Category Archives: Philosophy

Schopenhauer on Happiness 3b (Mutability, Poem by Shelley)

21 Tuesday Jan 2020

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Contemporary with Schopenhauer is the English Romantic Poet Percy Shelley.

I.

The flower that smiles to-day

To-morrow dies;

All that we wish to stay

Tempts and then flies.

What is this world’s delight?

Lightning that mocks the night,

Brief even as bright.

 

This first stanza comes closet to Schopenhauer’s pessimism. The flower “dies”. Those things we desire “tempt” and then they “fly”. He speaks of the world as purposefully causing this pain. Delight in this world “mocks” and has as much permanence as lightning at night.

 

But there is a hint here of something else: The flower “smiles”. That temptation is of a “delight”. Lightning may mock, but it is bright.

 

The final line “brief even as bright”.

 

II.

Virtue, how frail it is!

Friendship how rare!

Love, how it sells poor bliss

For proud despair!

But we, though soon they fall,

Survive their joy, and all

Which ours we call.

 

He moves from the physical to the moral world. Virtue is “frail”. Friendship is “rare”. Love turns to “despair”. Again, there is another side to these things: Virtue and friendship are good things, hence, the trouble of their loss. Love entails “bliss”. And these things all pertain to “joy”. They are lost, but they are good.

 

III.

Whilst skies are blue and bright,

Whilst flowers are gay,

Whilst eyes that change ere night

Make glad the day;

Whilst yet the calm hours creep,

Dream thou—and from thy sleep

Then wake to weep.

 

At this point, Shelley offers a very different take than Schopenhauer. The philosopher will caution against any joy or good; he will seek no bliss, no delight. He will protect himself from loss by cutting off the elation and thus avoiding the loss.

 

Shelley offers a different solution: to enjoy these things now. He marks the time in a series of three lines “whilst”:

 

Whilst skies are blue and bright,

Whilst flowers are gay,

Whilst eyes that change ere night

 

While these good things last, do not reject them like (as Schopenhauer counsels), rather:

 

Make glad the day;

 

This is an interesting line, because until now the joys have been received. But here he gives counsel: you actively make the day glad, you drink in this joy.

 

He then turns to a resolution:

 

Whilst yet the calm hours creep,

Dream thou

 

Drink in this joy, but know that this is a “dream”. It is a joy which will not last. But even that passion is not to be lost:

 

and from thy sleep

Then wake to weep.

 

This in the Romantic vein of drinking in all passion. In the Prelude, Wordsworth refers to the poet

 

Crazed

By love and feeling, and internal though

Protracted among endless solitudes (V, 145-147)

 

Both Shelley and Shakespeare have looked directly into change and loss. But they provide a model of using the loss as the basis for passionately holding onto what will last.

Arthur Schopenhauer On Happiness 3a (Mutability)

19 Sunday Jan 2020

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The rationale for Schopenhauer’s renunciation as the basis for happiness lies in the mutability of the physical world:

The chief obstacle to our arriving at these salutary views is that hypocrisy of the world to which I have already alluded–an hypocrisy which should be early revealed to the young. Most of the glories of the world are mere outward show, like the scenes on a stage: there is nothing real about them. Ships festooned and hung with pennants, firing of cannon, illuminations, beating of drums and blowing of trumpets, shouting and applauding–these are all the outward sign, the pretence and suggestion,–as it were the hieroglyphic,–of joy: but just there, joy is, as a rule, not to be found; it is the only guest who has declined to be present at the festival.

While Schopenhauer derived his concept of renunciation due to mutability based upon a Buddhist (which is consonant with Hindu concepts) understanding of reality. However, in evaluating his reading, we should also compare this language with Western responses to mutability. First, concepts of mutability were being addressed in contemporary Western Romanticism as well as Western thought generally. Second, by considering a different consideration of the same proposition from a different direction, we have a greater perspective to evaluate the matter.

Schopenhauer’s metaphor to life being a play (“Most of the glories of the world are mere outward show, like the scenes on a stage: there is nothing real about them), appears much in Shakespeare. Perhaps the closest analogy is found in Macbeth’s speech upon hearing that his wife has died and now his downfall is in view:

(FTLN 2278) [19]     The Queen, my lord, is dead.

