So while I haven’t eliminated all the dead links, I think I should introduce you to some of the highlights of the updated blogroll so far. You’ll notice that some people who’ve helped my work find an audience are listed: David Sullivan (visit his photo site), Emory Rowland (Clickfire’s review of webhosts is comprehensive), Ario, Xiane (add her on twitter), Melinda, Opal, Mitchell Allen. There are more, of course. You’ll notice I’ve linked a bunch of tumblrs who have been very supportive of my work.

Other things to note on the blogroll:

• The Leading Tone is an awesome tumblr; it probably is the most engaging classical music blog I’ve seen. A side project of me and some friends is Classically Sound – the idea is to get everyone contributing something about classical music. That hasn’t happened yet, but I think it will. For now, I’m content to keep it updated.
• The journo blogs I’m reading regularly: McArdle, Cost, Weigel. Wish Kristine Lowe would blog more.
• UD artists: Carrie Baker, Francisco Vargas, Rachel Muldez and Mirka Hokkanen. You guys get one side of my school when I talk about a more conservative approach to learning. There is some awesome art produced there and I regret that I’m always playing catch-up to it.

There’s so much more, so many to thank, so many to promote. If you’re linked to me and want a link back, let me know. You make my job easier when you talk to me.

In Cohen’s deliberately exaggerated expression, God’s being becomes actual in and through His correlation with man. “God is conditioned by the correlation with man. And man is conditioned by the correlation with God.” God cannot be thought properly as being beyond His relation to man, and it is equally necessary to understand man, the creature constituted by reason or spirit, as essentially related to the unique God Who is spirit. Reason is the link between God and man. Reason is common to God and man. But it would contradict reason if man were only the passive partner in his correlation with God. Correlation means therefore also and especially that God and man are equally, if in different ways, active toward one another. (Leo Strauss, “Introduction to Hermann Cohen: Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism” 238)

It takes a lot of Scriptural twisting to identify rationality as the central link between God and man. A sharp distinction between reason and revelation is much more sound for the study of philosophy or Scripture. And yet Cohen uses this strange set of thoughts to get here:

Our fellowmen we do not know through experience pure and simple but only by virtue of the command that we love them. Only on the basis of this intrahuman correlation can the correlation of God and man become actual: in man’s behavior toward men, not in his behavior toward God, the distinction between good and evil arises. It is in the light of “the social love” of our fellowmen that we must understand the love that proceeds from God and the love that is directed toward him. (239)

It’s beautiful. We understand fully there is nothing particularly rational, erotic or even friendly about this. This is a moral vision and it seems to indicate that concerns about the beautiful are moral concerns. It places a higher love as prior to justice, knowledge and even divinely inspired order. One does not argue with such a vision. There is too much in its generality and universality at stake to lodge petty complaints. What one does is sketch the more complicated pictures elsewhere. We recognize fully the power of the declaration that started this reflection. Sight, memory and thought create another world from the emergence of reason from darkness. Cohen, in his original vision, may not be attuned to the whole as tragic (although, given Providence and the fate of peoples, he certainly is aware of tragedy).

References

Strauss, Leo. “Introduction to Hermann Cohen: Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, ed. Pangle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. 238-9.

…every “merit pay” scheme demands that increases be determined by a committee within each department. That is, some colleagues are put in charge of determining which other colleagues have been “productive,” and thus compelled to adopt a model of business or corporate competition in their relations with each other.

The colleagues who have been left behind wind up hating the colleagues on the committee — everybody thinks he or she is as “meritorious” as the next person in these situations — and they wind up hating each other, and all hate the people who have been given the largest “merit raises.”

The effect, in short, is to turn what had been a “republic of scholars” into a group of mutually resentful individuals each of whom detests all the others. (William Dowling, “Rutgers after Lawrence”)

I don’t know you’re going to have a “republic of scholars” if we got rid of considerations that are strictly business, stopped fetishizing the sciences to unnatural degrees, and placed more of an emphasis on reading, writing and the liberal arts. In fact, I know exactly what you get and the problems are manifold. Those problems, again, trace back to pettiness. People would rather put each other down than do good for each other. And they find innumerable ways of putting each other down when there are issues of understanding involved.

