The Constitution, our dear Constitution, did not give us our rights. Our rights came from God and they are inalienable rights. The Constitution created the government to protect our God-given and unalienable rights.
Thus Sarah Palin in her speech earlier this month in Missouri, at the “Win America Back Conference.”
Though Palin’s words received the usual uncomprehending and comically overwrought response from at least one leftwing critic, the statement hardly represents a novel departure for a conservative politician. Even that little inalienable vs. unalienable problem goes all the way back to the Founding. More important, in recent years acceptance of the premise that “our rights come from God, not the government” has been become almost definitional for American conservatism. Search for the phrase and close variations on the internet, and you’ll find pointed, high-profile utterances, virtually word for word, from Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, Newt Gingrich, Jim DeMint, Paul Ryan, and George W. Bush. For Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Howard Dean, and Nancy Pelosi, the same searches will tend to turn up conservatives reacting to whatever latest leftwing heresy. You may have to go all the way back to John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address to find a leading Democrat who could voice the idea clearly, and seem to mean it.
The concept is, of course, embodied in one of the most important single sentences in American history – arguably in all of human history:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
In the speech that first brought Barack Obama to national attention in 2004 (the “no red states and blue states” speech), he did at least recite the sentence: It didn’t boil his mouth away, but that may be because he sought to interpret it as a mere generalized endorsement of egalitarianism – as though, in writing the lines, Thomas Jefferson had been dimly prophesying the arrival of someone like… Barack Obama in our political life. Most conservatives, especially those of a libertarian inclination, along with most historians, understand the statement very differently – but that does not mean that contemporary conservative politicians are using it more wisely.
Students of the Founding know that Jefferson was neither dreaming of politicians to come nor in any sense innovating. The Sentence derives from earlier writings on natural rights philosophy, a comprehensive worldview whose precepts, as the intellectual historian Jerome Huyler has amply demonstrated, were widely shared at the time – not just by the writer and signatories of the Declaration of Independence, but by the revolutionary generation they represented, and to a great extent by Americans colonists even to the first settlements. “Equal creation,” “unalienable Rights” as a gift of the “Creator,” and the immediate enumeration of the most significant rights were familiar to educated Americans and especially to all “thinking revolutionaries” in Great Britain and the not-yet-united states long before July 4, 1776.
It is hardly surprising that the use and even the insistence on just this language remains common on the American right, where both the deity and the Founders are treated with reverence. Nor is it surprising, or any less indicative, that the concept leaves many on the secular left dumbfounded. When reacting to Fred Thompson’s invocation of divinely ordained natural rights in 2007, for instance, “university scholar” Jacques Berlinerblau, faith-blogging for the Washington Post, saw only a calculated pitch to social conservatives, with a gesture to libertarians “on the backstroke. ” Double doctorates notwithstanding, Berlinerblau, like the HuffPo’s Malia Litman reacting to Palin as linked above, betrayed no apparent awareness of just where the wacky righty got his quaint notion.
Yet the ill-founded condescension and kneejerk suspicion from the likes of Berlinerblau and Litman underline a deeper challenge to the conservative right, as brought home during Rand Paul’s recent travails as well as in the rather appalled reaction to Newt Gingrich’s comparisons, under the rubric of “secular socialism,” of Obamaist liberals to Nazis and Communists. There may be an essential, not merely a contingent or politically useful, connection between libertarianism and Judeo-Christian moral philosophy, but in the America of 2010 the idea is far from consensual, or even widely held. It doesn’t even qualify as widely understood, and intimations of its rigorous implementation, theoretical or practical, are received as wholly unacceptable where not merely controversial.
Jefferson’s “we” ain’t us – not all of us anyway. His truths, where taken to be true at all, will seem far from “self-evident.” Many Americans will hide, or not even bother to hide, a contemptuous snicker at the phrase “created equal,” unaware that it’s gone completely over their heads. At best, since most like the idea of equality at least in the sense of fairness, they may decide to help the Dead White Male out, and, like senate-candidate Obama to fellow Democrats, adapt the phrase for present purposes (perhaps while reminding each other in superior tones that the DWM owned slaves). And when the skeptics reach “endowed by their Creator,” the snickering may escalate to New Atheist-style catcalls, or possibly to more polite forms of stubborn dissent. It’s only by the time that we get to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit,” with its hedonistic resonances, that much of the audience will be back on board at all.