Macbeth

(FTLN 2279) [20]     She should have died hereafter.

(FTLN 2280) [21]     There would have been a time for such a word.

(FTLN 2281) [22]     Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

(FTLN 2282) [23]     Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

(FTLN 2283) [24]     To the last syllable of recorded time,

(FTLN 2284) [25]     And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

(FTLN 2285) [26]     The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

(FTLN 2286) [27]     Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

(FTLN 2287) [28]     That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

(FTLN 2288) [29]     And then is heard no more. It is a tale

(FTLN 2289) [30]     Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

(FTLN 2290) [31]     Signifying nothing.

 

Act V, 5, 19-31. Schopenhauer has a similar view to Macbeth when it comes to the matter of the mutability of the world. Seeing that the world is impermanent, life is meaningless and is best not trusted. This is especially poignant in Macbeth, in that he has been destroying a kingdom and committing murder upon murder to obtain something which he hoped would be permanent: a kingdom. But even in that, he was told that the throne would not pass to his son.

There is thus the irony of seeking to obtain something seemingly powerful and permanent: a throne; and to seek it by proving that neither the throne nor life is permanent.

A similar but different view of the matter is found in The Tempest, Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage.

The Magician Prospero has put a play acted by spirits who appear from nowhere and then vanish just as quickly when Prospero needs to attend to other business. The young man who marry is daughter is distraught at the sudden disappearance of the spirits. Prospero then turns to him and uses the doctrine of mutability to explain the matter:

Prospero, ⌜to Ferdinand⌝

(FTLN 1832) [163]   You do look, my son, in a moved sort,

(FTLN 1833) [164]   As if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir.

(FTLN 1834) [165]   Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

(FTLN 1835) [166]   As I foretold you, were all spirits and

(FTLN 1836) [167]   Are melted into air, into thin air;

(FTLN 1837) [168]   And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

(FTLN 1838) [169]   The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

(FTLN 1839) [170]   The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

(FTLN 1840) [171]   Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

(FTLN 1841) [172]   And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

(FTLN 1842) [173]   Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

(FTLN 1843) [174]   As dreams are made on, and our little life

(FTLN 1844) [175]   Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vexed.

(FTLN 1845) [176]   Bear with my weakness. My old brain is troubled.

(FTLN 1846) [177]   Be not disturbed with my infirmity.

(FTLN 1847) [178]   If you be pleased, retire into my cell

(FTLN 1848) [179]   And there repose. A turn or two I’ll walk

(FTLN 1849) [180]   To still my beating mind.

Act IV, Scene 1, lines 163-180. This physical world is insubstantial, so why should a plain realization of this fact trouble you so. Shakespeare does not resolve this tension immediately, but does it work it out through the action of the play.

In Macbeth the usurpation of the king by murder results in the destruction of Macbeth and enormous sorrow for the kingdom. In the Tempest, the usurpation of the Duke (who becomes the magician on the island) is resolved by the restoration of his throne through the marriage of his daughter to the Prince of Naples.

When the play is read against the most common understanding which is Shakespeare giving his leave to the theater, there are various levels of irony. The play within the play is dissolved at the word of the Magician. The play itself is dissolved and the characters are released from their duty to the audience:

(FTLN 2344)          [1]               Now my charms are all o’erthrown,

(FTLN 2345)          [2]               And what strength I have ’s mine own,

(FTLN 2346)          [3]               Which is most faint. Now ’tis true

(FTLN 2347)          [4]               I must be here confined by you,

(FTLN 2348)          [5]               Or sent to Naples. Let me not,

(FTLN 2349)          [6]               Since I have my dukedom got

(FTLN 2350)          [7]               And pardoned the deceiver, dwell

(FTLN 2351)          [8]               In this bare island by your spell,

(FTLN 2352)          [9]               But release me from my bands

(FTLN 2353)        [10]               With the help of your good hands.

