With regard to this post…

I just read this post and am in the process of reading some others with a few preliminary comments. I think you may be giving short shrift to Levinas from a more traditional Christian apologist point of view. Speaking as one with many years experience in traditional Christian denominations and un-denominational Churches I have seen an abuse of the ‘salvation’ motif as a kind of license for abuse of the other. I see this abuse in a similar light as Levinas’ critique of Heidegger’s notion of authenticity (see my latest post here for a little more on this). If salvation empowers, endows one with a special knowledge, this elevated and founded origin (arche) can make Ethics in Levinas’ sense secondary just as Heidegger’s authenticity gives short shrift to ethics.

Did Jesus ever promise that salvation eliminated personal guilt? Sure, there is the notion of substitution, Jesus taking on the sins of the world, paying the price, etc. but isn’t the promise of salvation concomitant with following in his footsteps, becoming the servant not the master, the first being last and the last being first? Wouldn’t this mean the believer should accept the free gift not as merited or earned but as an interruption of the other, the other being Jesus, while we were “yet enemies”. Why would Christians use salvation as an excuse to bash the other, condemn the other, totalize the other in Levinas’ sense. Did Jesus totalize the other or did he meet each one as unique, as personal, as worthy of unconditional love even as sinners. This type of ethos puts the other in the place of a radical alterity, an interruption of mine-ness whether it be authenticity or salvation. As long as the other is known and understood in some prior understanding, disposition, metaphysics of ontology, there can be no place for a Jesus-like attitude or an Ethics in Levinas’ sense. The violent history of Christianity, while not reducible to it, does show another option for Christians that is more akin to the heretical disposition of the Pharisees and Scribes that Jesus decried. It might also be more along the lines of Levinas’ critique of ontology, totalizing the other.

Additionally you state in protest, “for Levinas, salvation comes by stopping the flight, turning, and with open arms embracing that which pursues and condemns me”. I believe that here is where Jesus has a noble but radical philosophy, in short, yes. Remember turn the other check? Remember, walk a mile for the other that forces you to do so, give your coat to the other that takes it? Remember while we were yet enemies Jesus gave himself, sacrificed himself to the enemies? Did he protest to Pontius Pilate? Did he claim that he was God and therefore innocent? He freely gave himself to be counted as a common criminal, guilty of sin even to the point that “God made him that had no sin to be sin “. Are you suppose to turn yourself over to the persecutor? If you want to follow the radical lead of Jesus, the answer is yes. The doe turning to the hunter is not so different than the sheep being led to the slaughter, is it?

I do not want to imply an across the board equivocation to Levinas and Christianity nor do want to imply that I am a Christian but I do see some deeper confluences in Levinas and Christianity (and Kierkegaard) than the conclusions I read in this post.

Also, in response to this post:

“The Other is totally absolved of my guilt. The Other cannot be made guilty for the guilt he or she places on me. This is a form of slavery, of imperialism. If the Other were to share in my guilt, even in a relational sense, than the self knows the guilt of the Other, and this is the Same.”

In Levinas this is not a reciprocal relationship. It is not what the other places on me, it is how I efface the other. This non-reciprocity cannot be brought into to ‘light’ of mediation. It is not synchronous with my time, my worldhood. The rupture happens diachronous to me. I do not share a origin with the other. The other is anarchical. Slavery and imperialism imply a relationship. This is not what Levinas has in mind. A logic of this sort would totalize the other in Levinas.

“Levinas argues strongly that when we were first created that we already had this guilt upon us. There is a choice in the guilt, but it is not ours. The choice of guilt lies in the choice of the Other. If I could assent to the choice of guilt, that would be an acquiring, a taking over. And this, again, is to acquire the Other.”

For Levinas, it is not a matter of choice or “acquiring”. It is before your choice. Is original sin your choice? That choice is not given to you either. Likewise, in Levinas your guilt is not up to whether you accept Levinas’ philosophy or not. Even more so, when the other is mediated into an object of my choice, the other is no longer other but a moment of my reflection, a facsimile of the other that Levinas would call totalization or murder.

Levinas does not say that “that we humans are free” but that freedom is a result of effacing the other. Freedom, whether it be in the first moment of Hegel’s Logic or in some vague notion, denies the absolute alterity of the other which gives me no choice except to cover it over (e.g. history), to declare my freedom from the interruption of the other which, in Levinas, implicates me before I can answer. I am responsible to the other before my choice. I owe a debt which does not originate in me but ruptures all my originations in the face to face encounter with the other. I would also call your attention to the famous Anaximander fragment which could also be thought from this context:

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.

If infinity looks back at us in the face of the other we would expect that my attempt to retreat and cover over such absolute otherness would require my destruction, the destruction of the plastic cast I make of the face of the other as infinity breaks through in the encounter with the other, by necessity. What is required is my guilt, my original sin (the sin of arche if you will), for effacing the call of the other, the rupture of infinity. In my time, my imposed temporal synchronicity to all things, to the other, I am implicated, founded as injust, as murderous in my obliviousness to the call. This is what Levinas calls guilt.