When conservatives invoke the Founders’ formulation, asserting and demanding consensus, it therefore has the opposite implication and effect. It points to a lack of political-social consensus, and to a large extent seems meant to – typically dividing an audience of sympathizers from a vast societal other. Indeed, if the consensus were general, it wouldn’t need to be proclaimed at all, the minions of King George having long since been vanquished.
As the strongest advocates of the view hasten to remind us, the lack of consensus would not be an excuse for resisting the truth of their position. They believe that the failure to acknowledge the transcendental origins of our rights renders those rights vulnerable – turns them into mere matters of opinion rather than the unshakable foundations of our freedom. Long before Dostoevsky, the American Founders and their intellectual precursors worried that “without God, everything [would be] permitted.” Though many modern readers sense first a fear of moral chaos in this statement, the natural rights theorists, like their descendants among us, were at least equally concerned with resistance to tyranny – with what a government (or government-established religion) that didn’t respect natural rights might permit itself. Following Locke, the concept of equal creation for them leads logically to “equal protection”: In matters of material property and conscience both, and in a manner prior to and beyond any social contracts between rulers and the ruled, government cannot infringe upon these natural rights without coming into conflict with the higher law, God’s law, and therefore with God.
The proponents of faith-based libertarianism see themselves to be offering the one political ideology whose commitment to freedom and equality is fundamental and absolute. Yet their argument for the divinely ordained inviolability of rights turns immediately into its opposite for anyone on the outs: If our rights depend on God and God alone, then non- and less-than-ardent believers, it would seem, are left to conclude that our rights must be fully negotiable, or at any rate that conservatives lack a good argument to the contrary. Even believers may be left uncomfortable by the sense that conservatives are promoting an inherently exclusionary and prejudicial worldview.
The rationale that often follows – “just between us smart people” – that
it’s better for society if people accept religious belief, whether or not it withstands inquiry, sooner or later tends to confirm the skeptic’s suspicion of an elite in waiting whose members are as or more interested in temporal power than transcendent verities. However we were created, and by whatever, and to whatever supposed effect and purpose, a corrosive and inherently vulnerable inequality, between the as-good-as-atheist illuminati and the masses manipulated for their own good, is put forward as a bargain whose terms must never be spelled out, for the sake of order. The purveyors of self-evident, transcendent truth seem to reveal themselves as willing dissemblers and ends-justify-the-means materialists after all.
Until we have translated Jefferson’s words honestly, accurately, and accessibly into a contemporary and inclusive idiom – inclusive enough to be spoken by Allahpundit and by James Dobson, by John Derbyshire and by Sarah Palin, too – the opponents of constitutional conservatism will find justifications for ridicule and general resistance, alongside potentially critical divisions in the conservative coalition.
If one is outraged that an injustice was done at Ruby Ridge, or in Chile, or by Israel offering nukes to S. Africa, why, exactly? Why the outrage–what makes it something other than as esthetic judgment, or the joining of a mob of those similarly outraged.
It isn’t something other,it’s part opinion,part emotion. There’s only three options,take Ruby Ridge,you’re either Pro-Government,anti-Government,or indifferent. With Israel,you’re pro-Israel having Nukes,anti,or indifferent.
@ Rex Caruthers:
But you should know from you reading of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky that all of the terms of any such decision are already a social construction, which isn’t the same as artificial. Adam suggests that the limiting case and organizing determinant of that construction is a taboo of some kind, if I understand him correctly. (Possibly has something to do with why the patricide in the Brothers K takes place “offstage” and is neither depicted nor truly solvable.) I think he means that once we define what would destroy us, then we can begin to construct a world with everything that’s left over.
CK,
I think Adam is saying that not only without God,Everything is Allowed,but that everything is equal in its meaninglessness,without God,we have pure,equal opportunity,Nihilism.
@ CK MacLeod:
Yes, very good, enough to keep the discussion going–thanks. The taboo is some unspeakable violence (unspeakable because we wouldn’t survive it) that we have averted and continue to avert. Of course, at a certain point, the methods of aversion themselves become a new source of violence, requiring a new event and taboo. My historical argument is that Judaism, Christianity and modern liberalism trace a fairly rare upward trajectory, one in which the taboos are less and less ritualistic and more and more based on transparent processes of distinguishing innocent from guilty. That’s when it becomes possible to theorize rights located “in” the individual.
