence by Marxist regimes; and when the only value is self-sacrifice for the benefit of others (mainly the ruling elite), there is nothing left to provide content to the individual freedom presumably achieved under Communism.
It is like the Buddhist metaphysics of "relative existence," where stripping away all external relationships leaves nothing but Emptiness -- śūnyatā, शून्यता -- whose point is the abolition of Self and, incidentally, attachments. So Marxism is stuck with a theory where only attachments count (by force and not by free choice), and this erases any promise or appeal from actual Communism -- which no Marxist regime has ever claimed it has achieved anyway -- rather than the socialist totalitarian slave state, where dissidents can simply be executed, as much of the population was in poor, ravaged Cambodia.
I don't think that Evolution will produce monasticism, unless it is a solution to overpopulation. But then monasticism does not seem to have arisen in places where there was an overpopulation problem. A key place of origin for Christian monasticism was in Egypt, but then Egypt was the place of just about the most productive agriculture in the Mediterranean world. We know that Egypt suffered drought at the end of the Old Kingdom, but then there was no contemporary monasticism -- that came centuries later.
Thus, it looks more like monasticism was one answer, not to the weather, but to the human condition. Religion may deal with the meaning of life beyond the present life, but monasticism intensifies this focus by the renunciation of this life altogether. We may be distracted by the history of monasteries being economically productive themselves, but then that qualification cannot be maintained when we consider hermits, anchorites, and mendicants. Such practitioners maintain a very severe withdrawl from the world.
Not a lot of this survives in Christendom. St. Francis of Assisi, who was a pure mendicant, founded an order that not only soon retreated to monsteries, but actually persecuted monks who wanted to continue as mendicants. The desire to embrace poverty as had St. Francis became heresy (in 1296 the "Spirituals" were declared heretical by Boniface VIII, although that did not end the dispute). Meanwhile, however, Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism maintain mendicant traditions, although I don't think a lot of Buddhist mendicants continue in, say, Japan, where monks became "priests" and married on top of it.
Protestants, who have abandoned monasticism (earning derision from Schopenhauer), and atheists like to think that many traditional features of religion, like ritual, were actually the invention of scheming priesthoods to empower their parasitic institutions. However, while from the earliest information we have about religion in, say, Egypt or Sumeria, we see a class of priests and temple institutions, we find something different in peoples who survive on the fringes of civilization, like the A signature practice of shamans is spirit possession; but this even survives in later, intitutional, organized religions, for instance with the mediums who practice in the Chinese temples in Malaya, but who are not priests and are unaffiliated with any priesthood. Their possessing spirits may be socially non-conforming and rebellious. This was also evident in 19th Century Japan, when the "new religions" took advantage of the introduction of freedom of religion.
The spontaneous practices of ancient religions, organized or otherwise, bespeak dimensions of existence that modern materialism and nihilism have been stripping away from human life. The results have been ugly. The murders of witchhunts and the Spanish Inquisition achieved body counts that would be equalled every few days by Hitler or Stalin or Mao, all to make the world a "better place" without religion and tradition. The ideologies of the 20th century, even if still celebrated by the fools in American universities, are left with nothing to boast of. Yet atheism alone was supposed to lift off most of the evils that had always afflicted humanity. Not quite.
Zwei Dinge erfüllen das Gemüt mit immer neuer and zunehmenden Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht, je öfter und anhaltender sich das Nachdenken damit beschäftigt: Der bestirnte Himmel über mir, und das moralische Gesetz in mir.
Parthenon to a storehouse and not really a temple, as though Athena Parthenos were a homeless derelict in residence there by accident.
Entweder wenn der Gegenstand die Vorstellung, oder diese den Gegenstand allein möglich macht.
Thus, the attributes are, after a fashion, folded above the substance, concealing its inner nature and leaving it as something that we do not perceive, as such, directly. We perceive the effected and passive Natura naturata, not the active and creative Natura naturans.
so that what is evident and perceivable are phenomena, while internal and external substance themselves vanish into transcendence. This leaves us in a very different situation than with Spinoza. Transcendent space is not confined to Spinoza's God. It is opened up to all of Kant's "dialectical illusion" and all the possible objects that metaphysics and religion can imagine.
This is what we see, like Spinoza's God, peeking out from behind the Kantian presence of phenomena and negative transcendence. Yet, unlike Spinoza's God, who is invisible, and not subject to the "withdrawal of Being," in some kind of occultation, posited by Heidegger (who seems to have thought that Being was disappointed, and sullen, after the failure of the Third Reich), positive transcendence is available for our inspection, in all value, but especially, as Plato recognized, most intuitively in beauty. Since matters of value can be very obscure, and even beauty admits of disagreements, what we get is rather like what St. Paul says, δι᾽ ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι, "through a glass darkly."
In the diagram at left, the idea is that, although all value is present, as the "shadow" of Being, in phenomena, its rational content and necessity varies in relation to its roots in the transcendent. Thus, the formality of moral rules, and their necessity, is fully present in phenomena, while beauty, in its variety, is not subject to rational systematization. Almost all the rational necessity of this mode of value is in the transcendent. De gustibus non est disputandum.