2. The fight against big-time collegiate athletics is refreshing in that it forces one to account for what the academy does. We know it isn’t just to advance the sciences, although that’s important. We know it isn’t just to form young people into a certain sort of person, although that too is important.

It really is about that clichéd sentiment: the purpose of the university is to allow minds to think independently. Not an empty mind, but an open one. I remember ISI’s “Choosing the Right College” guide being snarky about this once upon a time: there were liberal professors who couldn’t tell you what education was (because, apparently, minds less than Socrates’ can solve this problem). It didn’t take me long to learn that the problems identity politics posed were not unique to the Left.

Of course there are certain goals and standards to be met. No one can tell you “aha! You are thinking independently” at some prescribed moment (well, some can, but they are teachers of the highest order). We do want some reasonable standards set for a body of knowledge that is to be obtained. I will give ISI credit here: distribution requirements are no substitute for a Core curriculum and comprehensive examinations. Whatever says “here’s what you need to know, go learn it” is a good thing given how short and chaotic university life is.

3. But it’s what the Core and comps say that’s truly important. The intangible purpose – the hope – of the university is why the university exists. It ultimately does invest in its students. Every university could be doing more for its students in a multitude of ways. When I read, say, about Yale versus other schools -

There are few, if any, opportunities for the kind of contacts I saw my students get routinely—classes with visiting power brokers, dinners with foreign dignitaries. There are also few, if any, of the kind of special funds that, at places like Yale, are available in profusion: travel stipends, research fellowships, performance grants. Each year, my department at Yale awards dozens of cash prizes for everything from freshman essays to senior projects. This year, those awards came to more than $90,000—in just one department.

- I immediately think how much better it would be if every school was just a little bit more like an Ivy, treating their students like they’re deserving, like they’re the future. And by students, I mean more than undergraduates.

Until the academy realizes that it is to be a solid, serious institution for the sake of those it admits, more than just the fight against big-time sports will be lost. The university as a whole is endangered. People really are willing to create places where others go play around with dangerous, experimental ideas. They may get mad at times about these places. They may want a bit of spectacle attached to them. It’s the university squandering the fact it exists that’s the fundamental problem. I noticed a friend involved in educational issues – she’s not formally affiliated with any school at the moment – never wasted a moment online in terms of learning herself or trying to teach something (her command of Shakespeare and Rousseau were something else). There are many like her. Would that universities as a whole adopt that seriousness of purpose. There are places that provide an education, and then there are educated people.

Contrary to our first impression, conventionalism does not assert that the meaning of right or justice is altogether arbitrary or that there is no universal agreement of any kind in regard to right or justice (Strauss 108).

I understand where Strauss is ultimately going with this. However, those many times you encounter someone in a dialogue concerned with differences between law codes (cf. Minos, where the companion wonders about why people have different burial customs) or asserting the lawful is not exactly the just (cf. Memorabilia IV.5) do rely on something about conventionalism at least seeming arbitrary. Strauss continues:

On the contrary, conventionalism presupposes that all men understand by justice fundamentally the same thing: to be just means not to hurt others, or it means to help others or to be concerned with the common good.

And yet we can say that the ultimate expression of conventionalism is Thrasymachus’ position in the Republic: justice is the interest of the stronger. (I realize Strauss employs a vulgar vs. philosophic conventionalism distinction later. I am aiming to see more prior.) There certainly seems to be something arbitrary about that! Focus on “interest” and “stronger” helps bring forth the relevant considerations. “Justice” is whatever it takes for self-preservation or community (whether that community is united under a dictator or dictates itself is another question).

Conventionalism rejects natural right on these grounds: (1) justice stands in an inescapable tension with everyone’s natural desire, which is directed solely toward his own good; (2) as far as justice has a foundation in nature – as far as it is, generally speaking, advantageous to the individual – its demands are limited to the members of the city, i.e., of a conventional unit; what is called “natural right” consists of certain rough rules of social expediency which are valid only for the members of the particular group and which, in addition, lack universal validity even in intra-group relations; (3) what is universally meant by “right” or “justice” leaves wholly undetermined the precise meaning of “helping” or “hurting” or “the common good”; it is only through specification that these terms become truly meaningful, and every specification is conventional. The variety of notions of justice confirms rather than proves the conventional character of justice.