@ Rex Caruthers:
OK, if I understand you, I might endorse this formulation–the implication, then, is that “God” need be nothing more than the collective bestowal of meaning (on reality, on being, on us) through deferral, through all of us letting be the thing we all want, so that we can create a process of sharing it in an orderly way. I’m personally not a believer in any conventional sense, but I think Judaism and Christianity (and probably other religions of which I know less) understand this anthropological insight far better than atheism–and they probably convey it better than my (or, really, Eric Gans’s) more theoretical discussion could.
@ Rex Caruthers:
A promise to provide nuclear weapons is not the same thing as delivery of nuclear weapons. States that want something from one another lie to one another all the time.
“through all of us letting be the thing we all want’
I’m more comfortable with a conflicted existence with Fate pitted against letting us be what we want,or appearance,(the hybris and denial that we find so much of in “everyday” life) vs reality,Being what’s underneath the thin veener.
Check out “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson,that says just what I mean to say.
@ Rex Caruthers:
Not letting us be what we want–let be the thing we want, that is, the object on which our desires (each one’s desire spurred on by everyone else’s) converge.
It’s been a while (I remember them showing us the movie in school, who knows why) but isn’t “The Lottery” a story of a community that uses a public, collectively enacted slaughter of a scapegoat, selected randomly, to preserve the community (in their own minds, at least)? The anthropological insight is strong, the ethical one less so, if the suggestion is that that is what we are really always doing anyway, so why not be honest about it? I might be misreading it, though–like I said, it was a long time ago, and I didn’t actually read the story. I do have some clear memories of the movie, after many decades, so it must have made some impact.
if the suggestion is that that is what we are really always doing anyway, so why not be honest about it?
You certainly got the gist of it:I didn’t know it was a movie.
When reminiscing about the Vietnam War the other day,I recalled the Vietnam Lottery(Did you know that a Lottery System was used to determine who got Drafted,in the 1970s),and that reminded me of Ms Jackson’s famous story.
@ Rex Caruthers:
OK, in that case, I disagree with the suggestion that we have not overcome scapegoating–of course, we repeatedly lapse back into that very powerful tendency and perhaps we always will–but the cultural pulls in the other direction are also powerful and equally real (and not merely “superficial” or “thin veener”).
@ bob:
Don’t want to lose the idea that some version of evolutionary psychology might be helpful, but deriving “ought” from “is” is tricky: The new ought usually turns out to be the old ought in disguise – where it doesn’t collapse back into mere is and the negation of all ought, contradicting the whole point of the operation, and preparing a descent into materialism of the worst kind.
http://warincontext.org/2010/05/24/sasha-polakow-suransky-on-al-jazeera/
@CK
Ay yes, the legions of materialism are many.
Nihilism being the main charge.
Functionally, I think nihilism is the emotional acting out of those who are frustrated and thwarted in their relation with the world.
The implications of recognizing ourselves as completely contigent beings are no more nihilistic than any version of eternalism anyone has discussed here. If anything, those in the throes of nihilism often implicitly believe they themselves exist – how can “anything is permitted” be true for some one who doesn’t exist?
The issue is how we understand what it means to exist, rather than the existence of existence or non-existence.
The issue is how do we reconcile our manifest contingency with the compelling experience of our point-of-viewedness.
The word most used to do this is “embodied” – experience is a physical phenonomen embedded in our bodies which are embedded in the world.
This of course suggests that the word “individual” could use some redefining.
I think this approach is different enough from our hapbitual patterns of thought that we might have a chance of using it to better out situation rather than conducting a little mental interior decorating.
@ bob:
Materialism strikes deep.
Into your ontology it will creep.
@ bob:
Seriously – it’s an open question to me whether we can plug some set of hypotheses about the nature of cognition, about that not-merely-a-thing we call the human mind, into a modernized natural rights discourse. We may generally have a creeping sense that big pieces of what we are is “things doing things” while something looks on without really caring (because caring is also just things doing things), but it’s that very perception that we’ve learned to fight or flee. I really, really didn’t want to do this… but I’m afraid I’m going to have to go all Heideggerian and say that we in-sist, because we ek-sist, on the pre-primacy of the what’s-more without which trees never fall in the forest. (The frog’s existentialist formulation was already prodding in this direction.) As Adam noted, religious believers are happy to abbreviate such processes – he refers to “collective bestowal of meaning” – in their God concept, though I would side with them (and suspect Adam would, too), if they called that particular definition too reductive.
