Argument from Design, Two

LI’s friend at Fragmenta Philosophica, noting Flew’s apparent conversion to at least a watered down version of theism (but see our post yesterday), writes:

“I've always thought that the argument from design is the strongest "motive of credibility" for theism. Flew seems to agree, finally viewing it as the tipping-point:

'There was no one moment of change but a gradual conclusion over recent months for Flew, a spry man who still does not believe in an afterlife.

'Yet biologists' investigation of DNA "has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved," Flew says in the new video, "Has Science Discovered God?"'

LI has a different take on the argument from design. Our argument depends on two things: how one interprets a “motive of credibility,” and what exactly the argument from design is all about.

Fontenelle, in his History of Oracles (1687), which is one of the first early modern attempts to devise an anthropology of religion, also believed that a variation of the argument from design gave rise to the idea of the gods back in ‘ces siècles grossiers’ before writing.

“The men who had a little more genius than the others naturally tended to investigate the causes of what they saw. Where, for example, does that ever flowing river come from, a contemplative from those centuries must have asked themselves? –a weird sort of philosopher, but who can tell – he might have been a Descartes in this century. After long meditation, he happily discovered that there was someone who took care to pour out this water, eternally, from a pail (cruche). But who furnished this person with the water? The contemplative did not go into those depths.

It is necessary to keep in mind that these ideas, which could be called the systems of those centuries, were always copied after the most well known objects. One had often seen water poured out from inside a pail: one easily imagined, thus, a God pouring out that of a river; and by that same ease by which one imagined it, one could as easily completely believe it. Thus, in order to explain thunder and lightning, one represented God as a human figure throwing arrows of fire at us; an idea manifestly taken from familiar objects.”

The argument from design, here, is transformed, by Fontenelle, into a way of explaining the anthropological crisis that faced Christendom from the era of discovery: there was a world of people who, evidently, had lived and died for generations without hearing the good news. What was their cosmological status? It was the revival of a question that confronted the early Christians, once they had decided, after Paul, that Christ had come to redeem the world. This transposition of a specifically Jewish God who recognized himself solely in one people to a cosmopolitan God who established a relation with all people (a relation based on caritas) obviously leads to the question of the gods those people are worshipping. I'll note, in passing, that re-defining the bond between God and man in terms of love also reworked the whole notion of God -- a term that then took on amazing connotations as the centuries rolled by. But to return to our story...

Doubtless, if Flew is convinced, by the amazing complexity of the cell, that there is a God – instead of there being many gods, or instead of there being Persian 'angels' tinkering with organisms down here – this is due less to his own innate monotheism than to the triumph, for two thousand years in Western culture, of monotheism.

However, that triumph, as Hume cleverly saw, has an unconscious effect upon the philosophic discourse about God. Ourselves, we think Fontenelle’s idea is startlingly relevant to the naïve use of the computer metaphor to meet our contemporary cosmological questions. But we also think that there is something thin about the argument from design to explain belief in the gods. Our belief is that the real impress in our animal souls of a feeling of God – what Epicurus called prolepsis (although there is vast scholarly disagreement about what this means -- Cicero described this as “innate power”) is, in the anthropological order, prior to and more “credance giving” than the proof by design. We would call the latter a way of specifying God. Which is a different thing entirely.

Justice is ridiculous

Gary Winnick, a true superhero of free enterprise, was at last freed of those pesky fines against him by the Republican dominated SEC. Not that Winnick was a partisan man -- he had greased the palms of many a Dem in Clinton's palmy times. But with that Bush mandate, it was time to put the likes of Perle on a retainer -- and oh how such connections have paid off for the big guy! We are all psyched here at LI. Sorting through the creative destruction of the telecom bubble, it was obvious at the time, and even more obvious now, that the real master criminal was Martha Stewart.

But of course the LA Times had the gall to interview a coupla plebes about the thing:

"The fact that Winnick escaped a $1-million fine gnaws at Irene DiNolfo, a former Global Crossing director of marketing communications in Rochester, N.Y., whose severance and retirement were wiped out.

"What's $1 million to that guy?" said DiNolfo. "It would be like a $100 fine to me. And still, he gets out of that."

Global Crossing's collapse cost Janet Mahoney, a former call center director, about $35,000 in severance pay and $45,000 in retirement funds that were in company stock. Settlements in the civil cases are bringing in a few thousand dollars in dribs and drabs, she said.