τότε δὲ πρόσωπον πρὸς πρόσωπον·
tunc autem facie ad faciem.
but then face to face.[4] Ἡ ἀγάπη μακροθυμεῖ, χρηστεύεται ἡ ἀγάπη, οὐ ζηλοῖ, ἠ ἀγάπη οὐ περπερεύεται, οὐ φυσιοῦται,
[5] οὐκ ἀσχημονεῖ, οὐ ζητεῖ τὰ ἐαυτῆς, οὐ παροξύνεται, οὐ λογίζεται τὸ κακόν,
[6] οὐ χαίρει ἐπὶ τῇ ἀδικίᾳ, συνχαίρει δὲ τῇ ἀληθείᾳ·
[7] πάντα στέγει, πάντα πιστεύει, πάντα ἐλπίζει, πάντα ὑπομένει.
Bushmen, Australian Aborigenes, the Laplanders (now called the Sámi, an "endonym" used by the politically correct -- looks related to Suomi, meaning Finland and the Finnish languauge), nomads in Tuva (Tuvans who have not converted to Buddhism), and other people living along the Arctic. Their religious leaders were and are "shamans," a word we derive from "the Ural-Altaic peoples of northern Asia," i.e. Siberia and the tundra. But shamans are individuals who are part of no institution, let alone a cabal of conspirators.
| Good Will |  | z |
|---|---|---|
| +6ℏ | ||
| Justice |   | +5ℏ |
| Right |  | +4ℏ |
| Good |  | +3ℏ |
| Beauty |  | +2ℏ |
| Sublime |   | +ℏ |
| Holy |  | 0 |
To say what those features are, we must turn to metaphysics; and the only theory in Western metaphysics that really covers the possibilities is that of Kant, with his own theory of things-in-themselves and what he called "dialectic," while the epistemologial side of the matter, providing a functional equivalent of Platonic Recollection, is the theory of Fries.
Thus, the determinism visible in the external world nevertheless corresponds to the freedom, meaning, and value evident in the internal world. The conflict between the two, such as it is, is described by Kant's theory of Antinomies. This is less of a problem than it may seem. Indeed, it comes up in the courtroom every time there is a question about the competance of a person to stand trial. If the person is not sane, this means that he is not free to make moral choices like a sane person, but is subject to psychological forces beyond his control and is morally irresponsible. This is a practical question that often must be answered.
The issue also has a political dimension, since there is a body of opinion that criminals are the blameless victims of society, which has made them the way they are -- while their "bourgeois" victims are the true criminals (although most victims of crime are themselves poor minorities). We might take this more seriously did not the same people also hold that their "bourgeois" political enemies were racists (and guilty of other political crimes) fully responsible and guilty for their vicious beliefs and deserving of whatever sanctions or punishments society and the righteous "People" (i.e. the totatitarian police state) might inflict on them, perhaps violently. As we often see, determinists generally allow that there is freedom somewhere, not the least in their own enlightened opinions and goodness, by which the rest of us should praise and obey them.
Not all of our questions can be answered rationally. A Platonic theory secures the meaning and value of the world and of life. Beyond the world, we see a variety of often conflicting answers in religion. These cannot be resolved unless we believe we are given a sign. The Platonist, however, may be confident that, even without a sign, there is transcendent meaning, and this makes for a very different world than with the nihilism of the materialist or atheist -- which many of them may not even understand is nihilism, relying on the crushed reed of Nietzsche and Existentialism -- where the attendant politics curiously gravitate towards dictatorship.
There also is the sobering point that the reality of an afterlife may be withheld for a reason, and that is to preserve the difference, as we have seen, between morality and prudence. But there is more to it. Consider the moral reality of murder. In a merely material world, murder is the absolute annihilation of a person. As Clint Eastwood says in Unforgiven [1992], "It's a hell of a thing, killin' a man. Take away all he's got, and all he's ever gonna have." No punishment of the killer can ever make that good, and the victim vanishes into Not Being.
On the other hand, if there is certainly an afterlife, then there is a remedy. The victim is not really dead; and while there will be trauma from the killing, we would imagine that Heaven will have remedies for this. As Krishna tells Arjuna, the people he kills in battle will not really be dead and consequently what he needs to do should not bother him. This makes killing sound inconsequential, and might it make some wonder if there is any good reason not to kill people? It just moves them on to something better.
So, what we would like is where killing matters, but not to a level of an unhealable wound in reality: a compromise between the being and the not being of the victim, who may have really been killed, but not so much, in some sense, as to really be dead.
We seem to have an awareness of this in Confucius, whose injunctions are a combination of distancing or even neglect of the dead and also the performance of the appropriate rites for the dead. In the Book of Rites, 禮記, Lǐjì (or the Classic of Rites, 禮經, Lǐjīng), we get a sensible distinction about our attitudes:
孔子曰、 「之死而致死之、 不仁而不可為也、 之死而致生之、 不知而不可為也。」Confucius said, "In dealing with the dead [死, sǐ], if we treat them as if they were entirely dead [致死, zhìsǐ], that would show a want of affection [不仁, bù rén], and should not be done; or, if we treat them as if they were entirely alive [致生, zhìshēng], that would show a want of wisdom [不知, bù zhì], and should not be done.
The Book of Rites, Chapter 檀弓上, Tan Gong I, 74, translated by James Legge, Intercultural Press, Beijing, Washington, 2013, p.30. See Analects II:17 for "wisdom."