Until we see, perhaps until we actually read, the actual translations or interpretations of old natural rights formulations to whatever new formulations, we can only guess how we would react – suspect that they’ll be redundant or defective. We pre-judge because there’s no other alternative, prior to the actual emergence of the thing that is to determine newly how we judge.
We hold these opinions to be as true as other opinions that are equally likely truths. That all men, and women, and others who self classify differently, and others who choose not to self classify, are to be made equal, endowed by their betters, and others who do not self classify as betters, with certain more or less unalienable social constructions, among them life, except when inconvenient in the context of the cost of state provided health care, liberty, except when it conflicts with other rights which may be defined by a progressive state, and the pursuit of happiness, up to the point of enough as defined by their Obama (PBUH).
“We hold this hypothesis to be tested and proved: Just and durable government requires equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all citizens.”
I hold this hypothesis potentially interesting: All valid human rights can be derived directly from the presumptions underlying the inquiry.
@ CK MacLeod:
There is, of course, always Chou En Lai’s point of view that it’s too soon to tell about “durable.” And, absent a Judge, who is to define “just.”
Not ever having been up on philosophers I tried (not too hard I must admit) to find the frog’s answer, or anyone’s succinct answer, to your question re the source and definer of “rights” absent a Source and Definer; but I failed.
“Trees falling in the forest” is Zen rather than exstential, as are frogs jumping in ponds from the Poetry Month discussion.
Buddhism and Heidegger have meaningful similarities. A big difference is that Buddhism provides a path to living while Heidegger does not. The embodied mind of Evolutionary Psychology and the Deep Ecology movement are the children of Heidegger in the west attempting to find a path for living coming out of the western tradition.
The closest current expression of how to live (perhaps a more direct formulation of the word “rights”) with these insights currently existing is the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism. I specify this school because of its analytic tradition proceeding from the observation that everything has a cause and everything produces effects.
Here, a primary result of these observations is one of the hallmarks of all schools of Buddhism: no self.
In the west this idea upends conservative thinking completely. In the east it is deeply conservative.
Part of my fascination with current neuroscience is that the piciture of the mind that has so far emerged form it it seems to support several aspects of the Buddhist picture of the mind. To be sure, differences abound, especially what the Dalai Lama calls the “ontological confusion” of science.
I have avoided going in this direction here because it seemed either too far afield or too contentious (despite the blog’s title). I bring it up now only to provide a living illustration of the implications of what I have been discussing.
Perhaps there are significant defects to this way of looking at things. But I think they are not of any greater scale than the defects of proceeding from the assumption of truly independent individuals, which seems to produce a lot of confusion just in defining basic terms.
@ Sully:
# 28. succinct summation of Hobbes’ ultimate source.
Rights endowed by God upon you,
His blessings said to whisper, “I love you”
Life, liberty and happiness, whee,
Were just a little dream or three.
Say nighty-night to those dreams,
Since sage despoilers of the skeptical teams,
Have us alone and just as blue as can be,
Can’t dream a little dream or three.
bob wrote:
This confusion is fundamental politically, though easily lost when the cultural scenery is foregrounded and submitted to modern American coalition politics. The left is culturally associated with free expression (“Piss Christ”), which is in turn popularly associated with individualism – “do your own thing, free to be you and me, including your two daddies.” But the libertarian right is arguably more correctly associated with a defense of individual economic and political rights against the encroachments of state power, and this carries through in the character of Republican appeals for economic freedom and limited government.
How we conceive of the inwardnesses and essential selfhood of those individuals whose rights to free expression and a basic living tend to be defended most vociferously by the left, and whose rights to be left alone and keep the fruits of their labor tend to be defended most vociferously by the right, is less clear to me. I can see, however, how a biological picture of irreducible instincts and general tendencies of human beings could eventually influence the shape of public policy, including which battles aren’t worth fighting, but also including those rights that need most to be afforded special protection, or which must be presumed. For instance, the argument that some prized human attribute was not biologically favored might become an argument for affording it even greater protection, rather than for giving up the game. There was even some discussion a few years ago in Germany of declaring “complex individuality” a kind of scarce resource or endangered species.