(FTLN 2354)        [11]               Gentle breath of yours my sails

(FTLN 2355)        [12]               Must fill, or else my project fails,

(FTLN 2356)        [13]               Which was to please. Now I want

(FTLN 2357)        [14]               Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,

(FTLN 2358)        [15]               And my ending is despair,

(FTLN 2359)        [16]               Unless I be relieved by prayer,

(FTLN 2360)        [17]               Which pierces so that it assaults

(FTLN 2361)        [18]               Mercy itself, and frees all faults.

(FTLN 2362)        [19]                     As you from crimes would pardoned be,

(FTLN 2363)        [20]                     Let your indulgence set me free.

He exits.

It was magic which presented the momentary world of the play, “Now my charms are all o’erthrown”. But within the logic of the play, he would be forced to stay on a “baren” island rather than returned to his dukedom: By the audience letting lose of the illusion of the play, the Magician is permitted to return to his “real” or proper life. When we take a step back and put this into the context of Shakespeare’s life, Shakespeare then would leave the false and magic world for the “real” life at his home.

But notice here that the temporality of the world in this play is not a cause for despair, but rather of release and rest. The play ends with “mercy” and “forgiveness”.

In Sonnet 73, Shakespeare uses the temporality of life as the basis to drive the intensity of the love:

73

[1]       That time of year thou mayst in me behold

[2]       When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

[3]       Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

[4]       Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

[5]       In me thou see’st the twilight of such day

[6]       As after sunset fadeth in the west,

[7]       Which by and by black night doth take away,

[8]       Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.

[9]       In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire

[10]     That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

[11]     As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

[12]     Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

[13]     This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

[14]     To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

In short, the mutability of life is seen as a catastrophe and tragedy in Macbeth, whose life is marked by murder and usurping the crown. But in other circumstances, the brevity of life can be seen as a basis to better cherish and love the instant world.

In fact, he points to an even deeper reality, a truer life which stands behind the changeable play of this world.

Arthur Schopenhauer on happiness.2

16 Thursday Jan 2020

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Schopenhauer explains the heart of his philosophy is to “disown” life and this renunciation is the ultimate basis for his instruction on happiness:

He who has taken to heart the teaching of my philosophy–who knows, therefore, that our whole existence is something which had better not have been, and that to disown and disclaim it is the highest wisdom–he will have no great expectations from anything or any condition in life: he will spend passion upon nothing in the world, nor lament over-much if he fails in any of his undertakings.

There are various ways to understand Schopenhauer at this point. He admittedly derived a great deal of this his thinking on this point from Eastern religion, particularly Buddhism.  I wish to be careful here, because my knowledge of Buddhism and Hinduism is limited. However, a few citations may help explicate some of the background on his instruction in happiness at this point. For those who would like to take a dive into his relationship to Buddhism, here is an essay from  Peter Abelsen, Philosophy East&West Volume 43, Number 2, April 1993.  255-278, entitled, “Schopenhauer and Buddhism” http://www.ahandfulofleaves.org/documents/Articles/Schopenhauer%20and%20Buddhism_PEW_Abelsen_1993.pdf

Here are some quick citations which provide a quick background to the topic:

With the self unattached to the external contacts he discovers happiness in the Self; with the self engaged in the meditation of Brahman he attains to the endless happiness. Bhagavad-Gita 5.21

Kesava Kasmiri’s Commentary on this verse states:

If a person is inclined to attachment to sensual pleasures they will never have the opportunity to experience the transcendental bliss of the realisation of the  Brahman or the spiritual substratum pervading all existence. But a question may be raised what happiness can a person derive from life if they have introverted their senses and are averted to sense objects. Lord Krishna states the compound words  sukham-aksayam meaning unlimited happiness is what such persons attains for with disconnection to the senses and objects of the senses a natural detachment arises which frees one from worldly desires allowing one to focus within on the eternal atma or eternal soul where one tastes boundless joy and experiences unlimited bliss. In the moksadharma section of the Mahabharata it states that: The pleasures of the senses in this world and the joys of heavenly pleasures cannot be compared to even 1/16th part of the pleasure one derives from renouncing the desire for material sense gratification. This is the essential component that paves the way for perceiving the Brahman or spiritual substratum pervading all existence, atma tattva or realisation of the soul and moksa or liberation from the material existence and cognition of the ultimate truth of the Supreme Being.