But if we want to know how they exist to receive our affection (仁, rén, "kindness") without treating them as actually alive, this remains our dilemma. It is hard to see how we can really split the difference; but that is really our general problem with death and the afterlife. Neither alternative sounds quite right, which may be why the Sumerians settled on death as miserable, while the Egyptians didn't. Nobody wants to maintain the paradox, but people do want a consistent resolution; and that is what a particular religion will do.
ἐν τῇ οἰκίᾳ τοῦ Πατρός μου μοναὶ πολλαί εἰσιν·
In domo Patris mei mansiones multae sunt.
In my Father's house are many mansions.John 14:2
Meanwhile, those of us who have received no signs and possess no particular faith must settle for the Platonic Good. That is challenge enough to the materialists and nihilists, who for some reason would rather live in a barren Existentialist Void. Well, I suppose, if they can live happily in a meaningless world, more power to them. But if a meaningless world means a Nietzschean pursuit of power, or an equally nihilistic hedonism, these are evils far beyond an absence of an afterlife.
In fact, I suspect that many of them, like Heidegger and Sartre, fall victim to some vicious popular enthusiasm of the moment. As G.K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton (1874-1936) said, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
Our conscious existence and the world we inhabit continues to contain its mysteries. What the transcendent conceals is something we might like to know; but then the Buddha did refuse to answer questions that did not "tend to edification," leaving the nature of Nirvāṇa, निर्वाण, obscure, just as Jesus would say little about Heaven, as we see above. So the "need to know" looks like a real principle in this. What we really need to know, as Socrates would have agreed, is the good and the beautiful, τὰ καλοκἀγαθά. Platonism answers that.
The Emperor's New Mind, Roger Penrose, Oxford University Press, 1990
While the basic Marxist thesis is that all value is contributed to objects by the labor that produces them, this is qualified in the mature Marx as "socially necessary labor." That, of course, opens endless problems about what is going to be "socially necessary," although it does make it easier to say that someone who spends their whole life creating sculptures out of shipping pallets does not make things that will necessarily be of value to anyone.
Although we may have the impression that there is one metric of value in Marxism, the quantity of labor, there are necessarily two metrics in the theory, of which the "socially necessary" qualification is a clue. Thus, the labor necessary to make stone tools, the labor necessary to build pyramids, and the labor necessity to build an automobile are not just different in quantity. They are different in kind; and this goes along with the sense in Marxism that there is progress in history, by which life gets better over time, specifically in terms of the quantity, quality, and kind of the goods that can be produced for mass consumption.
Thus, while the Egyptians could build pyramids, they could not have built television sets. What's the difference? Since it certainly took more labor to build a pyramid than a televison, there must be a different scale of value by which the 20th century labor was more sophisticated than the 3rd millennium BC labor was. In Marxism, that scale can only be provided by the Hegelian "Dialectic," which accounts for increasing complexity and sophistication. Marx's version of the Dialectic does indeed provide the scale and the metric of value by which Marx can account for the progress of history. However, there is nothing in either Hegel's or Marx's dialectic that can account for the sophistication of an internal combustion engine, or even a steam engine. The concepts of such things can never emerge from the word games that actually constitute Hegelian or Marxist "reasoning." Indeed, all the Marxist Dialectic is actually about is the "class struggle" that, for Marx, drives historical change. But then he simply overlooks the technological developments that underlie the changing conditions of that struggle, as new forms of "modes of production" come into existence.
Changing "modes of production" are essential to Marxism, especially since mechanization ultimately leads to the elimination of the need for the exploitation of labor, and so makes a communist society possible. But we search in vain for the way in which the Dialectic generates mechanization, or any form of technological progress. Marx himself seemed to think that the steam engine was the ultimate mode of transportation and that when the British finished building railroads, Capitalism would collapse, because there would be nothing more for capital to do. It is not unusual for unimaginative people to think that everything that can be invented, has been invented. Marx and Engels were no different. If they had to explain where new ideas come from, they would be at a loss. Yet if automobiles and televisions are greater enhancements of human life, more than Egyptian pyramids, it is incumbent upon them to provide an explanation.
Of course, the embrassment in all this is that, once a dimension of value is admitted, over and above labor alone, and Hegelian sophistries are rejected as accounting for this, it must be admitted that the new dimension represents the value of capital, the very thing that Marxism is founded on rejecting.
Capital intensive production is founded on greater knowledge and greater skill, imagination, and discovery. Egyptian stone masons were obviously more sophisticated than the masons who built Stonehenge, since Egyptian stonework is often finished to within fine tolerances, even for very hard stone, like granite or quartzite. But fine machining in metals must wait until the 19th century, and only then can machinery be produced to operate at high speeds, high pressures, and high temperatures.
Thus, Marxism, which must allow a scale of value apart from labor, and which cannot account for technological innovation, cannot sustain its own theory of value. But there is more. The ideal principle of the communist society is "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." This requires the "new man" of communism, who will be completely selfless and will work for the good, not just of himself, but for all. This is the "solidarity" of the workers, who might well adopt the motto, "One for all; and all for one."
What this means is that persons of great ability and few needs will find that most of the fruit of their labor goes to those with greater "need." If you object to this, you're a kulak, кулак, and perhaps deserve to be starved to death. Similarly, Jack London (1876-1916), said that any worker more productive than his fellows was already a "scab," i.e. a strike breaker.