On the other hand, if through our philosophizing and neuro-scientific research – and drugs – we end up reducing respect for individual subjectivity and individual rights, we still might determine that we needed a sense of inviolability of the private sphere for the mass enterprise to function at its highest levels pragmatically as well as morally.
@ Sully:
In durable and just I was sneaking God back in – or what the notions of inalienability and endowment by the Creator do for a sentence that otherwise is written as an observation of “self-evident truth,” not an assertion of anything at all – as though Tommy was writing a letter home about the fad he and his buddies happened to have latched on to. A system that didn’t recognize The Rights might conceivably be durable, but couldn’t be just; or it might be just in the abstract or perhaps for a moment (a state of nature or a state of everywhere equal consumption… just before anybody got busy), but couldn’t be durably so. In this case, both terms are relative: We’ll never be able to prove that such a system will be eternal, but we can argue that in the real world a system guided, even if imperfectly, by respect for those rights can survive multiple generations more or less intact, to relatively and progressively more just outcomes (i.e., now more just than previously, and more just than all or most competing arrangements).
@ CK MacLeod:
Because if we undertake, in the spirit of genuine inquiry, to discover the source of rights we will find that first of all we need the right to such an inquiry (in order to protect such a spirit)?
adam wrote:
Yes. In addition, we presume that the inquiry might be worthwhile, implying the existence of a community of fellow inquirers susceptible to reason and potentially of influence. All of which isn’t really that far from the thought process and moral reasoning of the Lockeans, which they put in terms of salvation. If salvation requires the believer to come by free inquiry to true belief (acceptance of the truth), then government (established religion) that impairs freedom of speech and conscience does grave harm. The difference would be that the language of religion gives a static form to the presumed goals of free inquiry – as though knowing God or God’s will could be the solution to an equation, with the same result applying equally to all regardless of their differences – rather than an open-ended and evolving experience unique to each believer – which is also why the opposite of the frog’s formulation is also true: our rights come from our basic dissimilarity (possibly also from our non-existence, but I don’t think I can think my way through to the end of that one before the end of halftime).
I think it was Yogananda who spoke of every person pursuing his or her own personal love affair with the divine. I may be garbling his message here.
@ CK MacLeod:
I think we agree here–if I can conduct such and inquiry and hence realize the need for the right to do so, then I can’t exclude the possibility that anyone else might be able to do so, and so everyone must have the right. This puts things in the necessarily minimal terms. I suppose an atheist or materialist might say this would be true for any inquiry, not only one into God; but why are we able to share the process and results of inquiry in the first place? Where does the faith that we can do so, a faith without which the inquiry would be neither initiated nor continued, come from? You could probably construct an evolutionary process: “honesty,” in the sense of reliably informing others of, say, sources of food and danger, was “selected for”; developing a “reputation” for “honesty” would in turn be selected for, because such a person would be protected and supported by others; finally, “honesty” in the broadest sense of a love for the truth would emerge as one of the characteristics of humankind. In the end, though, we would have to remove the scare quotes around “honesty”–since no other species has anything to do with anything like “honesty,” in the sense of choosing to seek and communicate the truth (and to keep faith with others) when one could have chosen to lie (and betray that faith), we have found ourselves with a defining characteristic of humanity that had to have been “created” before it could be “selected for.” And, as I take you to be saying (or at least thinking with some affinity to), that creation must have been a salvation: without discovering a way to keep faith with each other, and therefore something to keep faith in, we would not have survived.
@ adam:
Thinking this over – am drafting some rambling thoughts – wanting 1) to substitute an expansive definition of “communication” (including non-verbal and internal communication, and meta-communication) for what you call honesty, 2) to relate it to will to power as opposed to mere “survival,” 3) to find a way back to a functional and accessible definition of political rights as rights to seek a meaningful existence (requiring the practical economic and survival rights as well as freedom to communicate).
@ CK MacLeod:
Yes, something like “communication” is better, but I think any use of signs will require some notion of “intention”–not in the narrow sense of “what did Keats mean to say in ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’” but in the more minimal sense of making space for others and soliciting a response. And if we can grasp another’s intention there must be some sense in which we “trust” them, so signs always include some implicit references to the presumed trustworthiness of the person issuing them.