Concerning a couple posts entitled “The Conservative Road to Serfdom” and “Why Is Distributionism So Intolerable?“…

While I am not a Hegelian, it seems to me that much of the direction of these essay’s thinking is captured and re-entangled in a Hegelian dialecticism. The notion of internal and external in Hegel directs us to the problem of limit and liberty, control and choice. In this question, we hear the faint echo of Aristotle’s potentia in Latin and dunamis in Ancient Greek and actualitas from Latin and energeia from Ancient Greek. These relations are inscribed from origin (arche) within the prism and reduction of power relations. The nagging question in Distributionism is “who decides, I or other?” For Marx, the question framed by Marx is forced communism or the natural evolution and unfolding of communism from the impossibility of capitalism. Both of these ideologies want to claim legitimacy in and from the freedom of the individual, the enlightenment of the masses, one at a time. Those who emotionally react to the prospect of external, dominating power want to force these dialectics into an externalizing mode. Those who seek legitimacy, lay claim to the individualizing, progressing, choice of critical thinking and self-determination…’I willed it thus’. Where is the origin of external and internal in Hegel?

It is in the beginning, the Logic. It is in nothingness and freedom. Pure, abstract being is the horror, the Dread (in my hybrid use of terms). It can mean nothing, be nothing, do nothing. Nothing neither opposes or confirms, hopes or despairs, moves or un-moves. It is antithetical to life. Pure being imprisons in absolute hermetic emptiness. Freedom finds its ‘infinite’ domain or realm not as a movement to something but as a movement from nothing. Freedom is escape from nothingness, from pure Being. Freedom has no choice but to escape, mediate, and discriminate. Differance [sic, Derrida’s fault] can only perpetually recapture itself, mesmerize, fantasize, phantasma-size, symbolize in order to escape the Real (Lacan).

Morality and religion may be thought antithetical to the highly secularized concept of ‘secular’. However, morality and religion also find their origin in freedom…freedom from sin, freedom from ethical anarchy, freedom from externally imposed, ‘secular’ norms. Morality and religion are surrogates of freedom while claiming and decrying their native heritage in freedom. Only God knows, only God is absolute. Freedom reserves the space for pure being, absolute otherness to be as Holy, as the safeguard which cannot be questioned. Freedom is from foreboding dread, anxiety, torture and age-abiding hāidēs. The ingenious synthesis in universal catholicism (not as noun) is in protecting and nurturing individualism while at the same time delimiting boundaries, immovable boundaries.

Boundaries reckoned by and through time in Anaximander ground justice and truth while simultaneously exacting a cost for their transgression. Heidegger would have thought ground (grund) and un-ground (ab-grund) in a typical Greek sense as origin and lack of origin (an-arche). Hegel seems to me to be fascinated and captured by this dialectic as were the Greeks. The excess to this dialectic can only be forever and infinitely recaptured by the dialectics all consuming lust for totality. It certainly merits an authenticity and easily brings one back to its bog. Hegel evens treats us to his profound psychological insight into the ever/never ending story in the master slave dialectic. The reciprocity and inextricable bounded-ness of the master and the slave find their freedom and their nemeses in each other. The freedom of the master is limited by the ever increasing dependence on the slave for livelihood, survival, definition and grounding meaning. The infinite freedom of the master, of necessity, requires the master’s servitude and indebtedness to the slave’s grounded-ness and existence. On the other hand, the slave, chained to existence, work and production requires the promise of absolute freedom. Freedom and nothingness, infinite and finite, determination and in-determinate dance violently in the bowels of religion.

In conclusion, let me simply draw upon the riddle posed at the origin by Hesiod and the Greek muses:

Hail, children of Zeus! Grant lovely song and celebrate the holy race of the deathless gods who are for ever, those that were born of Earth and starry Heaven and gloomy Night and them that briny Sea did rear. Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be, and rivers, and the boundless sea with its raging swell, and the gleaming stars, and the wide heaven above, and the gods who were born of them, givers of good things, and how they divided their wealth, and how they shared their honors amongst them, and also how at the first they took many-folded Olympus. Tell me all of this, you Muses who have your homes on Olympus, from the beginning, tell who first of them (the gods) came-to-be.

First of all Chaos came-to-be; but then afterwards Broad-breasted earth, a secure dwelling place forever for all [the immortals who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus], and misty Tartara in the depths under the wide-wayed grounds and Eros who, handsomest among the deathless gods a looser of limbs, in all the gods and in all human beings overpowers in their breasts their intelligence and careful planning. And from Chaos came-to-be both Erebos [ρεβος, the god of deep darkness, shadow] and dark night, and from night, in turn, came-to-be both Aither [the god of upper air, the mist of bright, glowing light, home of the gods] and day, whom she conceived and bore after joining in love with Erebos. But earth first begat, as an equal to herself, starry sky, so that he might cover her on all sides, in order to be a secure dwelling place forever for all the blessed gods, and she begat the tall mountains, pleasing haunts of the goddess-nymphs who make their homes in the forested hills, and also she bore the barren main with its raging swell, the sea, all without any sweet act of love; but then next, having lain with sky, she bore deep-swirling ocean,¹

The Greeks know the dilemma and riddle posed by infinite freedom and absolute indeterminateness and all the subsequent permutations in historical dialectic and spirituality. Their answer, for the purpose of this short essay; revere, create, think, dramatize, poeticize, sculpt but never be lulled into sleep and demise by the spirit of gravity not for ‘will to power’ as Nietzsche’s oracle requires but for Desire to love, to renew, to believe, to breath in again our debt to alterity, to open once again the epoch of civilization wherein we live and move and have our being.

_________________

¹ See my Philosophy Series 4 discussion

I agree with the old line Republicans¹, why should we pay for the indulgences and abuses of others? Now that “corporations are people too” according to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision² they should be treated like people.