So, the problem here is that obviously you are not entitled to the fruit of your labor, The dynamic of Marxist economics therefore will be poverty, not the greater abundance predicted by Marx -- topped off with "alienation" greater than what Capitalism was supposed to be. Recognizing this, Marxists have moved to the approach that poverty is good, because it is better for the planet -- to the point where a clueless law professor wanted to call Cuba an "ecotopia." However, no communist regime has ever had a good record on ecology. The Soviet Union used to dump nuclear waste into rivers. After the Fall of the Soviet Union, I had student immigrants who had lived near Russian rivers that where constantly red with toxic waste. China regularly builds coal-fired power plants yet is praised by clueless Environmentalists for its "carbon" policies -- including selling electric cars, full of toxic materials (mined by African children), to the Environmentalists.
Thus, we should especially note, the principal accusations of Marxism against Capitalism -- alienation, exploitation, and pauperization -- all turn out to be true of Marxist regimes instead. That Marxism leads directly to dictatorial slave states, obvious since the 1930's, should alert us that Marxists actually desire such governments, expecting to be the slave masters themselves -- when, as it happens, most academic Marxists, who are armchair cowards, and parasites on the abundance of Capitalism, have no idea how the truly ruthless, like Stalin or Mao, will humiliate and eliminate them, dismissing them as "useful idiots." So the whole business is a tissue of folly and dishonesty.
The Marxist-Leninist Theory of History The thesis of this book by Musa al-Gharbi, مُوسَى ٱلْغَرْبِي (Moses the Westerner), goes back to Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right [1843]. Hegel had said that bureaucrats would be the "universal class," whose interest would be for the State. Marx pointed out that their interest would certainly be for themselves, whether they did anything on behalf of the State or not.
To al-Gharbi, Hegel's bureaucrats have now been joined by many others in the press, academia, publishing, activists, "diversity consultants," corporate management, the harpies in "HR" ("human resource" departments, what used to just be "personnel"), etc., all of whom deal with "symbolic capital," i.e. words, rather than the physical stuff of manufacture or service industries. This has become what has been called the modern "Ruling Class," and the principle is also that examined in Public Choice Economics, where many interest groups become rent seekers against the public purse. "Higher Education" now seems to involve little else.
Yet al-Gharbi doesn't mention Public Choice Economics, despite its relevance. Also, given the subject matter, it is a bad sign that Thomas Sowell is not mentioned anywhere in the book. This is telling. Al-Gharbi is offering a basic Marxist class analysis of his subject; and misrepresentations of the history of Capitalism and a sort of fairy tale version of Marxism seem to underlie and direct much of what he says. A lot gets left out that doesn't fit into the paradigm.
Here, what is of interest is what he says about Capitalism and Marxism, and what he doesn't. For instance, a key point in Sowell's work is that all the successful ethnic groups in American history have been entrepreneurial. They start businesses. Nothing of the sort gets mentioned by al-Gharbi, for whom the lower class "workers" all seem to be employed, or exploited, by big money Capitalists. That the Capitalists can actually be avoided, evaded, and then challenged, in a system that allows the free entry of competition (which rent seekers work against), doesn't come up.
Also, that such successful ethnic groups often face hatred, discrimination, and even violence, against which they nevertheless often prosper, isn't addressed. To al-Gharbi, the exploited and downtrodden are universally suppressed unless a proper Marxist revolution can be mounted on their belalf. The argument of his book just seems to be that the politically correct Wokesters of recent American history tend to promote themselves instead of genuinely benefiting the poor and victimized. We hear a lot about "social justice" from Musa al-Gharbi. This seems to be what it is that needs to be pursued in political activism and what is ostensibly pursued by "symbolic capitalists," but isn't. Yet al-Gharbi never defines "social justice," or how that is different from simple justice. And, of course, F.A. Hayek once said that there actually is no such thing as "social justice."
Reading al-Gharbi, we might get the drift that social justice has something to do with "inequality." We hear a lot about "inequality." We might get the drift that "social justice" is all about inequality. Yet, as we shall see, al-Gharbi allows that there will be inequality even under Marxism. So we must assume that there are bad levels of inequality but also acceptable levels of inequality. We never get any principle to distinguish one from the other. Usually, however, the demon seems to be inequality as such.
A telling feature of this quote is the implication that "inequalities" exist at the "expense" of someone, the "losers" in the "prevailing order." This may betray that al-Gharbi is thinking in terms of economics as a zero sum game, i.e. that a limited amount of weath is divided among beneficiaries, more to some, less to others. The "winners," therefore, win by taking from the losers.
If we wonder whether that is really al-Gharbi's thinking, further comments reinforce it:
The image we get here, with "opportunity hoarding," is of wealth as a treasure chest of goods, "symbolic and financial," which should have been open and shared with the poor, but are selfishly withheld from them.
This is nonsense. Economics is not a zero sum game, although, under adverse cirumstances, it can be. Indeed, rent-seeking and government interventions inevitably turn it into a negative sum game, as wealth is degraded from diseconomic activities. Thus, both taxation and theft are negative sum games, since the value seized is always worth less to the takers than it was to their original owners. With theft, this is obviously reflected in what is paid by fences for stolen goods, which is far less than original market value, or in the indifference with which politicans budget billions, with little concern for the burden on taxpayers.
Before Game Theory even existed, Benjamin Franklin observed that economic exchanges generally occur because they benefit both parties. I grow potatoes, and you grow onions. When we exchange some of them, we are both better off. This is a positive sum game. If, however, I simply steal your onions, you suffer an absolute loss, and I value the onions far less, since they were so easily acquired. I, the thief, probably will even despise you for the work you had committed to your crop. I am no such fool.
