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For those scratching their heads, this is the personal page (blog? fan-mail publication? It's hard to put a pin on it) of Kelley L. Ross, PhD, a Chicago School libertarian who's miffed at the left.
The personal | about page segues into a lot of tangential and less than glancing incidentia .. but it carries the feel of the man.
There's a pretty uncomfortable dissonance between the rejection of antisemitism in TFA and starting the about-page proudly describing how an uncle got wealthy from making money for a rabid antisemite.
Same goes for rejecting Nietzsche, famous anti-nihilist, and then a few paragraphs later rejecting nihilism.
Seems this Ph.D. emeritus excels at confident confusion that distinguishes itself from discordianism by being crude and likely involuntary.
> Same goes for rejecting Nietzsche, famous anti-nihilist, and then a few paragraphs later rejecting nihilism.
I don't see anything wrong with that. For instance, Timothy Dexter was a wingnut who rejected prescriptivism in linguistics. Prescriptivism is generally unpopular today. That doesn't mean we have to praise Timothy Dexter for being right about anything else.
Never heard of him. In what area of philosophy did Dexter have an influence comparable to Nietzsche?
Or for instance Alasdair MacIntyre is in the same boat of being critical of Nietzsche (who after all was responsible for some terrible things, such as Pete Docherty) and yet disagreeing with nihilism, like most people do. This is a completely coherent position.
Don't remember much about MacIntyre from my years as a theology student, but he was a catholic, no?
If so, he doesn't disagree with nihilism as understood and critiqued by Nietzsche, on the contrary.
I've never heard of Pete Docherty.
I struggle to make sense of the implication that Catholics are nihilists (even in some narrow sense).
* Nietzsche saw nihilism as revelling in nothingness, but also as coming in a preferable version which was simply about iconoclasm and modernization.
* He saw Christianity as having a purpose of underpinning objective knowledge, thus opposing nihilism, but as failing in this, due to the erosion of belief and rise of skepticism.
I don't know if you're making a point specific to Catholicism, maybe. Can't work out what.
Christianity is life-denying, world-denying. Nietzsche concluded that christian ethics lead to life-denying societies.
Foundational to christianity is the belief that this world in which we find ourselves is a temporary punishment, and that this life only has meaning to the extent that we use our time to endure suffering and restrict ourselves. If we do this, we will then be rewarded with an actual life, an eternity of having the pleasure to watch our enemies suffer.
Another foundational belief is that all humans are born defective, and as a consequence the ideal is to never procreate. The most devout christians live in gender segregated communes and (officially) never engage in sexual activity. What could be more life-denying and nihilistic?
Personally I also find the solution to this original debt, this ever-present defect, highly suspicious. That is, that it needs to be repayed through human sacrifice, and then we all need to partake in this sacrifice through symbolic or actual cannibalism.
So, yes, Nietzsche saw in this a 'will to nothingness', a categorical denial of the possibility of a meaningful life and even a denial of life itself. He found it interesting, however. Compared to the ancient greeks he as a philologist knew quite a bit about he found the christians and the power dynamics they introduce devious and in some regards more sophisticated. 'You might be dominating me now, but you just wait, when Christ returns he will put you to eternal torment and I'll be watching, wallowing in the pleasure I derive from your suffering' is rather devious, both as a psychological power play and as an ethos for society at large.
From how you're describing MacIntyre he seems to have been mostly preoccupied with defending a dying academic epistemology and not really have engaged with the text of Nietzsche.
In medieval Christianity there were stylites dwelling up their pillars and (some thousand years later) anchorites sealed in their cells, and all this stuff about life-denying rings true except that Catholics, in the modern era at least, are mostly pro-life and anti-contraception and breed like rabbits.
MacIntyre wrote a book called "After Virtue" which is mostly posing Nietzsche against Aristotle, and his late-life conversion to Catholicism was because of Thomas Aquinas, who was an Aristotle fanboy. I don't know how he squared this with the supposed virtues of asceticism and living for the next world.
Religion gets into philosophy far too much, and kind of makes a big mess, since it doesn't have to make sense.