To go further: it is plain “conventionalism” in this stronger form, precisely because it is useful and accounts for enough of a variety of/within codes, completely blinds one to “natural right.” You’d have to be unjust in a certain way to see beyond “conventionalism.” You’d need to dissimulate, be a liar, the lie being that you were a true citizen. The want to be more just alone does not bring one to natural right, as we see from people who obsess over the most minute matters of legality and morality. One needs something to pause obedience and cause a “turn.”

How does Plato reduce “conventionalism” to “the good is the pleasant?” It seems the former is a serious theory about law and justice. Strauss talks about how the pre-Socratics, in bringing forth “nature,” make what is natural good and what is conventional false. The pre-Socratics are actually conventionalists. They just don’t confuse the common good with an individual’s good. For an individual’s good, you need to go to nature, and that causes the whole conventionalist thesis to unravel. It literally gets set aside in the face of what could be (and is, given that “science” emerges through the pre-Socratics) a more powerful understanding. This is in addition to any problems, of course, conventionalism may have with its own coherence.

I think one issue worth considering is conventionalism and the “common good.” Is the common good law? Justice? Not really. In our everyday political life, we can spot innumerable conflicts between the common good and law. I’d go so far as to identify a tension between both generally. If you want what is good for the community, it needs to be procured. That can happen through legal or illegal means, but at some point, it has to happen. The law points another direction entirely. For those of us reading Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, etc. full time, we need to take seriously that the philosopher’s considerations of the good and the just may diverge just as wildly as these phenomena do in everyday life.

References

Strauss, Leo. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1965. p. 108

Griswold visits Lampedusa, an Italian island receiving refugees while the civil war in Libya is raging (not to mention the Arab Spring generally). If you’re a refugee who survived the violence of others back home and the violence of the sea, you had this to look forward to:

As soon as they arrive on, or even near, the island, Italian coast guard ships approach most of the vessels, load the refugees up by the hundreds, ship them into port and deliver them to shore, where they are numbered before being run through a waiting line of police, Red Cross, and other emergency workers, and boarded onto repurposed tourist buses. The buses take them to “centers,” which are immigration prisons, surrounded by barbed wire. Filo spinato sounds less punative in Italian. The refugees arriving from Libya spend between a few days and a few weeks on the island until their numbers swell to two thousand. At that point, they are loaded onto a ferry and taken to the island of Sicily and to the Italian mainland to yet another center, and another, until eventually, they are granted asylum and allowed to stay in Italy or travel north to other European countries.

The refugees arriving from Tunisia are a different case. Because their lives aren’t at risk if they’re returned to their country, Tunisians are regularly sent home against their will. This is one reason why they’re generally more unruly than the newly arrived sub-Saharan Africans: they have nothing to gain by being cooperative. Two years ago on Lampedusa, someone set fire to the Tunisian immigration prison. I hear different things about who started the blaze. First, it was lit by very pissed-off Tunisians. Second, it was lit by very pissed-off locals, who didn’t want their island, which survives on tourism, to become a safe haven for African refugees, especially Tunisians. Four months later, hundreds escaped from a center and marched around calling for freedom.

On my mind is the quiet cruelty of the modern democratic state. The asylum seekers are handled very efficiently and there is money made. In the article, Berlusconi and a reporter call the situation a “crisis,” implying that only Italy and perhaps Europe are experiencing a crisis.

It’s the ability of the popular will to be so self-serving and in denial of what actually needs to be done that needs to be addressed. On the one hand, doing more for others always creates more trouble for self-governance. You get stuck with a bunch of obligations that involve sacrifice and more because of inefficiencies. On the other hand, if the asylum seekers are going to eventually be granted asylum, they need to be in a position where they can find support and eventually support themselves.