Wealth is not only not just a fixed "pie," which can be divided one way or another, or hoarded in my treasure chest. It is volatile. Nothing is worth anything unless we know what to do with it. Black goo coming out of the ground used to be a nuisance, but now it fuels the world. Thus, when the productive are vilified, robbed, and maybe even killed, the wealth they generate evaporates. When the Chinese were periodically accused of cheating the Filipinos, and driven out of the Philippines, everyone quickly discovered that they could no longer buy the things they used to. So the Chinese had to be asked to come back. Similarly, we all know the accusations against Jewish business, whether in Poland or Harlem, but we may have missed how Idi Amin drove the Indians out of Uganda, impoverishing everyone.
As I have already noted, if al-Gharbi ignores entrepreneurial ethnic minorities, he ignores the economic innovations that such people can introduce, which add whole new dimensions to economic development. Thus, when Jews stepped off the boats from Russia after Russian pogroms (погром, "to destroy, wreak havoc, demolish violently") in the 19th Century, they did not go directly to the City University of New York and become doctors.
With a Jewish history of tailoring in the background, they created the ready-to-wear clothing industry. This is usually noted now because of the "sweatshops" of ranks of women at sewing machines who were being exploited by these Jews. Of course, those women were Jews themselves. The industry at first was not yet using Chinese, Italian, or Mexican immigrants, or Blacks from the South, but other Jewish immigrants -- although when we get to the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, where 146 died, there were Italian women among the Jewish ones. But, however they were being exploited by the garment industry, Jewish garment workers (the ones who didn't die in 1911) did not remain poor, even the ones who did piecework at home, which is now illegal.
The harshness of working conditions in the circa 1900 garment industry in New York sounds a lot like the examples al-Gharbi examines of present conditions of people working for Amazon.com, delivery services, or ride sharing services [pp.146-157]. And as against the garment industry "bosses" in New York, al-Gharbi is harshly disapproving of the customers of Amazon.com, etc., who are happy to benefit from the services but indifferent to the working conditions of people who are often poor immigrants. But, perhaps al-Gharbi is so upright that he makes his own clothes: the garment industry still often uses child labor in India, Central America, and elsewhere.
Obviously, someone working in an Amazon warehouse or for a ride-sharing service is not starting their own business -- somebody else has already done that -- where, as I noted, successful ethnic minorities in American history have all been entrepreneurial. Today, according to U.S. Census data, the most successful ethnic group in America is people from India. That may not be right, since it is possible that Jews are the most successful, but Census data does not include religion.
But it is now an embarrassment that The Simpsons featured an Indian character, "Apu," who ran the Seven-Eleven equivalent, the Kwik-E-Mart, in the series. But that is just the kind of business that Indian immigrants might be involved in.
Something about this may draw our attention back to al-Gharbi. The last quote above continues:
Whether "overwhelming white" includes people from India, we will not know from Musa al-Gharbi. However, we might want to ask about some information that al-Gharbi inadvertently provides. There is a table on page 143 [Table 3.5], labeled "Median Weeking Earnings by Race/Ethnicity and Occupation, 2017-2019." We see, as we might expect from the text, that "White" earns more than "Black" or "Hispanic." But there is a fourth column. It is labeled "Asian American and Pacific Islander." Of the twelve rows in the table, in only one is the "Asian/Pacific Islander" weekly income less than those in the "White" column. Only in "legal occupations" do whites earn more than "Asian/Pacific Islanders."
But, something tells me is is not Samoans who are earning more than white people. The absurd category of "Asian/Pacific Islanders" lumps together what are certainly the high earners, of people with backgrounds in China, India, Japan, Korea, etc., with Samoans, Tahitians, Tongans, etc., who may or may not be doing particularly well in the American economy. I bet it's the Chinese, etc. But we hear nothing about this from Musa al-Gharbi, who relentlessly says things like "overwhelmingly white" when talking about this "symbolic capitalists."
But Chinese, Indians, etc. are perfect examples of successful, entrepreneurial ethnic minorities, sometimes in surprising places, as when I stayed in a motel in Artesia, New Mexico, that was owned by people from India. When I walked into the motel office, it did not smell like New Mexico cooking, but curry. Later I stayed at a business hotel in Albuquerque, which was also Indian owned and staffed.
Indeed, many of al-Gharbi's "overwhelming white" symbolic capitalists, among whom he actually includes himself, are in the business of keeping Asians and Asian-Americans out of the Ruling Class, especially by discriminating against them in admissions to elite universities. This was always illegal, although it took a Supreme Court decision to establish that, after biased lesser judges wanted to let schools, like Harvard, continue discriminating, as they had against Jews before World War II -- and may well be doing again. And, as it happens, the same schools that were guilty of discriminating, by obscuring the nature of their admission policies and procedures, have apparently been trying to continue their discrimination -- sometimes openly admitting it, since they self-righteously think of Court decisions protecting Asian-Americans as, paradoxically, racist.