"Meantime, he walks away with $738 million," she said. "Justice is ridiculous."

Well, we do wish the likes of Ms. Mahoney would read up on her Friedman or Sowell or something. Our system is simply so unbeatable it has charmed God and the angels, who are investing heavily in equities for next year. Meanwhile, Ms. Mahoney is going to have a chance to lose even more retirement with the privatization of her Social Security -- but not to worry! If some mutual fund company commits massive fraud, if some corporation cooks its books, the SEC is right there, like a guard dog. Or like the cardboard cutout of a guard dog. To make sure that the criminal who steals hundreds of millions does have to put a million back in the pot now and then! Good luck to you, Ms. Mahoney! We salute all those who are about to strike it rich, as Bush knocks down the last evil legacy of New Deal Socialism and sets you free to be owners.

The argument from design

LI heard of Anthony Flew for the first time in an Emory U. philosophy class on God’s existence. The man who taught the class bore a striking resemblence to Chuck Barris, the mc of the gong show, although he spoke with an impeccable Oxbridgian accent, and threw himself into the appropriate Wittgensteinian gestures then fashionable for teaching a philosophy seminar (i.e., he spent much of the hour or two he talked facing a corner of the room, to which he seemed to be attracted as he muscularly exerted his brain over various ways that we might say things. Perhaps the corner gave him the illusion of privacy that was necessary to bring his conceptual struggles to fruition, but it did tend to muffle his message).

So we read, or were forced to read, a little Flew. The man did not make a large impression on yours truly.

However, he seems to have left an impression on the world at large. ABC tv news itself recently reported his sensational conversion to theism. Just in time for Christmas, too. Flew has now written a “calm down people” paper in which he disclaims any intention of spreading the good word among the heathen in the Hindu Cush.

A pity. We love conversion stories. Although we can’t say that Flew’s conversion had the cosmological zing of earlier conversions. Take St. Barbara. A perfectly ordinary girl, daughter of a rich merchant in Egypt, raised in a high tower to which nobody could gain access – you know, that Rapunzel upbringing so many girls had to endure in the days of yore. Daddy comes home one day and discovers his towerbound princess is going on and on about God the father and God the son. Yikes! She’s even put three windows in her tower to betoken the trinity. And she's defaced Dad's prize idol collection. The bills for glaziers in those days were unbelievably high, so her Dad was righteously p.o.-ed. As the Golden Legend says:

“Then he being replenished with furor, incontinent drew his sword to have slain her, but the holy virgin made her prayer and then marvellously she was taken in a stone and borne into a mountain on which two shepherds kept their sheep, the which saw her fly. And then her father, which pursued after her, went unto the shepherds and demanded after her. And that one, which would have preserved her, said that he had not seen her, but that other, which was an evil man, showed and pointed her with his finger, whom the holy Saint Barbara cursed, and anon his sheep became locusts, and he consumed into a stone.”

Of course, as any paterfamilias would, her dad, whose idolworshipping had been honored by the Alexandria Rotary club, wasn’t going to have any funny stuff from his daughter. Although the sheep becoming locusts must have made him pause a bit. Sheep into locusts, lead into gold -- could be onto something here, what? Still, a tower is a tower and a beautiful daughter who proposes to sit around flaunting her virginity was an expense he wasn’t about to shoulder. Instead, he did what so many Dads did back then, took her straight to be tortured by the town judge’s men. It was a slow torture day, not many customers, so the judge just gave her the quick torture treatment – he bade his guys “unclothe her and beat her with sinews of bulls, and frot her flesh with salt.” Well, that didn’t work. Barbara was firm in the faith, and (having evidently impressed herself with that sheep into locusts thing -- quite a switch from quiet days knitting sacrifices for the idols) (never mind the flight into the mountains via stone) refused. She probably figured on having another little flight. Such things do go to a virgin’s head.

However, this time, as the axeman raised his axe and Barbara raised her eyes piously skyward, nothing happened. And before she could say, let's talk about this fellas, down came the axe and off came her head. God, however, while not exactly being quick on the uptake during the execution, did the next best thing, and had some hitman angel sling a lightning bolt into her Dad.

This kind of thing can’t happen in Flew’s Oxford, however, as it would cause the neighbors to talk. So artists in ages to come will not be painting Oxford dons frotting Flew's skin with salt. Nowadays you have to go to a spa to get that done -- and they charge an arm and a leg!