Regular people are charged more and more for garbage collection according to rising disposal costs.

Regular people pay for higher food costs because of destructive climate changes³.

Regular people pay taxes on gas to maintain roads and bridges.

Regular people pay the price for the housing crises and speculative banking practices.

Regular people pay the increasing health care costs for emergency room health care.

Almost everywhere you look regular people are considered responsible for increasing costs no matter who caused the increase.

If corporations are destroying the environment with climate change and increasing disasters, why shouldn’t they pay for it? Why should we pay for it? I suggest that we let oil companies make all the oil they want in whatever way they want too. I think we should have a national budget cost for typical historical, environmental damage including the cost of living and inflation. If the cost of environmental disasters exceed that budget, the oil companies, the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, etc. should be taxed to pay the additional recovery costs from these disasters. If the disasters are cyclical as these folks claim, when the costs go down they should be rebated the additional taxes proportional to what they paid in. Why should the burden get put solely on those that use gasoline with higher gasoline taxes? The “corporations that are people too” need to pay for the costs they incur. This logic used to be en vogue in Republican circles with Mitt and friends in something called “cap and trade” but became illogical when certain high positioned Democrats took up the cause.

If corporations too big to fail go under they need to pay the cost for economic recovery not charge it to the national debt. They should probably have insurance policies, just like regular folks do, to cover their costs in case they go under and can’t pay for their economic damages. Why should the Federal Reserve bail out the big guys and let regular folks go belly up on their houses⁴?

Banks and insurance companies need to be able to pay for risky investments and policy holder damages in case their bets don’t pay off. Why should regular folks pay for their maladies? Why should they get to charge it off to the national debt⁵? As recent history has shown, we get “cherry picked” with effectively “catastrophic” homeowners, health insurance and car insurance that we cannot use unless we want to get dropped or pay higher premiums.

Health care companies make great profits. The reason they do is because they are partly subsidized by the taxpayer for emergency room health care, Medicare and Medicaid⁶. Why are their profit margins covered while our health care costs go up? Why should taxpayers pick up the cost for corporations that do not pay their employees a livable wage? Why should we pay for food stamps and health care while these corporations pad their pockets with profits at our expense? Again, Mitt and friends found a logical alternative to this only later to be loudly decried on the right as “Obama-care”.

War hawks should sign up to pay for their wars from their political parties contributions and wealthy donors if they are hell bent on stating wars⁷. Why should I pay for a war I never wanted and have to live with the consequences of my lost family members. I think good ‘ol Republican boys that are gun-ho ought to be the first ones on the front line.

Let everyone that wants a gun get one but if the gun gets used to kill someone the gun owner and the company that made the guns ought to pay all costs and damages associated with their destruction. They should also pay for higher law enforcement costs. We should have VERY stiff fines and prison sentences for those that do not lock up their guns and keep them out of the hands of unlicensed gun owners.⁸

These folks need to pull their own weight and quit relying on the corporate welfare, nanny state to keep bailing them out. Many of these additional costs fall on the backs of regular folks. Why can’t these predominately Republican folks live up to their own professed ideology? They complain about the nanny state when it comes to others while sponging off the nanny state in understated or re-stated ways when it comes to them.

It seems to me that folks are all too happy to profess a Republican ideology⁹ when it comes to other folks but when it comes to them they become, shall we say, covert Democrats. Of course, they do not process it that way. They have all kinds of ways to rationalize their hypocrisy¹⁰. They call it ‘free market’, environmental liberal lie of climate change, Democratic nannies, politician Social Security robbers, “I get the Medicare I already paid for”, Medicaid bleeding heart liberals, etc¹¹. They have many ways to rationalize their implicit Democratic concerns about themselves in terms of good ‘ol Republican values.

If the free market really is the best way to distribute goods and reward risk-takers¹², the burden should rest on the risk takers not on folks that never took the risk. Why can’t we have a free market that really works as it is professed to work. Reward and punishment need to fall on the backs of the ones that take the risks and reap the rewards. If it does not then we have the dreaded nanny state albeit under the guise of blaming others for their failures.

As I have previously pointed out¹³, many conservative have enlarged amygdales. The evolutionary ancient amygdale is the fear center of the brain. It is highly functional for fight or flight. Unfortunately, it cares little about consistency and contradiction. That part has to do with the anterior cingulated cortex, a more recent evolutionary innovation. Our future will not rest on fear, deception, and brute power to uphold insane, contradictory and hypocritical ideologies but on compromise, error correction, and critical thinking. We need to hold ourselves and others to the same standard, whatever it may be, and not find ways to propagate our advantage at the cost of those that had nothing to do with us, our failures and our risks. Isn’t this a ‘conservative’ value?

_________________

¹ See Conservatism and Liberalism: A Historical Perspective

See The Question of Conservatism

² See Money is Free Speech?

³ See The Ryan Plan: Part 3

⁴ See Latest Observations on the Housing and Economic Crisis

⁵ See Myths Exposed: President Obama is Responsible for Historic U.S. Federal Debt and Spending Levels

See Down the Rabbit Hole

⁶ See FAQs on Health Care Reform

See Health Care in Louisiana and Massachusetts-Bobby Jindal and Bill Cassidy

See Mitt and Friends

⁷ See Wars Started by Republicans Including Vietnam

See A Case for Bashing the Democrats

See Why We Still Sacrifice Our Young

See War on Terrorism

See Nearly Every Member of Congress Voted for Intervention in Iraq?