Well, catholics, like most christians, consider it worse to have sex for pleasure (or otherwise satisfy desire and gain intense pleasure) than bring more sinners into the world. Celibacy is still the ideal and roman catholics have a long list of rules regarding who can have sex and under what conditions.
You might have noticed that christians have a long history of negative attitudes towards men who have sex with men, i.e. performing sexual acts for pleasure alone, as it is understood. Women don't feel pleasure from sex so lesbians have gathered less christian attention, and it's the penis that does the insertion of the homunculus and so on, hence it's the actually sexual thing involved.
From the Wikipedia page about After Virtue I get the impression that MacIntyre mainly engaged with Nietzsche through secondary sources. For one I have trouble reading the geneaology as promoting greek morals rather than using them for contrast, and I'll have to agree with Nietzsche that the labour movement, the main egalitarian movement of his time, is unlikely to birth a new kind of person that rises from the carcass of the old morality and initiates a new. If such a person comes it is likely that they will be perceived as elitist or aristocratic.
As for complaining about Nietzsche being non-egalitarian, that's rich coming from a christian thinker, who believes this world exists merely to separate the good from the bad so that the good can have some bad ones to gloat at for eternity.
And yes, historically, to a religion it's philosophy that is the main threat, since philosophers don't create martyrs, they create dissidents, unlike nasty emperors and the like. Things have changed since then, however. Under the nihilism of modernity the main problem for a christian theologian has changed from the non-believer to the non-person, to paraphrase Rick Roderick (who got it from a colleague in theology, I think).
I might have to read After Virtue to figure out whether MacIntyre addresses this, since if it's in there the wikipedians didn't mention it. I kind of doubt it though, if he did he wouldn't have put so much faith in projecting his ideals regarding purpose onto other people since he would have realised that this practice was already in service of capital accumulation.
You mean he sold Ford cars?
Do you have a competing interpretation you'd like to present?
The author seems well intentioned, but if you want to preserve the western canon from being overrun by old world chaos, you need a present and resonant description of the current, material capital-e Evil that demonstrates to young men that not only their survival, but the future possibility of good itself is on the line. Given how useful philosophy was against resisting the horrors of the 20th century, I'm surprised anyone thinks it could be helpful against current and imminent ones.
The Soviet Union, El Salvador, Argentina, and Chile, didn't escape communism by revisiting early modern thinkers, and the Axis was not defeated by flashes of insight, yet as we watch the institutions of freedom and prosperity fall like dominos to viral subjectivity, apparently we're still sounding it out.
cool website, terrible ideas
> whence modern science, now demystified and unmasked as an instrument of white, male, homophobic, Euro-centric oppression, had proudly thought to have dislodged an arrogant humanity. This has given new meaning to the words "obscurantism" and "sophistry." Where the arrogance (let alone the intolerance and "extremism") has settled now is all too plain to those familiar with American academic life, where many American colleges have "speech codes" or equivalent regulations (not to mention radical mobs, often masked) that openly violate the First Amendment and their contractual obligations for academic freedom. Radical professors, and often whole schools of "education," are literally teaching students to hate their very own civil rights, let alone respect those of others.
I agree; the ideas in it are terrible!
That quote is him criticizing a certain shift in science and education he perceives, right? Not him advocating for that position.
Agree that the ideas are terrible, but I thought the layout of the website was disjointed and confusing.
I take personal offense to the name of this school. To create a school like this and smearing the names of those lovely horses .
On a more serious note, I found it quite difficult to get a feel for what philosophy you are promoting. To me this page looked like a well read libertarian writing some snide comments about whoever they don't like at the moment. It would also do well to stick a bit more to facts and truths in your arguments.
They're not just horses; they're people of the low countries. And they were some of the first to bring back the republic after the collapse of the Roman Empire.
Those people from the modern day province of Frisia (or Fryslân), myself included, are called Frisians in English though. Same linguistic borrowing, but different time period, so the horses ended up Friesian and the people (and everything related to the province and historical region) Frisians.
Not sure what you mean by republic. Frisia became a kingdom after the collapse of the Roman Empire until the 8th century, after which the usual conquering and reconquering by various factions began.
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