Paul Craddick has noted the Flew story, and noted, also, that Flew was converted not by being filled with the holy spirit, but by pondering the argument from design. This, Paul thinks, is the most convincing evidence of God’s existence. LI disagrees. In an upcoming post, we are going to claim the authority of Epicurus for saying that the idea of God is an innate idea – which is also, of course, associated with Descartes -- and that 'idea', if it means a sort of overall sensation about experience (which it can be twisted into meaning) is the best evidence of God's existence.

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We’ve had a few letters about posts last week. A friend of ours wrote to us about our Franz Rosenzweig post: “the most important inheritor of Rozensweig, to me, is Levinas, who makes much more implicit and explicit use of Rosensweig than does Heidegger. Don't you think? Although since Levinas makes so very much use of Heidegger, and greatly admired much of his work even until the end, the influences are nicely compounded. Anyway, in the hit parade of philosophers, EL should come in with more overall hits than R, despite his "star" which does make him one.”

Another of our far flung correspondents, T., in NYC, wrote in to comment about our meditation on the figure of the fanatic. He quotes this, from our post on the Alabama cretin who wants to banish books by Gay authors from Alabama libraries:

"This is a story of a type that Mencken liked to collect for the Smart Set: cretinous Americana. Both the right and the left, on the web, love to find stories that report some aberrant act or another and pass them around. It is a genre that has, as yet, not found its Barthes" -- and comments:

Indeed, I'm not sure that you realize how insightful that comment is. Not only has it not found its Barthes, it has not found its Deleuze & Guattari. The Barthes of what is known in Howard's translations as "Mythologies" would be fascinating and helpful. The Barthes of the "close reading" of Poe, even more so; the Barthes who contemplated the 'other-ache' , where is that one? But it is the D&G of the genre that I would love to meet, the one that could bring a very heavy dose of phenomenology to the fantasy and desiring 'machines' of the genre. Much aside from Zizek's attempts to bring Deleuze back into conformity with Hegelian types, I'd prefer to find more chat about cretinous blogging that is not always so rife with dialectical turns from those simple, singular "acts" so widely propagated. The blogosphere is riven with these analyses from anecdote, from a single keyboard to generalization. There is all too much miming of that peculiarly Chomskian rhetorical tic: "All the evidence is in the public record, so there really is no reason to restate it.....we can freely move on to the obvious conclusions....." In Noam's hands, such a tic is often enough deft; in the blogosphere, it is often enough daft.

Any comments you don't particularly want to put in our comment section, but you want to send LI, send to rgathman@netzero.net. Oh, and we are contemplating a subscription drive here. We are thinking of making some LI t shirts and giving them to those who contribute 40 bucks to the site. We haven't decided whether that is too cheesey, yet. But it is Christmas time.

As Bush prepares to disassemble Social Security on the Chilean model (Pinochet’s ex minister of labor, Jose Pinera, bragged recently in the Times that he had talked with Bush when the guy was the governor of Texas about destroying the public pension plan), it is interesting that Chile seems to be moving the other way. The NYT has a large article, spotted with the usual propaganda, about the corruption indulged in by the Pinochet gang: the 15 million the general now possesses, due to the ‘gratitude’ of various businessmen; the 3 million doled out to Tony Jr., his son; the sweet privatization deals that made his son-in-law a millionaire/billionaire; and the cooperation, through the General’s murderous regime, of a consortium of the usual suspects – payments to the General from the grateful Thatcher government – Maggie sometimes ached for the stadium solution for her own left opposition; the money from Reagan’s administration; the money from China.

The article does, however, misrepresent the “shining record of economic achievement” of the General:

“As Chile's strongman from 1973, when he overthrew Salvador Allende, an elected civilian president, to 1990, General Pinochet presided over a purge of political opponents and the creation of a police state. But he also laid the foundations for what has become Latin America's most stable and promising economy - all, as the general's supporters have claimed, without ever stealing a dime.”