See Freedom Handout

⁸ See How to make gun control work…

⁹ See The Great Lie: The Great Depression and Recessions of the United States

See Poor Rich Folks

See A vote against Big Government is a vote for Big Business

¹⁰ See The Fox and the Hen House

¹¹ See Problems with Medicare and Medicaid

¹² See Fundamentalism in Market Economy: The Austrian School and Regulation

¹³ See The Conservative and Liberal Brain

I have somewhat loosely followed a translator in recent years who actually helped me on one occasion find an ancient quote. Anyway, from time to time he has complained of ‘Christian persecution’ in England and I assume by extension, the world at large. He also seems to have some issue with homosexuals as well which appears to have something to do with his religious beliefs. I think he may believe that homosexuals are great examples of ‘Christian persecution’. In any case, the majority of his work is not along this polemic but rather translating ancient texts. Recently, I read one of his posts here which I could not resist adding my own contrary two-cents to…

Roger,

After reading your post I think it is very close to, “This shall not have been a polemic!”. I would even go so far as to suggest it could be an apology in wolf’s clothing. First, I admire your work and dedication to scholarly pursuits. I understand the lack of time for such indulgences in whatever your post wasn’t. In any case, I must say that as an ‘other side of the pond’ observer, I do not see this Christian persecution that you rail about. It is hard for me to believe that the originators of the Magna Carta would imprison folks because of their religious beliefs. I think you may be over the top on these claims. On one hand, if you did convey the whole story in your slightly more than emotive quips on the arrest, I think most rational folks, whether Christian or not, would agree it was a travesty of justice. On the other hand, some of this alleged ‘persecution’ may actually result from a kind of natural law, reaping what you sow.

I cannot believe any magistrate would uphold such a shabby arrest as apparently he did not. Justice is not perfect every time. There are reasons why justice is required and not some kind of natural law which needs no socially sanctioned enforcers. Injustice occurs regularly not just by criminals but also by sanctioned enforcers and by regular ‘ol mean-well folks. I am not surprised at all when sanctioned authorities commit injustice. I am aggravated when they appear to get away with it carte blanche. I hope democracy can ultimately address such atrocities but I am not even sure about that. In any case Roger, it does seem as if this Christian persecution thing is a bit of a stretch. I can tell you get a lot of emotional mileage out of it but I think most folks are not convinced by such claims. Of course, I know that you write that off as more of what you claim, Christian persecution. It comes across as an unfalsifiable belief if you know what I mean. On this side of the pond there are panhandlers and/or street philosophy peddlers regardless of theological persuasion which do get arrested for harassment and aggressive behavior so ‘forced free speech’ is not a right that is typically defended here.

I think you ‘doth protest too much’. I am not a Christian but I have no need to persecute Christians. ‘Persecution’ seems to me to imply a kind of on-going plot, a concerted endeavor. As you suggest, who has time for such shenanigans. Certainly, there may be some folks Christian or not which engage in such pathologies but I would not think this takes place in the majority of the sociological bell-shaped curve. However, paranoia does seem prevalent these days as it affords a certain kind of passive response to the ‘devils’ of existence. It seems to me that paranoia elevates ones false sense of uniqueness and importance as keepers of the Truth which requires social critique and upheaval. It may be fun for some but actual persecution requires way too much time and effort for most. Folks are creatures of necessity not ideology. My take is that we may have disagreements which some, more or less, would like to sanction socially, politically and legally but personally, I prefer the philosophical path of polemos, not in the sense of overt war but in the sense of strife and conflict, which gets worked out cathartically rather than violently. I see no problem with challenging philosophical or theological positions. I found my many years of undergraduate and graduate work intensely challenged my belief systems and forced me to change my ideas many times over the years. I think if the Greeks had simply been ‘polite’ the Occident would be a very different place today. Additionally, I think if one were God and would weigh historical, religious persecution in the balance, Christianity, at least as self-acclaimed, would not find itself weightless.

Why would you complain and emote some sort of sacrosanct indignation over Christian persecution anyway? Didn’t Jesus tell you that is what you signed up for as a Christian. Did you see him rail against the unbelievers? Isn’t he the one that said, turn the other check; give a stranger your coat and walk with him if he asks; lay down your life as he did for the sinful world, the enemies of the cross. It seems to me that if Jesus had indignation it was for the Pharisees and scribes of his day and even more for the money changers in the temple.

If there is a God, the world was created with a huge amount of sow what you reap in it. If Christians are persecuted it may not be heathen indignation but it may be that they are sowing what they have reaped. As Kierkegaard tells us if everyone is a Christian no one is a Christian. Doesn’t the Revelator tell us of an apostate Church, false messianic claims and ask if there would be faith on earth? Could it be that what you deem aggressive resistance to Christianity could rather be ‘chickens coming home to roost’ for Christians? Here across the pond, we have no lack of Christians which are brash and have none of the famed English politeness in such matters. We are regularly accosted by faith warriors both at shopping malls and in our politics. We have those that would legislate their morality in the name of ‘religious freedom’. There seems to be no end to what ‘religious freedom’ means over here. Of course, not any religion but the Christian religion is what most clearly rises to the top in these jurisprudent befunkles. Did Christ try to establish a kingdom on earth? Didn’t he say to the contrary and those that defended an earthly kingdom misunderstood him? Isn’t the Christian kingdom not of this world. Isn’t the mystic vision of Christianity to have the Holy Spirit reveal the pettiness of this sinful world in light of the glories of Heaven? Epiphany allows Christian suffering without whining of persecution, without hostility and even more so – laying down one’s life for the persecutor, dying for the sins of others. What happened to that Christ?