The problem of these schools with Asians is probably not simple racism. It is that they belong to ethnic groups that are too successful, which falsifies the "liberal" narrative that minorities need the help of white liberals, "white heroes," the 白左, báizuǒ, because no minorities could possibly be successful from their own resources. Indeed, Musa al-Gharbi seems to be one of those 白左, whose complaint about white liberals is that they aren't doing what they are supposed to be doing. That al-Gharbi ignores Asians, Indians, and any ethnic minorities, and sees economics as a zero sum game -- dividing up the "pie" -- discredits most of his work here.
Al-Gharbi's ideas about Capitalism involve elements of Leftist propaganda:
This betrays the "treasure chest" fallacy of wealth that al-Gharbi seems to have in mind, with a zero sum mindset that sees capital accumulation as somehow stolen "at the expense of the rest of society." "Unending capital accumulation" is what in fact makes all economic development possible. Without it, there is nothing but stagnation and poverty. We are left wondering where al-Gharbi thinks that the accumulated capital goes, if not into a useless treasure chest. The rich must live off investments or savings, where the former must be in successful businesses, while the latter, if simply left in the bank, is loaned out by the bank for productive investments itself. "Freedom and prosperity" is exactly what Capitalism perpetuates, while Marxist regimes, applying Marxist principles, have always produced dictatorship, tyranny, and poverty, if not simple murder. Al-Gharbi's failure to understand this is already evident in this paragraph.
Al-Gharbi continues:
This is certainly what Marxist orthodoxy expected, but it is not what was actually happening. Real wages in the Untied States increased steadily from the end of the Civil War to World War I. The use of the phrase "tricked down" is obviously a swipe at Say's Law, without mentioning it or explaining what he means.
Thus, al-Gharbi avoids a real ad rem discussion but is happy to signal his orthodoxy to Leftist readers. Yet 19th Century contemporaries can be forgiven some confusion. Nominal wages were indeed falling after the Civil War. But this was because of a general deflation, which in turn was because the money supply was not keeping up with the massive growth of the economy. This still confuses some actual economists; and 19th Century Marxists -- or the 21st Century Musa al-Gharbi -- can only have seen it as the Capitalists gouging the workers, just as Marx predicted. Labor trouble was ineviable, especially in the Depressions of the 1890's (1893-94, 1895-97).
However, after 1896 the money supply turned around. Gold strikes in South Africa and the Yukon added enough to the money supply that an actual mild inflation began that persisted on into World War I. Labor trouble abated. In 1906, Upton Sinclair, in The Jungle, tried to expose how bad things were for the Chicago meatpacking workers. This alarmed people about meatpacking practices (even Otto von Bismark said we don't want to see how sausages are made), but not about the labor issues.
Sinclair described the crowds of workers waiting outside the factory gates, hoping to get hired. He wanted us to think that the workers had no alternatives and were in danger of starvation. However, unemployment in 1906 was 1.7%, an astonishingly low level for any period. Workers waited outside the meatpacking plants, just like they waited outside Henry's Ford auto factories, because they wanted what were very desirable jobs. In 1914, when Henry Ford raised his daily wage from $2.34 to $5 (also cutting the working day from 9 to 8 hours), this was a national sensation. Unfortunately, when Ford advised Herbert Hoover to drive up wages, this helped create the Great Depression. Ford could afford $5 a day in 1914, but in the deflation of 1930, wages needed to fall.
Thus, Musa al-Gharbi is significantly out of touch with economic, labor, and monetary history.
This review is placed where it is here as part of the "Marxist Value Theory" analysis. Thus, we should see what Musa al-Gharbi says about Marxism, as we have already seen many of his fractured ideas about "social justice," Capitalism, economic development, etc.
I have never heard that "equality of outcomes" was a principle of Marxism; but when the principle political complaint about capitalism is "inequality," it is to be expected that we would hear whether "inequality" is to be tolerated at all. However, in political discourse, I don't hear any qualifications about how any "inequality" will be tolerated.
On the other hand, if Marx concedes that there are different level of ability, and different levels of production, this is absolutely irrelevant to the point. The principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," certainly does not preclude that abilities and needs will be different. It is simply that one's abilities, however great, will be available to the needs of others.
The folly here is mainly how it is supposed to be determined what anyone "deserves" for their labor. This also clashes with the fundamental principle of "need." Whatever anyone "needs," they deserve. If producers don't "need" what they produce, it is owed to others. And what kind of "reward" are producers going to get? No one ever thought that Marxist economics would involve money. And what if producers "deserve" money for their production? Does someone in "need" need to pay for what they need? Not under communism. And what would producers do with the money they might receive? Put it in a bank? Buy things they don't "need"?
In the curious movie, The Host [2013], based on the novel The Host by Stephenie Meyer [2008], alien parasites have taken over the bodies of the people of earth. In one scene, uninfected humans, pretending to the parasitized, go shopping. In the store, they simply take what they want and walk out. No check-out. No payment. This is what Communism is supposed to be like, and the aliens live this way. The producers of The Host must have figured that the aliens, although destroying the lives they parasitize, seem to be so enlightened that they practice Communism.
