Posted on 02/04/2003 10:13:26 PM PST by JohnHuang2
Phaedrus, a whole lot of the people I talk to routinely seem to suggest that reason itself is some kind of universal language. But the more you talk to such folks, the more convinced you become that they do not have the least clue what reason is.
I gather that is why a "culture war" is continuously a-brewing these days. Its result for practical human political and cultural purposes is a kind of "Tower of Babel scenario" in which each one speaks his own "private" language. The discourse of the British "commons," or of the ancient Greek "Agora," is completely missing.
Which quite possibly may be some part of the reason why many people today don't have either a map or a compass.... That is to say, they are perfectly clueless about things that are larger than themselves.
Phaedrus: You know that I believe truth to be a "felt thing", and an example I would give is your earlier post recounting a vivid, compelling, enlightening dream, a moving experience having everything to do with truth.
I agree! Truth is revealed, it cannot be discovered by intellectual prowess. It is discerned spiritually, and results in a sense of knowing. Some call the experience “illumination” or “enlightenment.” It doesn’t compare with solving an equation or riddle or actualizing an image.
Betty boop: The search for a common language seems to be the main challenge these days.
Phaedrus: You are asking, though, a very large question, bb, and I know you have your thoughts, but I don't believe the answer is to be found in improved communication for a large minority of our culture. Most do not think and are thus led apathetically toward vague "conclusions".
Betty boop: Phaedrus, a whole lot of the people I talk to routinely seem to suggest that reason itself is some kind of universal language. But the more you talk to such folks, the more convinced you become that they do not have the least clue what reason is.
This is an excellent and timely debate! Thank you both!
My two cents: we have become a society of spectators with very few players. People choose sides in causes, politics, ideology and scientific theory with as much thoughtfulness as picking a football team to win the Super Bowl. The advocacy is based on sound bites, spin and slogans. The results are strength in numbers - energetic, loud, loyal - but at the same time, deaf and blind. Thinking has nothing to do with it for the spectators. IMHO, whereas a universal language would be useful to the precious few players - it will nevertheless require marketing for the spectators to benefit from the effort.
My conservatism was saved by the same chevalier.
From an early age (13) I have despised the international style of arch. personified by van der Rohe and Johnson, Ventura is a dog as well. Beyond a doubt it is UGLY, impersonal, and anti-human. All of these characteristics can also be applied to liberalism. Modern "art" is equally as quilty in debasing humanity.
Tom Wolfe wrote a scathing indictment of this arch. in "From Bauhaus to Our House" which, I think, changed the direction of arch. in a significant way.
Wait--we aren't switching courts, are we? (Oh, never mind. Back to Burke and Scruton.)
The sneers of Callicles can be effective only against men of his own ilk. They fall flat before a man who is ready to die. . .The argument [between Socrates and Callicles] is not yet directed personally against Callicles, but we feel the tension increasing toward the point where Callicles [in his speech] is co-responsible, through his conniving conduct, for the murder of Socrates and perhaps of Plato himself. The social conventions, [FR protocol?] which Callicles despises, are wearing thin; and the advocate of nature is brought to realize that he is a murderer face to face with his victim. The situation is fascinating for those among us who find ourselves in the Platonic [Socratic?] position and who recognize in the men with whom we associate today the intellectual pimps for power who will connive our murder tomorrow. . .
Insofar as a dialogue is an attempt at existential communication, it is an attempt to liberate the soul form its passions, to denude it of its body. Socrates speaks to his interlocutors as if they were "dead" souls, or at least as if they were souls who are capable of death. On the part of Socrates, the dialogue is an attempt to submit the others, at least tentatively, to the catharsis of death. The judgment of the dead thus is enacted in part in the dialouge itself, concretely, in the attempt of Socrates to pierce through the "body" of his interlocutors to their naked souls. He tries to make die, and thereby to make live, those who threaten him with death.
Well did Voegelin understand this. Unlike Heidegger, who became a willing tool of the Nazis, Voegelin spoke out against them, and so was stripped of his teaching credentials. When he learned that the Gestapo was about to pull his passport, he and his wife, Lisse, fled -- just in time. Sneering, murderous rhetoric inevitably leads to just plain murder.
Thank you so much for writing, cornelis.