As a natural law, it may be that aggression requires aggression, enmity requires enmity, persecution requires persecution. Who would break this cycle? I think from ancient texts we may surmise that, for one, Jesus would not answer hatred with hatred but love. Did he strike out on the cross or pardon criminals? Even Socrates asked another to pay his debt with his dying words. Jesus and his disciples went to prison multiple times. Do you see any writings from those folks complaining of the ‘injustice’ or the persecution? They accepted it as par for the course and ministered to their fellow prisoners. They healed the sick, championed the poor, comforted the poor in spirit. I do not detect modern animosity and religious fervor in their approach to the world. They were long suffering. I think the thin skin approach to one’s faith and theology betrays a kind of insecurity in the coherence of one’s beliefs. If someone tries to convince you that you are wrong make them reason, explicate and clarify while you attempt to do the same; the worst case is you both walk away thinking more clearly, the best case is both may learn something.

Hegel’s being and nothingness dialectic is taken up (aufhebung) into becoming. Hegel notes that being and nothingness are not really opposites as much as nothingness is the immediacy of abstract being. In this sense the dialectic here is not as much a play of absolute differences as universal and particular but a play of ‘sameness’ which nevertheless gets taken up, transformed, synthesized by becoming. In any case, the notion of being as abstract immediacy is first thought as nothing, as abstract, as NOT becoming. Hasn’t the existentialist taught us that being IS becoming? …nothing more or less. If I remember Hegel correctly the dialectic cannot go backwards, i.e., from synthesis to thesis and antithesis, becoming to being and nothingness. Isn’t there a progressive directional arrow of Spirit in Hegel’s dialectic? If we take Nietzsche’s maxim seriously that,

But no such agent exists; there is no “being” behind the doing, acting, becoming; the “doer” has simply been added to the deed by the imagination – the doing is everything. [Genealogy of Morals, Chapter 7, 13]

then aren’t we drawn to the conclusion that Hegel’s dialectic of being and nothingness is merely a verbal play? If we think of being and nothingness, abstract immediacy, then we must have already thought of being as not becoming, not yet lifted up to existence. Isn’t there already at work in Hegel’s thought a dichotomy, a binary opposition or at least a separation between being and becoming intrinsic from a prior and un-thought assumption? Have we thought of being as an absolute abstraction in order to ‘found’ existence and becoming? Has Hegel really revealed something profound or has he simply lapsed into the Latin, metaphysical belief that the mind does the body, being does becoming?

And, doesn’t this assumption have a progressive direction? Is there some kind of ‘creation ex-nihilo’ at work in Hegel’s cosmogony or idea-gony? Becoming rises up from being and nothingness. Existence is surmounted from being and nothingness. An ‘I’ is concretized, existential-ized as becoming, perhaps metaphorically as rising up from a kind of human vegetative state, from the emptiness of abstract immediacy. At play here is an ancient strife, polemos, a battle epitomized in the Roman misconception of Greek thinking, the thinking of truth, veritas, as oppositional from falsity. Heidegger points out the indo-European ‘ver’ as command, as rule, as higher imperium. I wonder if there is also a tale to be told here from the Roman dissimulated notion of Greek arche; origin, as rule rather than Hesiod’s notion of arche as yawning gap, differentiation not yet determined.

Truth then is taken as oppositional to false, fallere in Latin and from indo-European ‘to fall’, fallen-ness. To fall in Christianity is to not heed the command of the Lord. Here we have the beginning and most original Form of truth and falsity as absolutely oppositional. Hegel may be the most perfect expression; teleology of the Latinized absolute-ized reduction of truth to correctness, to truth as binary oppositions. Could Nietzsche have this in mind when he writes of the binary opposition of master and slave:

The watchwords of the battle, written in characters which have remained legible throughout human history, read: “Rome vs. Israel, Israel vs. Rome.” No battle has ever been more momentous than this one. [Genealogy of Morals, Chapter 7, 16]

Could this be the metaphysical canonization of slavery, of rule and imperium, we find in Constantinople Rome? Could Heidegger have this in mind when he writes of truth in his lecture on Parmenides? The excess of aletheia, unconcealed-ness, that Heidegger brings out from ancient Greece in contradistinction to the modern conception of truth is not thought from the binary opposition of conceal and un-conceal, semblance and truth, false and real? The rule, the order, the command determines origin and makes being possible without becoming or prior to becoming in some Idea-ological determination. If the order tells us that being and nothingness come before becoming, make becoming possible as the resolution of creation ex nihilo then the determination that being and becoming are differential, differentiated, draws its breath from the metaphysics of Rome. If these distinctions are merely verbal, merely historical repetitions of rutted patterns of habitual thought which oppositional-ize, deduced from artificial origins of being and nothingness that cannot stand in existence, in becoming, aren’t we really just reifying in auto-affection a beginning rule and order, a mathematics which cannot think excess to itself.

Heidegger thinks the excess of truth forgotten in Latin as aletheia. Nietzsche thinks it as the body doing the mind, becoming doing Being. Levinas think excess as the face of the other. Is there violence in ordaining that the rule reduce these terms to oppositions and transformations, that order oblivi-ate, forget its forgetting, make order the conquest of chaos, gap, differentiation without determination and not even be able to be able to escape its absolute subjectivism?