I’m not going to delude myself and argue that such problems are ever going to go away. I will say this. The more I think about American politics, the more I conclude that the feeling of a lack of equality of opportunity is the largest problem. We can simplify and say there’s just a lack of genuine opportunities and cite a number of causes. I wonder if one of those causes is that people don’t care to be aware of what’s happening to others, much less actually do something for them. Being generous in the abstract probably translates into being self-governing in the abstract.

Woken up. At once entangled
in the business of the lake. A few hours before
dawn. Most probably. And the lake already
lives, breathes, sends off the swans
to eye him: a shadow
in the darkness seeking the path
to the human terminal. Awake. At a loss.
First shoots of grass take off from the dark ground.
Blindly. What for? Without himself, without time.
Time has grown so spatial that it is
invisible. Lost in the darkness.
Woken up. What for? If only he still had
the watch he was given for his First Communion,
if, at a suitable moment, he’d become a scout
and had a compass, if he knew how to rightly
use the compass

– he wouldn’t be here.

’95

Comment:

I did some googling. Still have no idea what the title refers to or what the ’95 is doing at the bottom, exactly. And it goes without saying I don’t know Polish.

So this comment is even more guesswork than usual. Which is fine, because some of this poem is exquisite. “A shadow / in the darkness seeking the path / to the human terminal” and “Time has grown so spatial that it is invisible” make me want to learn Polish. Maybe I’ll get to write like that.

There is nothing certain about “the business of the lake.” It does seem to be like the soup life emerged from, except it is itself alive. Is it conscious? “He” isn’t really conscious. “Woken up” and “most probably” testify to his lack of understanding. “At once entangled” makes me think he is the lake or mirrored in the lake. “Swans,” perhaps more refined desire, are in a way the “eyes” of something primal. The only difference between “him” and the lake is that he moves toward the “human terminal.” That not terribly positive implication regarding life’s meaning again pushes us to think he is the lake and the lake is he. This is a dreamworld, where all kinds of desires predominate and the only recognizable ones spy us more than the other way around.

Then we’re told he’s awake. He doesn’t understand why there is growth. He doesn’t understand time. Has the path been found? Did it disappear? The latter is the easy conclusion, but I don’t think we can take it. If time is spatial and has become invisible, he’s treading down a path. He recognizes something like growth. “Lost in the darkness:” you don’t need to be completely disoriented to wonder if you’re going down a useless path or not. He may be on the path, but he’s “without himself.”

Finally, it turns out that he may not have really awoken yet. This second “woken up” is explicitly about moral guidance and a sensitivity to needing it. If in the other two parts we’re wondering about whether the speaker is the person being talked about, there seems to be a strict distance between the narrator and subject in this part.

What’s happening may be this: let’s talk about a man wholly governed by appetite, in a lustful turmoil (see M – Black Monday’s last three lines; this is a theme Świetlicki and Kundera share). That man is not without strengths. At least the image of man itself, its shadow, moves toward an end. And one can’t say a sensuous dreamworld isn’t alive in some way. Moreover, we can say such a man isn’t oblivious of time, but that time is real for him in a way it isn’t for those of us who conceptualize. His world simply is. But there’s a catch. The same man cannot account for growth or motion toward. Moral guidance is literally needed to be able to have time and place. There isn’t even a way of marking his progress or lack of it. These considerations might push us to say man is a moral creature. Two caveats: 1) we certainly can relate to the turmoil where we are continually awaking and never realizing anything 2) “Man” is considerably narrowed in the last few lines. “Communion,” “scout,” “suitable moment:” man has a particular role or set of roles. The construction of such roles depends on favorable circumstances.

I realize this site is a mess in terms of organization. I also realize that I have quite a few entries which rant and make no sense. This blog is a continual work in progress.