Ask Chile’s workers about that. In fact, as we’ve noted before, Pinochet’s radical Chicago style shock therapy resulted, in 1983, with Chile plunging into the a depression comparable to the 30s. In order to get out of it, Pinochet socialized the private debts amassed by the corporations freed by his first round of privatizations. In essence, he socialized Chile’s economy in a manner undreamt of by Allende. On this site, Jörg Sancho Pernas summarizes the ‘reforms’ of the General:


"The cause of the economic growth was the influx of private foreign loans until the dept crisis of the early 1980s. The disadvantage of this kind of miracle was the increase of unemployment: Dieter Nohlen mentions that during the entire dictatorship unemployment was at an average of 17.3 % and sometimes between 20 % and 30 %. He also points out that by comparing the figures of previous years, poverty has increased during the government of Pinochet (Nohlen, Dieter/ Nolte, Detlef (1995): p. 322). Combined with the economic liberalization, the Chilean government introduced a series of social reforms in order to reduce the role of the central government in social security, labor disputes, health care and education. These reforms were created in order to shrink the central government, decentralize administration, and privatize previous state functions. For example, in 1979 the government privatized the health system by establishing private health insurance companies. The transference of the market principles towards the health sector was justified with the following arguments: guarantee of free choice of doctors, more efficiency of the health sector, equity of chances (Friedmann, Reinhard (1990): p. 80/81). At this point it should be marked, that the military regime was deconstructing the welfare state by leaving the citizens at the mercy of the private market. The government focused its social assistance only to provide the basic need of the poorest citizens.

"In 1981, the pension system in Chile was reformed by the military regime. The target was the privatization of the social security. The reason was that by the early 1970s, there had been thirty-five different pension funds (although three of them served 90 percent of contributors) and more than 150 social security regimes for the various occupational groups. This expansion was leading to inequities in the social system. The newly incorporated groups obtained by law special treatments and new benefits. There also had not existed before a standard retirement age for all groups of pension funds. In order to be covered by the pension fund people had needed to have a job, because coverage continued to depend on the employment history of the main beneficiary. So the pension funds had never reached all Chileans. The new social security system was based on private investment companies, the so called AFPs (Administradores de Fondos de Pensiones) which should secure the old age pensions. The AFPs nowadays compete with each other. Since 1983 salaried employees can only contract the obligatory private insurance. But the insurance company can be selected independently by oneself. Changing from the public to private insurance the contributions accumulated have been transferred accordingly. There was a deadline for the insurance change of 5 years. The contributions of the insurance contractors are invested with the new pension system at the private capital market. The contractor gains a share of the profit. The age of retirement amounts to 60 years for women and to 65 to men. The pension is calculated of the accumulated contributions and the profits of the pension fonds. The state still gives a guarantee for a minimum pension by contributing additional payments to the insurance. (Nohlen, Dieter/ Nolte, Detlef (1995): p. 325/326).”

The NYT article continues to play the Pinochet shell game by describing Pinochet’s ‘privatization’ program as if he had inherited a heavily nationalized economy. He hadn’t. Allende’s nationalizations came to an abrupt end, as did Allende, when the General kindly embodied the invisible hand in 1973.

“The Chilean authorities are also focusing special attention on privatizations of former state-owned companies in sectors like steel, electricity, mining and telecommunications, with an eye to uncovering financial gains the general might have secured through those transactions.

The most lucrative privatizations were from 1985 to 1990, when it was clear that the Pinochet government's days were numbered and when even some military officials questioned the wisdom of rapidly selling companies in industries vital to Chile's national security and economic well-being.”

Right. What happened in Chile is what happens periodically in countries in the neo-liberal system that veer to the right. A period of bubble prosperity is succeeded by a period of deep ‘recession.’ During the recession, the people who did not prosper during the bubble, i.e., the majority of the population, has shifted onto its back the debts accumulated by the wealthy to hold their party. This is exactly what happened when, in 1982, the IMF, the huge partisan of privatization, suddenly turned around and demanded that the Chilean government take responsibility for the huge outstanding debts racked up by its new private sector. The government, of course, responded with its bracing rhetoric of individual responsibility. The IMF and World Bank responded by closing Chile’s credit lines. The government then responded by stuffing the individual responsibility crap, nationalizing the debt, which entailed nationalizing most of the economy, and agreeing to pay it off – in other words, the debt was spread over the people of Chile.
This is a pretty standard pattern. After Salinas oversaw the entirely dirty privatization of Mexican banks, the crooks that bought them rode them directly into bankruptcy – at which point their debts were nationalized. Same with Argentina, Russia, etc. Privatization always is a two part shuffle – one part enriches an irresponsible and often corrupt elite, the other part nationalizes that elite’s debts. After the debt situation is taken care of, the elite is then surprised and delighted by a second wave of “privatizations.” It is a beautiful machine, and the Bush gang obviously have studied it. That is the point of the privatization of social security – don’t worry, no administration will allow the private part of the public pension fund, after it bottoms out in some predictable recession, to go to zero – no, the debts there will be quietly nationalized, in the same way S&L debts were nationalized. Under capitalism, this is known as individual responsibility and free enterprise. It is called reform -- a wonderfully civic sounding word. We have wondered why bank robbers don't plead "reform" in court -- "Judge, I was just reforming the deposit structure of the bank!" On this site we are too ignorant to handle those words. We call it moral hazard and stealing.

