Posted on 12/20/2003 12:47:34 PM PST by bdeaner
I think the dangerous byproduct of your thesis is that life becomes cheap and easy to legislate away, as death loses its philosophical impact.
Mankind is a very varied species, with speciating parts. The Conservative in every culture is interested in preserving what is unique in the traditions and achievements of his people. Human "solidarity" is hardly consistent with such preservation. And Europe after the war was not such a demoralized intellectual wasteland, that there were not Conservatives in each country, who wanted to get back to their traditional values. One need not speculate on who was or was not a Conservative in the period.
Conservatism, again, is about preserving traditional values. Simply refusing to kill conservatives in the pursuit of non-traditional values, hardly makes one a conservative or even a moderate. All Leftists were not Bolsheviks or Nazis. I will accept that Camus was not a Bolshevik or Nazi. That does not make him an ally.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
The charge against the modern world by those who hate it is fundamentally a charge of impiety. That basic point remains. What the German radical right showed was that the hatred would remain even if or when those leveling the charge lost their own piety. Because the objection to living in a secularized modernity is not that secularism is false, but that it is unacceptable even when it is believed to be true.
The animus behind the charge stems from an underlying fear of living in a world in which death is final and justice has no cosmic support. The German radical reaction to that situation was to deliberately set about creating a replacement of myth for the faith that had been lost. The same motivation lies behind modern radical Islam. The only difference is that there are various shades of honest belief, myth-making, and cynicism in the latter camp.
In that myth making, Strauss and Camus did not follow the Germans. Both kept their allegiance to morality on rationalist and humanist grounds without any support of faith. Strauss, more than Camus, considered it entirely implausible that any large number of people could or would do the same - that is, he thought most people's allegiance to morality, and contentment with modernity, depended in the last analysis on faith or on myths. Which all involved seem to agree, modernity systematically undermines.
The "existentialist mind trip" as you put it certainly has its sillier elements, and anyone can see as a replacement theology it leaves much to be desired. It is a reaction, perhaps an unsuccessful reaction, to a real cultural-political issue and problem, however. The dominant one in the modern world, both in their day and in ours.
There is a nihilist revolt against modernity as soulless. It has had many manifestations and it will undoubtedly have others in the future. Radical Islamic fascism is just one version of it. Original Nazism was another. Conscious myth-making and deliberate rejection of reason as a standard characterize that revolt. The root of it, psychologically, is not a SNL skit or a sophistic verbal game.
It is the fear of millions of human beings, newly without faith in historical terms, of their personal annihilation, and a frantic attempt to conceal that real prospect from themselves. Which leads them to hate anyone teaching anything that reminds them of why they came to doubt in the first place, anyone who reminds them of the harshness of the world. At the same time, feeling a release from all moral restraints, and a hatred of the imagine hypocrisy of those still upholding them.
If anyone wonders what is uniting the infantile pacifist left here, the fanatics in the Muslim world, and secular leftist intellectuals in Europe, look no farther.
Camus is better than the other existentialists of his day, left or right - along with someone like Ortega y Gasset. He held morality foremost, higher than politics or philosophy. I would not call him a wise man, but he was at bottom a decent one, trying to grapple with what are effectively the theological difficulties of his age. And doing so honestly, without evasion, without letting himself off easy with some facile inward lie.
He faced the political problems of fascism and the French war in Algeria, as well. There is nothing wrong with the recommendation to read him, particularly "Plague" (which is fundamentally about the futility of a hyper-political reaction to mortality) and these days, "Stranger".
Incidentally, Strauss is more important than the linked article suggests, as well. He not only understood this whole terrain better than just about anyone, he understood its links to the inter-civilizational struggle presently underway. He was not ignorant of Islam, or of medieval attitudes still very much alive in the modern world, nor of some of the inconsistencies and difficulties within modernity that give them points to aim at. He knew as much of Averroes as of Socrates. It is not the first time a similar issue - a destruction of legitimacy through widespread loss of faith - has arisen in history.
I don't think Eddie Murphy's got any answers to all of that. But thanks for offering.
Heidegger ends up with a center at 'care' or 'concern.' He is close to the true center, one step away. It's not the true center, but no philosopher would dare to mention the true center lest he be labelled Buddhist.
Lowith was saying something similar when he said mankind cannot be saved because it does not exist - by which he meant to put the emphasis back on the individual soul. Voeglin was saying something related, though not the same, when he diagnoses the problem as making immanent what ought to have remained transcendent. What makes Camus a man of the left despite this is simply that he had no faith, himself.
What he means by human solidarity is hardly leveling or social homogenization. It is simply seeing the common mortality of man, and if you like a sort of clinging to one another in the face of it. Among religious conservatives much the same point would be expressed by saying all are children of God, and seeing that as the basis of the moral worth and dignity of men as men. Camus hasn't got God. Men can only help hold each other up in the face of death, or else tear each other to pieces vainly trying to run away from it - as though it won't get them if it gets the other guy first. Well, it will.
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Yes. Thanks for posting that.
My brother had it a little harder than me. When we came to the US he was five years old. We disembarked in NY in April, and he had to attend kindergarten in September of the same year. The only phrase he knew at that time was upside down. By the end of the school year he spoke English as well as his native born school mates.
Those Nuns were tough, sometimes even vicious, but they were very, very, well educated, and they were excellent teachers. We received a private school education that cost my parents nothing.
My how things have changed: today the cost of attending a Catholic school is very high, the education while better than most public schools is still dumbed down, and the Church has to organize a 'Capital Project' to raise money to settle lawsuits filed against it for unspeakable acts committed (sp?) by its aberrant priests.
My Church is sorely in need of a good fumigation or schism, take your pick.
It seems that my Church has nothing on the godless humanism practiced by the godless humanists. It really depresses me.
By the way, do you know a lot about Heidegger and the existentialists (sp?)? There seems to be some debate on this thread concerning the merit of their thinking. I'm not acquainted with his writings in great detail, but I find his movement in general to be peopled with windbags and not deep thinkers.
I agree w/Cicero in that it's a hard act to take seriously unless you're pretty short sighted. The long view of History mocks nearly everything they stand for, and the advancements of society as they follow momentous Military engagements reduces the existentialist core message to that of thrashing adolescence.
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