And meaning as “salvation” includes both survival and “will to power,” doesn’t it? And more: meaning, or our ability to live and breath through signs creates the “world,” and therefore goodness and beauty as well–along, perhaps, with the uniquely human forms of evil, like envy, betrayal, malevolence for its own sake, etc.
I still think more complex forms of property rights is going to provide the answer to the third desideratum you lay down here.
This should clear everything up…persevere to the second half.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmrm4-hYiNw
Interesting discussion.
Seems to me there is no semantic bridge capable of spanning the philosophical gap at the base of the question. An existential view of life (which I would say necessarily devolves to the will to power) or an essentialist view (which would include Christianity, Judaism, deism and all of the founders). The line in question presumes the latter view and cannot be rendered coherently without the essentialist presuppositions on which it is based. Any attempt to de-mythologize this statement destroys its meaning.
@ John:
Took a break for a day from this discussion while letting the last exchanges settle (and taking care of some other business/getting caught up in other scraps), but you re-state the fundamental question succinctly. Adam can speak for himself, but I suspect that he would take the position along with me, though perhaps reach it by other means, that what you call the existentialist position can only offer a pretense of being non-mythological. According to this framework I would suggest that Comments 71-5 could be interpreted as a demonstration that any participation in the inquiry already presumes and recognizes the necessity of symbolic exchange. You can’t intelligibly claim the lack of a semantic bridge without crossing one.s
@ bob:
Are you a fan of the movie MEMENTO? It just occurred to me, as I was watching the video, that it could be viewed within the frameworks we’ve been discussing. If you’ve seen the movie, then you know that the main character has suffered a brain injury that has scrambled his ability to remember things. He’s continually coming aware in predicaments that are completely new to him, because he doesn’t know how he got wherever he is. He therefore has to reconstruct his own intentions, and determine his own role from the context in which he finds himself, sometimes with the aid of notes he’s written to himself, either on his body or on snapshots he’s taken.
So he continually has to re-create social relations from scratch. No matter how far from “normal” he travels, and no matter how broken and reduced he is as a human being, he always ends up recapitulating a provisional normalcy whose exigencies he’s able to master on their own terms as he understands them.
I’d link to a favorite scene or two – I believe the whole movie may be on YouTube – but I wouldn’t want to ruin it for you if you’ve never seen it.
Yes, I caught that. And I do agree that atheists of a certain stripe frequently sneak God in the back door without admitting it. Along those lines, Adam seems to be seeking an evolutionary explanation for a Kantian categorical imperative in #73. I think this is, once again, the bridge to nowhere, i.e. you can’t get there from here. It may work semantically (or appear to work) but you never really go anywhere.
Kant tried to do for the golden rule what you’ve been toying with doing to the Declaration. But I think we might agree that all he’s really done is give it a patina of disbelief. There’s still a lot of magic hiding underneath which he can’t account for.
John wrote:
My understanding of the critique of the critiques is precisely that Kant, though struggling mightily and covering vast territories in the process, in the end as in the beginning had to depend on a leap of faith. Derrida referred to Kant’s “parergon” (or frame) – and, wonders of the internet, I was able quickly to find a nice summary and a useful quote from Kant directly on this subject:
As Derrida demonstrated (over and over), such admissions support the non-dichotomous position (often, ironically, in the act of re-asserting whatever dichotomy or opposition). There’s no need to cross a semantic bridge to anywhere because, as Derrida might say, we’re always already coming back the other way.
None of this is to suggest that in the comment thread of a small internet blog we’re going to arrive at a philosophic work for the ages, nor are we trying to have our God and eat him, too. All I’m really seeking, or all I set out to look for, is a defensible, non-sectarian, accessible interpretation of natural rights that derives from the actual necessary presumptions of democratic life rather than from a pre-existing, identifiably culture-bound religious discourse.
In the top post I argue that “our rights come from God” is not a consensual position. The relevant question to me is whether that would mean that we lack a societal consensus on some very fundamental level, or, what I would prefer to believe, that we possess that consensus or a capability for sufficient consensus, though may not have found the words for it (or may have found them – just no one bothered to inform me).
I agree with your assessment of Kant. That was the point I was making as well.