What would the Gipper do?

In the devastated city of Falluja, the International Red Cross visited for the first time since the American-led military offensive last month, meeting with Iraqi engineers to discuss the city's sewage and water needs, The Associated Press reported. The Red Cross officials were unable to visit a potato-chip plant where several hundred bodies of insurgents and civilians are apparently being stored.


LI has been reading Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars: The secret history of the Cia, Afghanistan and Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 11, 2001. We came across this interesting passage. Afghanistan, 1979:

A charismatic Afghan army captain named Ismail Khan called for jihad againt the communist usurpers that March and led his heavily armed Heart garrison into violent revolt. His followers hunted down and hacked to death more than a dozen Russian communist political advisors, as well as their wives and children. The rebels displayed Russian corposes on pikes along shaded city streets. Soviet-trained pilots flew bomber jets out of Kabul in vengeful reply, pulverizing the town in remorseless waves of attack. By the time the raids were finished, on the eve of its first anniversary in power, the Afghan communist government had killed as many as twenty thousand of its own citizenry in Herat alone.”

If you wonder how the Soviets justified a massacre like that, go to this article in Slate that glorifies the American war crime of razing Fallujah. It would have been right at home in, say, the columns of Pravda in 1980. Apparently the editors of Slate, who love to nitpick NYT journalists’ mistakes, swallowed this with a big piece of American apple pie and ice cream:

“… Most of the beheadings featured on the Al Jazeera news network were committed in the city, carried out under klieg lights with written instructions how and when the CDs should be delivered to make the evening news. The city's warlords, Janabi and Hadid, paid obeisance to the arch terrorist Zarqawi and competed for his favor by assassinations and bombings. They bragged their "martyr battalions" would cut to pieces any American force entering the city.

:Deciding otherwise, the residents fled the city, leaving a few thousand jihadists to their fate. In a swift offensive, American soldiers and Marines swept in and hunted them down, destroying every house and mosque where Zarqawi's soldiers stood and fought. Seventeen-thousand buildings were searched, uncovering cache after cache of weapons. The numbers were staggering: Over 100,000 explosives found in just one section of the city.”

An account that simply skips the American bombing of the city, the buildup to the assault, the American effort, announced for a month, to empty the city, the American blocking of the routes out of the city, the American culling of the males in the city, the American bombing of civilian sites in the city, the American refusal to put up any kind of refugee center for the fleeing population, the American refusal to let anybody in the now razed city except propagandists of the type that Slate favors, the American targetting of hospitals, etc., etc.

Although LI thought Reagan was a rotten president, he said something rather sweet about the Soviet war crimes in Afghanistan.

“The year 1984 was an especially hard one for the Afghans. The Soviets have become frustrated with their inability to crush the spirit of the Afghan Freedom Fighters and are increasingly turning their military might against the civilian population of the country, forcing hundreds of thousands more innocent people into exile away from their homeland.

Reports of Soviet atrocities and human rights violations are increasingly gaining the attention of the world's public. Respected organizations such as the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International, and Helsinki Watch have recently released studies detailing the terror that the Soviets and the Karmal regime regularly inflict on the people of Afghanistan. Karmal's tenuous, and brutal, hold on power continues only because his rule is supported by more than 100,000 Soviet occupation troops.

All Americans are outraged by this growing Soviet brutality against the proud and freedom-loving people of Afghanistan. Moreover, the entire world community has condemned the outside occupation of Afghanistan. Six times, in fact, the UN General Assembly has passed strong resolutions -- supported by the overwhelming majority of the world's nations -- which have:

-- called for the immediate withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan;
-- reaffirmed the right of the Afghan people to determine their own form of government and choose their economic, political, and social systems;
-- reiterated that the preservation of the sovereignty, territorial integrity, political independence, and nonaligned character of Afghanistan is essential for a peaceful solution of the problem; and
--- called for the creation of conditions that would enable the Afghan refugees to return voluntarily to their homes in safety and honor.”