I believe it was William James who observed that it is in the deeper, blinder strata of the self that is the only place in the world where we catch new fact in the making. I agree with you, truth is a "felt thing." However, it seems to me that to "feel" truth in this sense requires the death of the passions -- in the Socratic sense that cornelis was speaking of earlier. For passion misleads; it disorders; it does not permit us to see clearly. Unruly, disordered, power-mad men generally will not be terribly interested in truth. They're just interested in "results."
And I suppose thus it has ever been, Alamo-Girl. The really scary thing is the increasing legitimacy being given to public opinion polls as guides to public policy. That is a prescription for disaster. Rhetoric increasingly becomes a substitute for reality. But you can't live in rhetoric....
Thank you so much for writing, A-G!
No I haven't, I'll look for it.
cornelis: Wait--we aren't switching courts, are we?
I didn't mean to switch courts. If I did, I apologize. The article said:
IMHO, Marxism derives power from the thought-mechanism of the animal soul, the nephesh in Hebrew. Conversely, conservatism derives power from Truth revealed to the spirit, the neshamah in Hebrew.
Nephesh responds to gratification and yields moral relativity. Neshamah submits to higher purpose and yields moral absolutes.
From there I went into my rant about our spectator society. It seems to me that the "players" (you thinkers) will need to communicate Truth to the general public in sound bites, spin and slogans.
Just my two cents, I'll leave the intellectual "heavy-lifting" up to y'all.
Thanks!
Lovely, Alamo-Girl! You've spoken of this before, and I'm glad you mention it again in the context of this thread.
Only Neshamah can respond to the divine "pull," or to the golden cords of our nature, as Plato put it in his myth. Only Neshamah can "resonate" with the Rauch, the Spirit (or Breath) of God. Only Neshamah can give us a felt sense of our common humanity with other men, the only source of human fellow feeling, of pity, of mercy.
But here's a little taste of what Nephesh can do -- when animal nature is given free rein and dissolves itself into the frenzy of the mob:
“BELIEVE ME, SIR, those who attempt to level, never equalize. In all societies, consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost. The levelers, therefore, only change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground….
“The [French Revolutionary National] Assembly, their organ, acts before them the farce of deliberation with as little decency as liberty. They act like the comedians of a fair before a riotous audience; they act amidst the tumultuous cries of a mixed mob of ferocious men, and of women lost to shame, who, according to their insolent fancies, direct, control, applaud, explode them, and sometimes mix and take their seats amongst them, domineering over them with a strange mixture of servile petulance and proud, presumptuous authority. As they have inverted order in all things, the gallery is in the place of the house. This assembly, which overthrows kings and kingdoms, has not even the physiognomy and aspect of a grave legislative body -- nec color imperii, nec frons ulla senatus. They have a power given to them, like that of the evil principle, to subvert and destroy, but none to construct, except such machines as may be fitted for further subversion and further destruction….
“But history, who keeps a durable record of all our acts and exercises her awful censure over the proceedings of all sorts of sovereigns, will not forget either those events or the era of this liberal refinement in the intercourse of mankind. History will record that on the morning of the 6th of October, 1789, the king and queen of France, after a day of confusion, alarm, dismay, and slaughter, lay down, under the pledged security of public faith, to indulge nature in a few hours of respite and troubled, melancholy repose. From this sleep the queen was first startled by the sentinel at her door, who cried out to her to save herself by flight -- that this was the last proof of fidelity he could give -- that they were upon him, and he was dead. Instantly he was cut down. A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with his blood, rushed into the chamber of the queen and pierced with a hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence this persecuted woman had but just time to fly almost naked, and, through ways unknown to the murderers, had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of a king and husband not secure of his own life for a moment.
“This king, to say no more of him, and this queen, and their infant children (who once would have been the pride and hope of a great and generous people) were then forced to abandon the sanctuary of the most splendid palace in the world, which they left swimming in blood, polluted by massacre and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcasses. Thence they were conducted into the capital of their kingdom.