In a market economy, supply and demand determines prices, and the prices determine what producers "deserve," even as it constrains the desires of consumers for what they "need." Without markets and prices, Again we have no hint how levels of equality or inequality are going to be determined, if it is not by a dictatorial authority, as in all Marxist states. Al-Gharbi's protest that people would not be "identical" is simply irrelevant. The ruling class will never be identical to the ruled, even as Marxism never expected that all abilities and needs would be identical. Al-Gharbi follows this with some gibberish about how "private property" will not exist but "individual property" will, which apparently means that those who "deserve" it get more property. Somehow "private property" also becomes "social property." Marx says, "we by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labor," which is silly, since anyone with a "need" will "appropriate" the products that they "need." So this is just Hegelian sophistry. And if you cannot accumulate capital to start a business, then the engine of production is cut off at the root. Marxist businesses, as in Soviet Union, required persuading bureaucrats to allow the business. Since bureaucrats don't want to expose themselves to criticism for sanctioning failed projects, it is better just not to approve any. By the 1990's, it was often noted that the only original product ever created by any Soviet block country was Rubik's Cube.
This implies that we already understand how "meritocratic redistribution" would occur, but al-Gharbi has provided no such explanation. And the term "redistribution" itself means that production has been taken from its producers and "distributed" to others already. How does that work? Markets? I doubt it. Yet "redistribution" remains a key slogan for all Leftist politics. And markets don't work on "merit," but only on supply and demand. So al-Gharbi ignores almost everything we need to know about this business.
And then we get al-Gharbi setting out to "clarify" who is "needy." Well, everyone is needy. Everyone needs food, clothing, shelter, etc.
Again, we must wonder how anyone is "compensated" for their production, and how it is decided what the value would be for what they produce. And what if the value produced is marginally worthless? Wouldn't the producers then be the "working poor," whose abilities are almost socially useless? So al-Gharbi's explanation is just preposterous, but perhaps not as preposterous as what comes next: "there wouldn't be people who chose not to work." So al-Gharbi has never heard of people who are simply lazy, or of economic arrangements that are vulnerable to "free riders." If I can consume whatever I "need," then I actually don't need to produce anything. Experimental communes have always been undone by free riders.
Stalin took care of that by substituting "toil" for "need" in the Soviet constitution. As St. Paul said, "He who does not work, neither shall he eat" [2 Thessalonians 3:10]. This looks like something a long way from Communism. And, of course, we still need some way to determine how much someone needs to work to earn some quantity of goods. So the Soviet Union, after Lenin had tried to abolish money, simply had wages and prices like anyplace else. The wages sounded good, but then goods were scarce; and Russians took to stuffing matresses with money -- which all got demonetized when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Al-Gharbi's fairy tale of Marxism then gets worse:
There are two levels of nonsense in this. One is about human nature. There are people who are just happy to be parasitic on others. Many are simply criminals, others are socially or politically privileged, who "deserve" conpensation for being important, like Nancy Pelosi. No Marxist regime is without such people, who step easily into the shoes of any kind of Mediaeval aristocracy. Other people are just not that creative. In fact, real creativity may be rather rare.
The other level of nonsense is that no Marxist regime has ever been more productive or innovative than a free market economy. And this is obviously the result of authorities judging what is of value, what is "deserved," and what is "needed" -- with a great deal of the credit for production taken by the authorities themselves. This can go so far as the mass murder of much of the population in Cambodia, or the Terror Famine that Stalin inflicted on the Ukraine. Successful Ukrainian farmers were, of course, "kulaks" (кулак), who, like capitalists, were class enemies. Take away their food and let them starve. And then, naturally, this sort of thing crippled all of Soviet agriculture, which had to be bailed out with grain sales by Jimmy Carter. But Russian agriculture has never recovered.
That is, Marx envisioned a world where hard work, innovation, and ambition are valued and nurtured, where people can be anything they want to be (commensurate with their talents), and where all receive their just rewards for the value they produce. [pp.112-113] I've never heard that wealth comes "from the earth itself," according to Marx. Instead, value is created by labor; and actually, more like it, value is created by the human imagination, which govens both labor and what labor is used for. The "earth" is otherwise useless. Wealth "from the earth" is more a Cargo Cult conception, which is popular among modern fools, particularly in English Departments or al-Gharbi's own Sociology.
And then we are up against human nature again. "People would look out for one another," unless what we get is Lord of the Flies [1954, movie 1963] instead. And when "people would look out for one another," how does this work to determine the value of production, what "just rewards" are owing to people, and exactly what it is that these "rewards" will be paid with?
Instead, in a market economy, the needs and preferences of consumers determine the "demand" side of the leger, and entrepreneurs and investors see what they can do about the "supply" side. But in the world of Marx and al-Gharbi, we can't have capital "accumulate" for such investment, and the entrepreneurs, especially if they are ethnic minorities, are ignored, if not suppressed or expelled.
To an extent, al-Gharbi may be aware of what happens when Lenin's "vanguard of the revolution" takes control, determines what is of value, and abolishes private finance and investment. Yet his disappointment with "symbolic capitalists" is that they conform to human nature and act in their own interest, rather than creating a stateless system where "people would look out for one another." So a fairy tale Marxism underlies his whole book, and he is doomed to social and political disappointment.
We should remember the wise principle of James Madison: By a division of powers, "interest will oppose interest," so that we need not rely on the denial of self-interest by anyone, but on the jealousy of others for their own power, to oppose those who would exceed their authority. As Jefferson soon observed, however, the Constitution failed to establish this principle against the Federal Government itself, whose own Supreme Court would tend to wink at the unconstitutional expansion of Federal power.
This is what has happened, while the States, contrary to what Madison, Hamilton, and Jay said in the Federalist Papers, have no direct or simple mechanism to override Supreme Court decisions eroding the "powers... reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Thus, the Federal Government has become a centralized, general, absolute, and irresponsible government, contrary to the most fundamental principles of a Constitutional Republic -- actually in the interest of many, like Musa al-Gharbi, and the whole Ruling Class, to keep it that way.