A few posts I’m pretty proud of, with quotes from them:

• Skyrim and Political Philosophy – Like all political philosophy, the divide between political things and cosmology is problematic to say the least. The political things point to ever higher orders: underneath all the dogma is genuine wonder about what man himself is, where he belongs. But that doesn’t mean there’s any logical link between political things and cosmology.
• Maimonides, “Letter to Obadiah the Proselyte” – Milton speculated that at the end of time, there would not be any facing God, since God would be “all in all.”
• Nietzsche, “Thus Spake Zarathustra: On the New Idol” – With method, there is no such thing as theory in the older sense. There are only theories which have immediate practical use.
• Leo Strauss, “Memorial Remarks for Jason Aronson” – Socratic self-knowledge: Socrates knows exactly when he is to die (cf. Crito).
• Emily Dickinson, “I dwell in Possibility” – Possibility means choice – when you make a choice, other possibilities are closed to you.
• Xenophon, “Agesilaus” – It is true Xenophon describes philosophy in martial terms in some places: the boar in On Hunting is Being, and must be hunted with friends willing to shed both its and their own blood.

I do realize some of you might be here because you’ve seen my poetry. I’m a bit hesitant to link to that – that is very much a work in progress. “Enfolding” is the only one I share often without cringing. If you want to see my prose entirely on its own, divorced from a specific text, there’s a story about a trip I took to Iowa with choir to sing a wedding.

I’ll have a round-up of last year’s philosophy posts up soon.

No, the big problem isn’t the candidates or the system. It looks more and more to be the base. I was watching PBS’ NewsHour and my face sunk into my hands as voters talked on national television, with no shame, about candidates being God-approved. One guy even talked about Newt being making mistakes, being repentant, and his story being an appealing and powerful one. Apparently there is no difference between “sinner” and “slimeball” (not that I think Newt is a slimeball), no criteria we can use to distinguish a crazy or cynical person from someone who’s made mistakes or forged themselves into leadership material. And “let not your left hand know what your right hand does” is completely gone as integral to piety.

The main lesson, if I’ve got a correct read on things: we’re going to have to do something apart from campaign season to communicate real issues to voters and make them aware politics is a trade-off. It is very rare you get some policy that is an unqualified good for all. I’ve already expressed my skepticism over the idea that the low taxes/less government mantra is a feasible proposition for modern conservatism. In fact, I think sticking to that ideology too rigorously has created a set of unrealistic expectations for governing. What I’d really like to see are Republicans talking about policy being good for as many Americans as possible, getting people out of hopeless situations. Right now, I see a preachy party that needs unity fast.

A Sickness of this World it most occasions
When Best Men die.
A Wishfulness their far Condition
To occupy.

A Chief indifference, as Foreign
A World must be
Themselves forsake — contented,
For Deity.

Comment:

The way “occasions” is used has overtones of “appropriate.” Is it most appropriate the world is sick when best men die? The Latin root of “occasions” means “to fall,” “die,” “set like the sun.” Does best men dying cause sickness in this world?

“A Sickness” parallels “A Wishfulness:” whose wishfulness does/should “their far Condition” occupy? Our wishfulness may cause the sickness, as we need the best men, in our conception, to be ever present. Our conception, unfortunately, is tied to “their far Condition.” We only know the worth of the best men through what they’ve accomplished. In our lives, they are always dead to us. (The best men have another wishfulness not a sickness of this world.)

We don’t miss the best men, though we think we do. “A Chief indifference” refers to us and only by analogy applies to them. “As Foreign A World must be Themselves forsake:” “A World” follows after “A Sickness,” “A Wishfulness,” “A Chief.” The movement is from a lack to a priority (“Chief”) to a reality (“World”). The best men might love a foreign world – a whole new place to explore excites. Only trouble: this world is that foreign world; the best men did their best in it. “Must be” cements the necessity. “Most” and “far” in the first stanza point to matters of degree. We don’t see what necessarily holds, as our ironic mourning of best men demonstrates. But the distance of the best men almost puts them in a parallel situation to us – almost. Instead of simply not knowing the world, they banish themselves from it by choice. They forsake the foreign world “for Deity.” This might say more about the best men than anything else. Compared to us, they’re knowers, indefatigable and implicitly immortal. But the best men were not strictly defined as knowers. Their restlessness drove them in this life toward some place of rest. Our relation to that place of rest is the only issue.