Transposing a few phrases, this accurately sums up what is wrong with the American occupation of Iraq. We particularly like the strong condemnation of terror tactics used against civilians – so civilized! So, in the name of Ronald Reagan, I think we can safely condemn as an act of American brutality against the freedom-loving people of Fallujah (wow, freedom-loving even back in 1984!), call for the immediate withdrawal of foreign, i.e. American and British and their coalition of the servile, from Iraq, as well as the creation of conditions that would allow refugees in Iraq to return voluntarily in safety and honor, with reparations, to Fallujah. We think reparations can be put at roughly 100 thou per person.

Do it for the Gipper.

LI has pondered the parodoxes of the upcoming election in Iraq. In the past, the U.S. has used fake elections to try to legitimize its foreign policy adventures. South Vietnam, El Salvador, Panama – the m.o. has a dreary consistency.

This case is different insofar as the Iraq occupation is different. While the election is being held in an atmosphere that renders it illegitimate as a democratic process – the massive censorship, the arrest of opposition leaders, the way American military strategy has normalized war crimes, etc., etc. – this matters less than the fact that the elections are the first step in relieving Iraq of its biggest problem: the Americans. On Ghazi Yawer’s latest trip to this country, he made that explicit – as he foresaw it, the elected government would ask for a timetable of withdrawal. Yawer was talking about a year. We’d like to see six months. In American eyes, the elected government’s biggest task is to write a constitution. Americans love constitutions. But the impetus gained from having a power, however weak, that had actually communicated with the Iraqi people opens up the possibility of doing many things: getting American hands off Iraqi oil money; negotiating, themselves, for the end of reparations to Kuwait; the introduction of Iraqi concerns into the internal governance of the country; destroying the last remnants of Bremer’s economic legacy to Iraq (all of that privatizing nonsense). The outcome for the Americans, over the next three or four years, isn’t going to be upbeat. We doubt the U.S. has a new, reliable ally in the region. But the U.S. has too much at stake to exaccerbate the natural hostility any Iraqi government would feel towards its recent oppressors.

While LI has viewed Allawi, throughout, as a thug, his latest suggestion about the election is a surprisingly good one: in Sunni areas, the election time must be extended. In fact, in all areas.

The withdrawal of American troops does have a definite downside. As long as they are tied down in Iraq, the Bush gang doesn’t really have the resources to bedevil the rest of the world. However, with combat ready troops available, we know that America, a perennially belligerant country being lead by a man whose popularity crucially hinges on making the American masses identify with his brand of acts of irrational violence, will be on the lookout for another deployment. This is partly why we are ambiguous about the Bush project of privatizing social security. On the one hand, it is class warfare that will, as always, continue the impoverishment of the average American as money is directed to the investment class – Bush’s version of Pinochet-ism. From the standpoint of the American citizen, it should be resisted at all costs. But the standpoint of the American citizen is no longer the standpoint of the cosmopolitan liberal. The gap between America and the rest of the world has widened to the point that what benefits the American economy feeds into the American imperial psychosis. The borrowing required to rob social security will almost surely sink the U.S. into a pretty deep recession. This is especially true insofar as the Chinese, eyeing the U.S.’s military, will be less than enthusiastic in financing another round of the Bush Saturnalia for the wealthy. The lack of money to maintain an aggressive foreign policy might well blunt the Bush gangs’ natural homicidal instincts. But there’s a large caveat hereL it is important to remember that the society Bush’s America most resembles – Peronist Argentina – was susceptible to war hysteria even in the grey tumult of recession.

Over at Crooked Timber, they are having another silly bout of deciding who was the great philosopher of the twentieth century. We don’t know why this compulsion to name the greatest philosopher has suddenly sunk its memish jaws into the Zeitgeist: Leiter did a similar thing a couple of months ago, and Mark Taylor, in his op ed piece about Derrida, was moved to call Jacques one of the century’s three great philosophers (the others were Moe and Curly).

The candidate from greatest of one of the CT-ers is David Lewis. David Lewis! It is like calling the greatest philosopher of the seventeenth century Antoine Arnauld.