The concept of renunciation is central to Buddhism. Schopenhauer’s connection between happiness and renunciation is articulated within Buddhism as for instance in this essay, “Renunciation and Happiness”:

When we understand this, we can start to glimpse that renunciation is not a matter of doing something or having to create something, or getting rid of some­thing or exterminating something in life. Rather it is moving towards non-conten­tion, a sense of rest and relaxation—not having constantly to try and manipulate and control and evade and maneuver any more. We are able to open in a fear­less way and relax into the experience of the moment, whatever its quality may be. In opening to receive life, we still engage in the conventional level of reality—the social level of moral values, indentities, mother and father, livelihood and mort­gages. If we grasp these things and ex­pect complete fulfillment from them, we will always be disappointed. But if we see our life as an opportunity to under­stand Dhamma—the way things are—that is renunciation. This letting go is very freeing. Whatever comes to us is Dhamma, and there is a joy in being in contact with Truth, whatever its particu­lar flavor.

Renunciation can sound like passiv­ity, a “door mat” philosophy, but actu­ally it is the opposite. True response-abil­ity—the ability to respond wisely and compassionately to life—naturally arises in the non-attached mind. There can be both activity and letting go.

https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/article/renunciation-the-high-happiness/ I would be curious to know whether the precise concept of “happiness” was connected to the concept of renunciation prior to extensive Western contacts. Schopenhauer obviously is drawing a connection between renunciation and happiness. What I do not know is whether Schopenhauer is first in tying the two concepts together. Certainly there is a connection between tranquility and renunciation which pre-exists Western interaction; but whether this tranquility and “happiness” was drawn I simply do not know.

That’s also what made want to become an actor

06 Sunday Oct 2019

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That’s also what made me want to become an actor, so that by taking on another’s role I could acquire a sort of surrogate for my own life and in this exchanging of externals find some form of diversion. That’s what I lacked for leading a completely human life and not just a life of knowledge, to avoid basing my mind’s development on–yes, on something that people call objective–something which at any rate isn’t my own, and base it instead on something which is bound up with the deepest roots of my existence,* through which I am as it were grown into the divine and cling fast to it even though the whole world falls apart. This, you see, is what I need, and this is what I strive for. So it is with joy and inner invigoration that I contemplate the great men who have found that precious stone for which they sell everything, even their lives,* whether I see them intervening forcefully in life, with firm step and following unwaveringly their chosen paths, or run into them off the beaten track, self-absorbed and working for their lofty goals. I even look with respect upon those false paths that also lie there so close by. It is this inward action of man, this God-side of man, that matters, not a mass of information.

Soren Kierkegaard

Edward Feser: Materialism Subverts Itself

16 Wednesday Jan 2019

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So, if we start with the modern materialist’s conception of matter and start to unpack it, materialism ends up being transformed into one or another of the various views that one would have thought to be at odds with materialism – dualism, panpsychism, Platonism, idealism, or pantheism.

You’ll have to read it yourself You really should be reading him if you are at all interested in philosophy

Carl F. Henry, Secular Man and Ultimate Concern

06 Friday Jul 2018

Posted by in Carl F Henry, Philosophy, Psychology, Uncategorized

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(Chapter 8, God, Revelation and Authority. Btw, these short takes on his essays cannot begin to cover the density and wealth of thought in Henry.  They really must be read, but) Theologian Millard Erickson once said, “I love Carl Henry’s work. It’s extremely important. I hope someday that it is translated into English!”

Secular Man and Ultimate Concerns

There is a Woody Allen joke, “If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit, in my name, at a Swiss bank account.” But what sort of evidence would show that God exists. No matter how power an agent were to display itself, would that ever be proof of God? If something as powerful as the aliens in a thousand movies were to appear about a large city, would that prove God? What if the agent were as dazzling as the sun?

In this essay, Henry argues that the radical secularism – which the is the default “intelligent” position of the age – itself bears witness to God. It is an answer to the question, “If God is real, then why don’t I see Him?” To answer this question, Henry speaks of “cognitive levels of experience”. The reason why God is not obvious is because He is not being sought in the right place and the right way. (This is an interesting sort of presuppositionalist argument.)