As for the semantic bridge, you seem to be saying (or saying Derrida says) that there is no such ground on the other side at all. If that’s your point, I would disagree. I think nihilism is a genuine alternative, a separate place if you will. This, I believe, is where existentialism always ends up if it’s honest, which is why real atheists have angst not humanist manifestos. That gap will, IMO, always remain unbridgeable. And so I think the easier job would be to try and convince the humanist atheists (you mentioned Allahpundit, whose work I respect tremendously) that they’re not really living on the ground they claim to be living on. They’re expatriates who really live in the same world of unsupportable moral beliefs as the rest of us (and not among the nihilists). Of course I have to acknowledge that my take is influenced by my perspective as an evangelical. We tend to see conversion as the answer to everything ;-)
I hope you didn’t take my jumping in as an attempt to be critical. On the contrary, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this thread and was impressed with the level of thought going on. I envy you your readers very much and just wanted to get in on some of the fun you seemed to be having kicking this thing around. And frankly I’m a bit weary of discussing SB1070 over at my place.
To the contrary, your contributions and your criticisms are very welcome, and I wish I had more time right now to go into them in further detail. I think you have accurately assessed my approach to the humanist atheists – and towards atheists and believers generally.
I’ll be looking up your SB1070 discussions – and will later be adding Verum Serum to our blogroll. Was just yesterday watching that bizarre Folks/Haley animation that I guess one of your colleagues dug up.
These threads, befitting the name of the blog, tend to live on, or come back to life unexpectedly, and I anticipate further hair-raising twists and turns on this subject, either here or in subsequent posts – so stay tuned for the next exciting scenes.
CK
Momento looks really interesting, but I haven’t watched it yet. I ration out my brain injury themed movies for when the “I can relate” response is likely to override the “god this is making me incredibly anxiious” response.
As to the more substantive comments post #77 my response will have to wait since I’ve just gotten home from some out patient surgery and am pretty high from the pain meds.
But I don’t see “will to power” inevitalbe at all after deconstructing the self. That was part of my point about Buddhism about nihilism being psychological acting out.
Good meds.
I will. It’s not very often that I encounter someone (much less a group of someone’s) who understand any of this stuff, much less are in basic agreement with me about it. I’m hooked.
Thanks for the blogroll. Will be doing likewise.
In a sense I’m offering an evolutionary answer, not so much to Kant’s categorical imperative, but to our ability to make sense of the signs we “emit,” which Kant is just one of many to try and figure out. That is, what became human beings must have met certain “preconditions” for the transformation to come, but that transformation was a leap, that took place in a single, unpredictable, even unlikely event (that may, therefore, have something “existentialist” to it)–the emergence of the human, in a sense ex nihilo, in an event, and along with God, is what Genesis gets right. I’m not sure what “bridge” this hypothesis has trouble crossing.
That Russian novel Petersburg, by Bely, has a lot of references to Kant and Nietzche, in almost equal parts. In a land that never sees
liberty, like Czarist Russia, one could also add Saudi Arabia, one could
see how extreme philosophies take hold
@ John:
I’m arguing, I believe in a manner parallel to adam, that nihilism is moral false consciousness. If you’re in any way acting or speaking as though your argument is something rather than nothing, that it can have a truth and that its truth can matter – if, for instance, you participate in an intellectual debate about nihilism – then to the extent you make any sense at all you’re affirming sense and affirming affirmation, along with a comprehensive set of implicit or immanent social relations and objectives. My old deconstructionist perfesser liked to quote Nietzsche at this point: We must still believe in God because we still believe in grammar.
Logically, the argument as to meaninglessness is either meaningless or self-contradictory. If it’s meaningless then it’s irrelevant, and it can’t be correct, because there is no right or wrong in a world without meaning. If it’s self-contradictory, then that’s because it’s also wrong.
So, nihilism survives only as a stance, a refusal to be pinned down on particulars, but as soon as it enters the conversation, it becomes something else, at minimum a gnosticism that may refrain from stating its fundamental premises, but must commit to particulars in order to be intelligible to itself and others. I’m not sure that we need to go any further than that to give birth to civilization. As a moral and political philosophy operating within civilization, it could be negative dialectics, which accepts what is, negates it, and lets synthesis take care of itself. It could also operate or be reduced to will to power, while anticipating and advancing, along with Nietzsche again, a transvaluation of values rather then a negation of values.
So, to return to the main question, I don’t think we have to accept that nihilism is ever an actual alternative, ever really available at all – it’s always already nonsense.
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