One philosopher never mentioned in this embarrassing sweepstakes is Franz Rosenzweig. Yet LI would venture to say that, of those philosophic tomes composed on little notecards or in little journals by soldiers in world war one, only two have stood the test of time: The Tractatus-Logico and Stern der Erloesung. (pdf file)

We’ve been reading the Star of Redemption since we found it on the web. Shamefully, we read Heidegger and Benjamin in grad school and never picked up Rosenzweig. Yet, as everybody knows who reads the introductions to Benjamin, Rosenzweig was a big deal for both Benjamin and Heidegger. Karl Löwith wrote that Heidegger’s true philosophical contemporary was Rosenzweig. Heidegger claimed never to have read him.

Claim and counter-claims. This is a tissue that LI sees no sense in exploring. One thing is certain: Stern der Erloesung does not begin like a David Lewis essay. It begins: “The knowledge of everything begins with death and the fear of death. To shed the anxiety of the earthly, to take the poison needle from death, the breath of the plague from hades, is precisely what is missing from philosophy.” (Vom tode, voen der Furcht des Todes hebt alles Erkennen des All an. Die Angst des Irdischen abzuwerfen, dem Tod seinen Giftstachel, dem Hades seinen Pesthauch zu nehmen, des vermißt sich die Philosophie.” Rosenzweig ends this passage thusly:Man shouldn’t try to rid himself of the fear of the earthly; he should remain in the fear of death.

(Der Mensch soll die Angst des Irdischen nicht von sich werfen; er soll in der Furcht des Todes – bleiben).

It is pretty easy to imagine how the fear of death, and its image as the fear of an earthly creature, one on earth and made of earth, would occur to a soldier in the Balkans in 1916. There is a gap in our historical consciousness of what World War I meant – we transpose, in America, the realization among intellectuals that mass, mechanized killing is the unexpected fruit of Western culture, to a post Holocaust period. In U.S intellectual history, the erasure of the first World War operates as a necessary moralizing prelude to the anti-communism of the Cold War. Lenin is then reduced, by way of Churchill’s phrase, to a bacillus released in Russia – a pathogen apart from history. This is flattering to Churchill, whose history in World War I consisted of a rumsfeldian fuckup in Gallipoli. This is also flattering to the governing classes, directly responsible for the deaths of millions in that war.

Rosenzweig wrote the Star of Redemption after having been a part of the Neo-Kantian movement – after having written a well received book on Hegel and the State. He could witness how, within a liberal, rational culture that presented itself as the creator of organizations that operate with rules to create an optimum of tolerance, wealth, and liberty, the same organizations could apply the same rationality to create vast killing machines, that whole ensemble of hundreds of thousands of men, trenches, machine guns, barbed wire, tanks, and planes set in motion to kill each other again and again, for pointless gains, with an intensity and duration never before experienced on earth.

“The fear of the earthly must be taken from him only with the earthly itself. But so long as he lives on earth, he must also remain in the anxiety of the earthly. And philosophy betrays him in this “must”, insofar as it weaves the blue haze of the thought of everything (allgedankens) around the earthly. Because of couse: an All doesn’t die, and nothing dies in the All. Only individuals can die, and everything mortal is individual. This, that philosophy must make the individual vanish out of the world, this de-creation of the Something is the reason it must be idealistic. Because Idealism, with its denial of those things which divide the individual from the All, is the instrument with which philosophy works over its recalcitrant material until it no longer counters its general (Ein-und Allbegriff) concept with any resistance. Once this mist has been spun around everything, death is clearly swallowed up: if not in eternal victory, yet, even so, in the general night of nothingness.”
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Eventually, we want to comment about the essay of Tom Nairn over at Open Democracy. Nairn is trying to understand the apparent seizure of irrationality in the U.S. philosophically – reclaiming the legitimacy of the nation (as opposed to the nation-state, that thing continually bartering itself to the IMF); tracing the working through of patterns that arise naturally from the hegemony of the American capitalist system, etc., etc. Nairn assumes – and we agree – that the major task in the world today is to curb American power. Americans are reckless, sporadically immoral, ignorant, and create much too little for the amount they suck out of the world system. There are, however, self correcting mechanisms at work that Nairn doesn’t mention. We’ll return to this later. We should say, Nairn’s article is written in an alarm clock style (which is something of an LI specialty): it is as if every sentence had to keep the reader awake. However, the style tends to get in the way of the sense. Metaphors keep being sent out to do battle in sentences that witness their melancholic last stands, over and over again (see – sentences like that). However, he racks up a good ratio of commonsense to drivel.

For later.