Western secularism has made naturalism, a radical empiricism to be the entire basis for rational discourse and understanding. This radical naturalism entails a number of related entailments:

A correlative implication of this theory of the comprehensive contingency, total transiency, and radical relativity of all reality and experience is the absolute autonomy of man. Man alone remains, self-sufficient and autonomous, to rescue the cosmos from absurdity and worthlessness. No divine sovereign places human life under unchanging commands, no divine revelation tells man what is true and trustworthy, no divine book stipulates what is permanently right and wrong. External reality supplies no transcosmic supports for human security. A clean break is required with all transcendent, heteronomous absolutes as alien and arbitrary.

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 139. The universe – and us – are contingent, transient, relative – and somehow also autonomous. It is an odd sort of agency, because it is grounded in absolutely nothing.

This autonomous agent, contingent and existent only for a whisper of time, seems strangely to be completely unable to believe this true. For instance, if we are truly meaningless, then what is the basis and what is the point seeking for “meaning” and security. Then why do we do what we do? “Modern man actually has a much wider range of experience than the naturalistic credo acknowledges.” (145)

This simply does not work.

And when we move beyond just our desire to be meaningful, we run into other problems.

For example, how do we explain any moral fact? Why is murder wrong? It certainly and without question is evil. But why? Because we don’t like it? There is no naturalistic explanation. But what if someone were to make the adaptive argument: not murdering was necessary for the survival of the species and those camps which held to the no-murder position survived better than others. That merely proves it is more adaptive, but not that it is truly right or wrong. Moral facts are just feelings about things, not truths. If one were merely able to overcome the feeling, there would be no morality at all.

Here is where makes the argument for God. God is “inescapably an aspect of everyday experience” (149). God is there and cannot be gainsaid or avoided. The fact of God is built into our consciousness; a “primordial ontological awareness of God as the ultimate given.”

If this is so, then why do we deny its truth:

The reality of God as depicted in his revelation best explains why secular man refuses to order his life exclusively by the naturalistic world life view, while the fact of sin best explains why he refuses to order his life exclusively by the truth and will of God. (148)

He makes an interesting observation which deserves further consideration. The conflict inherent in humanity as a result of a conflict with a sovereign God creates psychological damage within the human being, which we attempt to manage by various psychological and psychiatric methods. (149)

Our very existence, our concern for meaning and morality, our refusal to take our own and other life as utterly meaningless (which is precisely what secular naturalism teaches), is constant undeniable evidence of God. Sin makes hypocrites of Christians; God makes hypocrites of secularists:

Not only his secret alternatives to meaninglessness, but also his distressing anxieties concerning personal worth, imply presuppositions that touch upon man’s responsible relationship to his Maker. The ongoing revelation of God and remnants of the imago Dei in man supply the continuing conditions of man’s humanity. The ineradicable convictions we harbor about the character of reality and the way we frame the fundamental questions of our lives reflect, however unwittingly, a response to God’s revelational confrontation of his creatures. The universal disclosure of God penetrates deeply into all man’s confidences and doubts. God is the Eternal with whom unrenewed man, in all his experiences, has a vagabond relationship. Evidence of God’s reality and power and truth and goodness is ongoingly refracted into the course of man’s daily life. (151)

In short, the espoused secularity of the modern world cannot account for itself. Even the bare attempt to “explain” the world in terms of secular naturalism is itself a contradiction of that naturalism.

 

Kierkegaard: Freedom of Choice in Either/Or

20 Tuesday Feb 2018

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408px-Kierkegaard_portrait

Volume 2 of Either/Or is composed of two long, often tedious [the first letter, “Aesthetic Validity of Marriage” can be particularly slow, repetitious, dull], meandering, letters from Judge Vilhelm to man of volume 1 (which includes the famous Diary of a Seducer).  A primary aspect of this volume is to convince the seducer of the primacy of marriage (over a life of well… seduction).  He argues that one should choose to be ethical.

There is an aspect of irony in all this, because Kierkegaard is arguing to Regina Olson (as has been noted by many) about marriage after he had broken off his engagement to the young lady.