Dr. Krugman,

I have been an author for a number of years at a blog called “Critical Thinker Applied”. Steve Horwitz of the Austrian School has occasionally provided a guest essay and commented on various essays. I was a bit taken back when he responded to a rather provocative op-ed piece I wrote called “Smart” is the new dumb. While I am not an economist, I have done some research and posted articles on some of the issues I have with Austrian Economics. Of course, Steve did not like my article which concerned my idea that the government is more like a large business conglomerate than some different kind of large, homogenous, monolithic beast. I compared the electorate to shareholders or board members who could fire politicians (management) for doing a bad job. In particular, Steve wanted to claim that the government could not retain knowledge as well as private sector business and could not be as efficient as private sector business. My idea is not so black and white. I pointed out that there are parts of government like the GAO that can be just as efficient as business and retain knowledge. I also pointed out that business can fail to retain knowledge and become inefficient at times. His rebuttal was that studies proved voting has “built-in bias that do not assure the same sort of corrective processes”. In my response I asked him,

“It appears as if you question the whole ideal of democracy as a self-correcting process, albeit bumpy and messy but a progressive form of self governance. If voting is irretrievably flawed with “built-in bias, under your systemic analysis wouldn’t that indict democracy in general? Isn’t voting the cornerstone of democracy? Are we to suppose that the unbridled governance of the market is sufficient to replace the flawed governance of democracy?”

I am perplexed by his seemingly somewhat ambivalent and arbitrary designations of government and the private sector. I am sure he must be aware that even shareholders and board members vote. If voting is fatally flawed when it comes to government, how is it that this flaw does not follow into the private sector?

Best Regards,

Critical Thinking Applied is no more. Jeff, the guy that was running the site, doesn’t have time for it anymore but my posts will continue on this site.

It is amazing to me that listening to Republicans rail about the Obama-Care web site, they have so much more consternation about it than they ever did about the two wars their cohorts started in Iraq and Afghanistan that killed and maimed thousands of our young people and tens of thousands of civilians. Even the neocons in the administration that started the Iraq war admitted it was a “mistake” and that there were no weapons of mass destruction. Both of those wars were tragic “mistakes” and created more terrorists than they ever killed. The silence of the right at that time is now replaced with bitter screeching about Obama-Care. You would think Obama-Care was poised to kill many more than those two wars with all their high pitched commotion.

Personally, I am sick and tired of hearing these government haters that call themselves “patriots”. I guess I can understand now how terrorists come to think of themselves as saviors and righteous. This malady is really best understood as a psychological pathology which ravages rationality and makes topics such as ‘healthcare’ worse than any war ever could be.

Before Critical Thinking shut down I wrote an article titled “Smart is the new dumb“. It was very interesting that Steve Horwitz, a leading conservative academic apologist for Austrian Economics, made a comment about this article. Steve had posted an article on the Critical Thinking site before. I wrote a series of articles which addressed his article and Austrian Economics:

Shadow Universals

Austrian Logic

RE: “Restrictive regulation is positively correlated with corruption”

Prelude to Understanding

Fundamentalism in Market Economy: The Austrian School

Fundamentalism in Market Economy: The Austrian School and Regulation

Fundamentalism in Market Economy: The Austrian School and the Problem of Suffering

Steve never responded to these articles but had his devotee Jeff respond. When Steve responded to my piece I was a bit taken back that rather than try deal rationally with the issues I brought out in previous articles he would rather respond in the emotive way detailed below. I have no problem with emotive responses but I would think it would be more valuable for an academic to respond to substantial criticism rationally.

In any case, my opinion about Austrian Economics after reading and studying their most famous advocates including Steve is that they are Economic Darwinists with a slight difference in contemporaneous spokespeople from their historical advocates. Many of the neo-Austrians nowadays are fundamentalists Christians. Steve just wrote a series of articles on the rationality of his Christian faith. These folks cater to the new right, the ‘libertarian’ to anarchist right with roots in fundamentalist Christianity. The Austrians in the United States are very outspoken about their dogma that, in effect, government is the root of all evil. Government keeps capitalism from being capitalism in their opinion. Government is the cause not only of the 2008 recession but also the Great Depression. Regulation is not the same as monopolistic tendencies in the ‘free market’. Somehow because regulation is done by the government it makes it infinitely worse than anything a ‘free market’ monopoly could achieve. Large corporations which buy up competitors, kill smaller competitors with cheaper production costs from mass purchasing, effectively regulate the market with ‘approved partners’, ‘approved hardware/software’ as is the case for Microsoft, are exempt from artificially deforming the ‘free market’ but government cannot be absolved of its ‘free market’ sins. When these Ayn Rand’ers beat their ‘free market’ elitist chests over the conquests of economic Darwinism they also decry the source of all market booms and busts, the government. The market would not create such hyperbolic deformities in its own terms but only when government interferes with the market’s Darwinian ethos, ethics, morality of sorts.

In view of this, I think the irrationality of these fundamentalist Christian Darwinists can probably not be understood as a legitimate academic pursuit as much as a psychological pathology. In my response to Steve’s comment I address the “monolith”, the “obelisk”, which conveys a kind of ‘magical’ wisdom for these pathologies. In this case, “government and not-government” which I shortened to “G and not-G” functions as government which is both a diabolic and monstrous evil and simultaneously a chaotic, bureaucratic albatross and not-government which functions as a holy order of freedom and simultaneously as a Darwinian, heroic defeat of weakness and inefficiency. It is as if God has decreed that the meek shall not inherit the earth but be banished from the earth. The beatitudes have found the ‘original intent’ in the ‘free market’. The ‘free market’ provides goods and services cheaper from a highly simplified notion of ‘competition’. It winnows out the chaff from the wheat. Instead of ‘those who will not work shall not eat’ we have ‘those who cannot win shall not eat’ and by the way, Jesus loves you.