“Two had been selected from the unprovoked, unresisted, promiscuous slaughter, which was made of the gentlemen of birth and family who composed the king’s body guard. These two gentlemen, with all the parade of an execution of justice, were cruelly and publicly dragged to the block and beheaded in the great court of the palace. Their heads were stuck upon spears and led the procession, whilst the royal captives who followed in the train were slowly moved along, amidst the horrid yells, and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell in the abused shape of the vilest of women. After they had been made to taste, drop by drop, more than the bitterness of death in the slow torture of a journey of twelve miles, protracted to six hours, they were, under a guard composed of those very soldiers who had thus conducted them through this famous triumph, lodged in one of the old palaces of Paris, now converted into a bastille for kings.”
-- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France.
How any human being on the face of the earth, at any time in human history, could ever suppose that such horrific acts can be the precursor of some genuine, real human good is beyond all understanding. And yet, supposedly, the Parisian mob entertained just this idea.
I note with dismay the "rent-a-mobs" of our own time....
How any human being on the face of the earth, at any time in human history, could ever suppose that such horrific acts can be the precursor of some genuine, real human good is beyond all understanding.
Indeed. I assert it is beyond all understanding because the nephesh never understands, it only gratifies. I also join in your dismay at the "rent-a-mobs" of our own time.
IMHO, the best hope lies in speaking to the neshamah. And that is very difficult in these times, as much of mankind – particularly many of the intellectual elite - are delusional. They have silenced their neshamah by declaring that the physical realm is all that there is; that the conscious is but an impertinent physical phenomenon; and therefore, the end (or objective) always justifies the means.
I should have said "primo" bookcase, which sits in my living room. (The major part of my library is located in another part of the house.) It's the one that I use for my most cherished books. It's a sort of "grab bag," the sort of thing you'd expect of a generalist of conservative tendencies. Your asking me what's on it gives me a welcome chance to "flog" my favorite books! :^)
There's lots of Eric Voegelin (I'm collecting all his titles over time) and Plato. There's a rather large "Americana" section: works of the Framers (e.g., collected letters of T. Jefferson, Federalist); plus the new John Adams biography; a few years back I was collecting sources of the Framers' thought (e.g., Locke, Hume, Burke, Milton's Areopagitica, Trenchard and Gordon's Cato's Letters). They're all there still. Also critical studies of the founding period by Bernard Baylin (e.g., The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and The Ideological Origins of American Politics). I have the Autobiography of U.S. Grant (a first edition!), the collected writings of John Calhoun, including his masterful Disquisition on Government.
Then there are writers on American and Western culture, such as Russell Kirk (The Roots of American Order), Richard Weaver (The Southern Tradition at Bay), the Vanderbilt Agrarians (I'll Take My Stand), A. J. Nock (Our Enemy, the State), Frank Chodorov (Fugitive Essays) Jacques Barzun, James Burnham (esp. Suicide of the West); lots of Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. I only have two works on economics on these shelves: Ludwig von Mises (Human Action) and Joseph Schumpeter (Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy).
Other than Voegelin, Plato, Aristotle, and the Framers' sources, the only other philosophers there: Alasdair McIntyre's After Virtue. Theology: St. Thomas Aquinas, St. John of the Cross, Francis Schaffer (Trilogy), Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, and books by or about Pope John Paul II (including the fine Carl Bernstein biography). Of course, the King James Bible is there.
My science section is a-building: Wolfram, Gleick, Heisenberg, Sir James Jeans, Einstein, and (new accessions!!!) Roger Penrose, Evan Harris Walker, Christopher Wills....
I have Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Also Vilfredo Pareto's Mind and Society.
This bookshelf is relatively poetry and plays "lite": But T.S. Eliot and John Donne are there; also a collection of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Also Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost. The plays: T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, Aeschylus' Orestiea, and a collection of Moliere (he just cracks me up!).
I have most of the C.S. Lewis (my favorites: The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce) and G. E. K. Chesterton titles (I love his biographies of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Francis of Assisi).
It's "fiction-lite", too. Only truly beloved titles are there, including Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, The Possessed, The Idiot); the collected works of Jane Austin; Boccaccio's Decameron; Sir Thomas Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur; also Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Also one of the greatest autobiographies ever written (IMHO) is there: Whittaker Chambers' Witness, as well as Sam Tannenbaum's excellent critical biography of Chambers.
I think that's about it. Pretty eclectic, no?!
Thanks for asking, A-G. Hugs!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.