He argues that marriage is no duty — because it is a duty of love, which is something thus done willingly (and then as he makes this argument, he seems to almost contradict himself).  Thus, the ethical choice is one of freedom. By way of contrast, the one who lives merely for pleasure has no freedom, because he has made no choice — he has no ability to even reflect upon anything.

I have received second-hand or so some ideas of Kierkegaard and existential choice: an act whereby one chooses in some manner and thus secures some sort of meaning in life. Now, I am not an expert in the history of existential philosophy, nor have I traced all the movements in the area from Kierkegaard through Sartre and Jasper. But what I have seen — and this is perhaps the fountainhead of the concept is this section from Equilibrium in volume two of Either/Or:

That which is prominent in my either/or is the ethical. It is therefore not yet a question of the choice of something in particular, it is not a question of the reality of the thing chosen, but of the reality of the act of choice….As an heir, even though he were heir to the treasure of all the world, nevertheless does not posses his property before he had come of age [an allusion to Galatians 4:1-2], so even the richest personality is nothing before he has chosen himself, and on the other hand even what one might call the poorest personality is everything when has chosen himself; for the great thing is not to be this or that but to be oneself, and this everyone can be if he wills it.

He then goes on to explain that the aesthetic man is one not merely lives for pleasure, but one who lives immediately, without an act of choice, “the aesthetically in a man is that by which he is immediately what he is; the ethical is that whereby he becomes what he becomes.”

But because the aesthetically man is merely what he is — not having chosen something else — is “enmeshed”. He has “no time to tear [him]self loose.” This is in contrast to the ethical man (the writer of volume 2), “I am not enmeshed, either by my judgment of the aesthetical or by my judgment of the ethical; for in the ethical I am raised above the instant — I am in freedom — but it is a contradiction that one might be enmeshed by being in freedom.”

The act of choosing, ‘imparts to man’s nature a solemnity, a quiet dignity, which is never entirely lost.”

The man who merely wants to enjoy life finds himself at the mercy of “a condition which either lies outside the individual or is in the individual in such a way that it is not posited by the individual himself.” For in the inside, he gives the example of a young girl “who for a brief time prides herself upon her beauty, but soon it deceives her.”

For the man who lives constantly for some pleasure outside himself, he gives Nero as the example — nothing is able to sate him, “all the world’s cleverness must devise for him new pleasures, for only in the instant of pleasure does he find response, and when that is past he gasps with faintness.” [His discussion of Nero is particularly interesting.]

But something still troubles Nero, he cannot “break through.” He has a place which terrifies anyone who sees it – he cannot bear for anyone to look into his eyes. “He does not possess himself; only when the world trembles before him is he tranquilized, for then there is no one who ventures to lay hold on him. Hence this dread of men which Nero shares with everyone personality of this sort.”

This seems to match the diary of the seducer, who works out the desire for the woman — but cannot permit her to actually be with him — he cannot make the ethical move to marry (marriage is the constant background of volume 2).

“At least we can both learn that a man’s unhappiness is never due to the fact that he has not the outward conditions in his power this being the very thing which would make him unhappy.” — This leads to melancholy:  “But melancholy is sin, really it is a sin instar omnium, for not to will deeply and sincerely is sin, and this is the mother of all sins.”

(It continues on through many twists in turns on the nature of despair for the aesthetic man. Later, in Equilibrium, he writes, “For no intoxication is so beautiful as despair, so becoming, so attractive, especially in a maiden’s eyes (that you know full well), and especially if one possess the skill to repress the wildest outbursts, to let despair be vaguely sensed like a distant conflagration, while only a glimpse of it is visible outwardly.”)

On the other hand is the ethical choice which willing embraces duty: it is here that marriage as the basis of the argument makes sense. He is not merely telling the young man to stop being a cad, grow up and get married — he is explaining that choosing a duty to love another is not a burden but an act of love. To choose to love is an imposed duty, but it is not burden because love is the expression and obtaining of desire: “If I attach my  closely in friendship to another person, love is everything in this case, I recognize no duty; if love it is at an end, then friendship is over. It is reserved for marriage alone to base itself upon such an absurdity.” [Here is an example of the maddening paradox of this essay — it is long, twisting and the author never seems to be completely clear even to himself. He makes a point and then argues out another way.]