Comments below:

Steve Horwitz

October 25, 2013 at 12:20 pm· Reply

Wow. This is what is called “critical thinking” and “reasoned discourse?” You guys sure this post was supposed to go on this site?

It may be hard for some to handle this but the private and public sector are no different in fundamental ways. They can both be inadequate, ineffective, competent, provide an important service to the consumer. The can both put Shinola on shit. It is up to the employees and shareholders to either make the organization better or preside over their own ruin.

This is the worst sort of uncritical thinking about markets and politics. The comparison is NOT between what individual corporations/firms and individual government departments (or gov’t as a whole) do, but the systems within which they operate.

The argument for the superiority of markets is not that corporations are “better” or by themselves less likely to be bad in all of these ways. It’s that they operate in an institutional environment that provides them with knowledge and incentives to both KNOW when they’ve made errors and give them guidance and incentives to correct them in the right way. This is what market prices/profits/losses do and there is no comparably powerful analogue in politics. Voting doesn’t do the trick as numerous scholars have shown the ways in which that process has built-in bias that do not assure the same sort of corrective processes.

I don’t give a gosh dilly darn about how wise/good corporate leaders and government employees are, nor about how they try to spin their mistakes etc.. What I care about are the epistemological and incentive properties of the institutions within which they operate, and on that score the theory and evidence favors markets.

Rather than treating those of us who think markets are better as ignoramouses (do you really think the tone of this piece enhances civil discourse?) why don’t you do what critical thinkers are supposed to do and read the BEST arguments on the other side, not the strawmen you so clumsily knock down here?

• Mark

  October 26, 2013 at 12:29 pm· Reply

   

  Wow, too. I didn’t know anyone was reading this blog. It has been quite some time since I have seen any comments at all. I do not really write for others. I write these days more as a personal diary as I have found few that are really willing to hang with a detailed and prolonged argument come what may. Most of the posts here are simply copied from my personal blog. I am elated that you actually took the time to respond. I was not aware that there were any requirements for the ‘regulation’ of this site; the free market place of ideas if you will. If I were to classify this piece I would think of it more as a provocative op-ed. I guess in that sense it worked. It really came out of my frustration with the Yahoo email engine, the current propaganda about technology and Obama-Care and the highly simplistic ways these topics get tossed around. I was not trying to write a ‘critical thinking’ piece nor do I think that is a requirement for everything that gets posted here. I am not the only one that has posted these types of articles here. I have seen thinly veiled anti-Semitic, anti-Islamic, anti-liberal, anti-religious, pro-gay, civil morality lessons posts here by the other authors. I do not think or advocate that these kinds of topics should not be posted here. In many cases, they certainly are not reading and dissecting the “other side” nor do I think they necessarily should. I can comment and disagree if I choose or say nothing at all. Unlike academia I have no career to make, position to take until death do us part, economic incentive to publish or impress. As far as I am concerned all is fair here but always subject to scrutiny, objection and argument.

   

  I certainly love to engage in detailed and critical argument as the vast majority of my posts have been concerned with studies from reports by the GAO, CBO, OBM, FCIC, AEI, Congressional reports, legislative bills, Supreme Court decisions, Pew and Gallop polls, Simpson-Bowles, the Ryan Plan, historical surveys (i.e., Adam Smith, Carl Marx, etc.) and the detailed and highly referenced and footnoted series on philosophy. I believe I footnote and reference more than anyone else on this site. I have worked with statistical correlations as yet, unpublished and the problems of causality. The references below this post barely scratch the surface of the more ‘critical thinking’ posts I have published here. I also have read and dealt with articles by yourself, Jonathan Catalan, Mises, Rothbard, Rand and other publications on the Mises site. I have read much more than I have ever published from that site. I have read and commented on critiques both pro and con of empirical evidence related to microeconomics and the business cycle, regulation, inflation, boom/bust, capitalization and the Fed . The only person that ever really took the time to respond on this blog was Jeff. I really appreciate him taking the time to comment even if we disagree. I seriously doubt that you have ever read many of my posts here even the ones concerning yourself so I am a bit amazed that this post elicited a response from you.

   

  I disagree with Jeff on his notions of civility. I have no ‘ought-to’s or moral compulsions about civil argument. I do not attack individuals personally with profanity because I think that is an admonition of defeat in an argument not from some moral compulsion. As a blogger for many years I have regularly been attacked personally. I actually like it when that happens because I use it to illustrate the failure of an argument. In general, I have no problem attacking ideologies, philosophies, dogmas, etc. as they are not people but positions which can be dissected, subjected to empirical evidence, critiqued for logical inconsistencies and parodied. Provocation is one tool among others to elicit comments as you have demonstrated and possibly spur further, more critical examinations. Certainly, professors are not strangers to these tactics. I see the market place of ideas as an unfettered, type of ‘social contract’ which replaces war and violence with a cathartic sport and linguistic sparring and most important offers me the possibility of learning something, being persuaded to change my position, research and articulate issues more clearly. I would think you would not be unfamiliar with these notions.