A Deuteronomy on Mind and Consciousness; Note 1;
Marxist Value Theory
Because of the popularity of Marxist principles in the modern totalitarian university, and among the communists who are taking over American politics, this warrants some consideration of the 
problems at the root of the Marxist theory of value.
just like supposedly under Capitalism, with the difference that you don't even get paid when your production goes to those with greater "need," like Bernie Sanders. But then the obvious remedy for this is suggested by Jack London: just don't produce very much. Don't demonstrate your ability, which is actually what we see in socialist regimes, where there is then no incentive to be productive. Your efforts are just going to be subject to what Ayn Rand called "looting." You are doomed to being "exploited" by the politically privileged, what Lenin called the "vanguard of the revolution," who somehow live well, very well, without producing anything -- just like what we see in the corrupt "swamp" of Washington, D.C.
We Have Never Been Woke, The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, by Musa al-Gharbi, Princeton University Press, 2024
If you want to understand whom a social order serves, or who benefits most from systemic inequalities (and at whose expense), the starting point of analysis should be to look at who is flourishing in society and who is falling behind. By almost any measure, symbolic capitalists are the primary "winners" in the prevailing order. [p.134]
As Richard Reeves's research robustly illustrates, "opportunity hoarding" by those in the upper quintile has been the primary driver of rising inequality and stagnating social mobility in recent decades. In their efforts to preserve their socioeconomic position, and help their children advance further up the ladder (or at least avoid sliding "down"), upper-middle-class families have effectively "captured" key sources of symbolic and financial capital, and zealously defend their hold on them. [pp.134-135]
Because this "new American aristocracy" is overwhelming white, this hoarding of wealth and opportunity has not only exacerbated inequality but has reinforced its racialization as well. [p.135]
Karl Marx's core project was to explain why the liberal revolutions that deposed aristocrats, the church, and monarchs somehow culminated in the expoitative and hierarchical relashionships that defined the industrial period. Marx sought to illustrate how the bourgeoisie (roughly, symbolic capitalists and business owners) shifted from being a revolutionary bloc ostensibly committed to widespread freedom and prosperity.... into a class dedicated to unending capital accumulation at the expense of the rest of society. [p.110].
The bourgeoisie oversaw an age of unprecedented innovation and productivity; they established institutions that operated at an immense scale and were increasingly complex and interconnected. Vast wealth was created at a rapid pace. Yet very little of this wealth "trickled down" to the workers, whose labor undergirded the whole system. They were working harder than ever, under increasingly harsh conditions, while being paid subsistence wages (at best). [pp.110-111]
Yet the fundamental point remains that the sustained increases in productivity of the Machine Age brought widespread benefits over time: average real wages in Britain rose between 15 and 25 percent in the years 1815-1850, and by an impressive 80 percent in the next half-century. [Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Vintage Books, 1987, 1989, p.146-147]
Although Marxism is widely associated with a call for "equality of outcomes" today, Marx himself disparaged equality per se as an absurd political goal.
Although a core goal of communism was to ensure work and renumeration was allocated to "each according to his ability, each according to his needs," as Marx repeatedly observed, abilities are not equal! Nor is the level of value that each worker produces. [p.111]Marx's foundational critique of capitalism was that it was a system in which virtually no one actually got what they deserved. Capitalists produce little but extract "surplus value" from those who do produce via their monopoly [?!] over the means of production (that is, capitalists get far more than they deserve by coercing others into accepting less than they deserve).
The goal of communism, at bottom, was to reset social relations so that all were appropriately rewarded for the value they produce. [ibid.]what anyone "deserves," or "needs," must be determined by someone, i.e. the Communist Party and its bureaucracy -- each member of which is going to "deserve" a great deal as a reward for serving the workers.
On Marx's account, inequality would be less dramatic following the communist revolution, but it would not be the case that everyone was identical (nor would that even be desirable to Marx). [pp.111-112]
Of course, the latter part of the maxim, "according to his needs," suggests nonmeritocratic redistribution as well. However, it is important to clarify who would be "needy" under communism. [p.112]
In a world where people were compensated according to the value they produce, Marx theorized, there wouldn't necessarily be "working poor." And in a world where people were no longer alienated from their labor, there wouldn't be people who chose not to work and tried to live parasitically on society. [ibid.]
But then, under Communism, it is their "need," not their production, that determines what they can consume. Otherwise it is just back to a market economy.
Marx argued that the desire to be productive, to create, to add value -- these are fundamental human drives currently blunted by capitalism and the alienation it produces.
Communism, he argued, would set those drives free -- leading to radically increased prosperity. People would want to work. They would become far more productive, far more innovative -- because they would finally get what they deserve for the value they produce and would be freed from coercive and dispiriting labor relations. Pretty much the only people who would be "needy," then, would be those who literally cannot work... [ibid.]Marx believed that in a world where people's relationships were less exploitative, where society was less self-oriented, and where there was an understanding that all wealth flow fundamentally from the earth itself, which no one actually owns (or, better, which we all own in common), people would look out for one another. Marx did not envision a permanent welfare state, perennially seizing and reallocating income according to citizens' apparent needs. Instead, he argued, the state would eventually "wither away."
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