A historical irony lies here: if this is indeed the basis for the idea of the existential choice of which I heard and read in 20th century philosophers (and their cheaper imitators), then that choice was originally a choice offered by a moralizing older man (a judge no less), to a younger, carefree man to get married!

20 Saturday May 2017

Posted by in law, Philosophy, Politics

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When people speak about separation of religion and politics, particularly “legislating morality” as improper, they display a stupendous ignorance. 

For example, why is it wrong to lie to get someone’s money? Well, that is fraud. Why is fraud wrong? Because it is lying? Why is lying wrong? The answer to that question is itself a moral proposition. 

Morality is either a type of aesthetics or is based upon some sort of transcendent proposition: some morals may be more functional than others (everyone lying would soon destroy all commerce), but even caring about the effects is a moral decision.

The basic premises of Western law have a theological basis – a legislative morality: Consider this proposition:

God has ordained contracts of various kinds, Melanchthon wrote, to facilitate tate the sale, lease, or exchange of property, the procurement of labor and employment, and the lending of money and extension of credit.” God has called his political officials to promulgate general contract laws that prescribe “fair, equal, and equitable” agreements, that invalidate contracts based on fraud, duress, mistake, or coercion, and that proscribe contracts that are unconscionable, conscionable, immoral, or offensive to the public good. Melanchthon was content, for the most part, to state these general principles of contract law in categorical form. Occasionally he applied these general principles to specific cases. He condemned with particular vehemence loan contracts that obligated debtors to pay excessive rates of interest or entitled creditors to secure the loan with property whose value far exceeded the amount of the loan, unilateral labor and employment contracts that conditioned a master’s obligation to pay on full performance from the servant, and contracts of purchase and sale that were based on inequality of the exchange.

Law and Revolution II

Howard J. Berman

Harvard University Press 2003

Kierkegaard on the Impossibility of a Secular Morality

27 Monday Mar 2017

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His own own experience, rather than any theoretical requirements, convinced Kierkegaard that man’s real predicament is to be placed between a thoroughly esthetic way of living and a thoroughly religious one. No permanent footing can be maintained on a purely ethical basis, and in this respect Kierkegaard stands opposed to all efforts to make morality self-sufficient. Ethical principles are intrinsically ordained to the religious outlook, and a secular morality is either unaware of its religious significance our only esthetic discourse about being moral. The genuine alternatives are still the world and the cloister, the esthetic and the religious kinds of existing. Recollecting his own battle at playing the Romantic genius and also the tremendous upheaval involved in his return to Faith, Kierkegaard was inclined to state the contrast is being between “perdition and salvation”–between which there can be no compromise for reconciliation.

James Collins, The Mind of Kierkegaard (London: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd., 1954) 46-47.

An easy illustration of this can be found when one tries to establish even the most “self-evident” forms of ethics: Why is murder wrong? If you say, Because killing is wrong? The next step is “Why?” Because you killed a person. “Why is it wrong to kill a person?” Where does one stop searching for an answer to the “why”? Wherever one stops implies a religious position (to use Kierkegaard’s term) or an ethical (I simply find this distasteful).

The implicit esthetic morality of many people is apparent in the tremendous transformation taking place in ethics (particularly sexual ethics) in the West — and the speed in which it has happened. It seems that a great deal of public ethics was merely a matter of taste. Indeed, the “religious” positions of many people seem to be little more than taste and convenience.

Kierkegaard: Christianity as style

15 Wednesday Feb 2017

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He went on to maintain the Christians of our day have only an esthetic grasp upon the meaning of Christianity. They accept it along with other factors in their folkways, but it never becomes for them anything more than a customary way of acting and meeting crucial events, like birth and marriage and death. All the thoughts that really count, the important free decisions, the attitudes which shape and build the man through his deliberate consent and self formation, are taken from outside the Christian, even the religious, sphere. This meant for Kierkegaard the Christian religiousness had been transformed into a kind of automatic dreaming, and that peoples lives are being shaped by aesthetic rather than religious categories.

James Collins, The Mind of Kierkegaard (Chicago: Henry Regency Company, 1953), 41. How little has changed.