   

  I understand your lack of concern with anecdotal comments. I enjoy theoria and praxis. Naturally, “systems” can and endlessly have been characterized and constrained to fit theoria so ‘critical thinking’ would be remiss without a healthy skepticism in this regard. I, apparently unlike some of the purported microeconomic theorists, put some stock in empirical studies and statistics. I also sympathize with Mises’ concern with underlying ideologies which has been discussed in terms of essentialism and with his distrust of positivism. However, when you argue from ‘the whole’, the somewhat editorialized “systems”, you indict and implicate the particular. Therefore, the particular is relevant and, depending on the degree to which you universalize your systemic dynamics, hold to your unique characterizations of ‘the whole’, particular divergent cases may indicate a systemic crisis with your organizational analysis, your theoria. Anecdotal evidence may be an indication of systemic inconsistencies but should not be construed as apodictive proof under any circumstances. I find theroia informs praxis and vice versa. Therefore, with regard to this,

   

  “The argument for the superiority of markets is not that corporations are “better” or by themselves less likely to be bad in all of these ways. It’s that they operate in an institutional environment that provides them with knowledge and incentives to both KNOW when they’ve made errors and give them guidance and incentives to correct them in the right way. This is what market prices/profits/losses do and there is no comparably powerful analogue in politics. Voting doesn’t do the trick as numerous scholars have shown the ways in which that process has built-in bias that do not assure the same sort of corrective processes.”

   

  I have a few comments. Your systemic assumptions here if I understand you correctly are:

   

  Private, by this I mean non-government, institutions are systemically built to retain knowledge and incentives. Is the logical contrary true that government is systemically inferior to the task of retaining knowledge and providing incentive? I assume this is implied by your reasoning.

   

  It appears as if you question the whole ideal of democracy as a self-correcting process, albeit bumpy and messy but a progressive form of self governance. If voting is irretrievably flawed with “built-in bias, under your systemic analysis wouldn’t that indict democracy in general? Isn’t voting the cornerstone of democracy? Are we to suppose that the unbridled governance of the market is sufficient to replace the flawed governance of democracy?

   

  The market is “self-correcting”. Is this in opposition to democracy’s fate fatale?

   

  Part of the problem in this undertaking has much in common with problems in Hegel. Your systemic analysis has run aground by virtue of its implied and assumed universality. The unicity which characterizes the superiority of the ‘free-market’ over the rabble of a democracy is highly over generalized. I would love to see the studies you alluded to as I am sure they and their opposing scholarly rebuttals do not paint such a clear and unobstructed path as you insinuate. In particular, you along with Ted Cruz seem to not take into account the ‘conglomerate’ organization of the Federal Government ; indeed, indeed, the possibility of any large and diversified (heterogeneous) systemic governmental organization. Do you think the GAO is micro managed from a ubiquitous hierarchy? Be careful, my wife retired as an auditor from the GAO and she loves to digest uninformed generalizations. Do you think that Federal employees are de-incentivized by a looming, homogenous bureaucracy? And would you have us believe that this does not occur in large corporations? Are all Federal agencies rendered systemically inadequate by the phallic obelisk, the evolutionary monolith, of your homogenized systemic analysis? Isn’t there some over simplification at work in such conveniences? I am not imputing a “better” or worse, a value judgment, on your analysis. I merely make the claim that the systemic underpinnings you are so eager to attribute to government and not-government (i.e., free market), henceforth G and not-G, may not be taken up (aufhebung) by what I see as the somewhat arbitrary boundaries of G and not-G, public and private, but alternatively and more appropriately by organization size, complexity, and coherency.

   

  It might be informative to take your statistical correlations and plug in dependent variables with regard to these organizational dynamics to see what you get. It seems somewhat intuitive that size (and the quality of size) matter in this regard. If you are looking at efficiency and knowledge retention you will probably find that sheer size, obstacles throw up by complexity and the degree to which management holds or does not hold multi-varied goals, dynamics, personal and collective goals together has much more to do with your outcomes than G or not-G. This is where you lose credibility in my opinion. You apparently cannot see the ways in which G and not-G share more organization dynamics in common than mere reduction to nouns. These dynamics are verbs not nouns. A conglomerate like GE can be run efficiently and with knowledge retention by making itself more heterogeneous, localized and departmentally self-contained. The government can and has done this as well. If you think the government is organized like over-hyped politicians would have you believe you really know nothing about how the Federal Government works. It is highly intuitive to think that to the degree that the G or not-G becomes a huge, vertically non-integrated, homogenous monolith, an obelisk to chaos is to the same degree that inefficiency and learning system feedback or loopback is inhibited AND that the difference between the nouns G and not-G is irrelevant and indistinguishable except only by virtue of your ideological underpinnings. Rather, system organizational dynamics do not come from the macro but from the micro as I assume you have some sympathy. Depending on how they are run G and not-G, massive organizations, can do well with your determining criteria or fail. The praxis, the truth is always somewhere in the middle. Some things they do well and others not so well. An oracular pronouncement based on ideological persuasion does not address systems and organizations as you suppose. I beg to differ, there is no decidable difference between G and not-G based on their formal noun derived and ideological infusions but on the successes and failures of size, complexity, and coherency. The ‘decidability’ of a dynamic, a systemic organization, a verb must itself be founded on a verb not on a self-evident, apriori, dogma that rests on a name, an arbitrary designation, a merely verbal bias (originating from subtle essentialisms as Mises might inform us) as G and not-G.