In making Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence the theme of this book, Gillespie has set himself a huge task. Not only is it one of the philosopher’s weakest and most unconvincing theses, it is the one that sits in opposition to nearly everything else he wrote. For Nietzsche, despite his writing appearing wistful and gothic Romantic, was essentially an empiricist. He had no time for the dualism of Plato and only a fleeting but unconvinced interest in Kantian metaphysical idling about what lay beyond the tangible world. Nietzsche wrote that all there was for sure was the here and now.
This is exactly why he was not a militant atheist in the way we understand the expression today. He felt no need to concern himself with the veracity of Christianity’s claims about the afterlife, something we cannot be sure about. He seldom railed against the theological pretensions of Christianity or the absurdity of religion because to him the only thing that mattered was how religion affected us. He objected to Christianity because he saw it as nihilist and life-negating. It taught people to be meek, humble and to accept their lot. Nietzsche was an empiricist in that he wanted people to fulfil their life in the here and now, something that Christianity was hostile to.
Yet Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence belongs strangely to the realm of metaphysics and dualism. Its fatalism and determinism contradicts Nietzsche’s exhortation for each of us to become our own masters and to become who we truly are. While he did not believe in free will, he did believe that the Übermensch could harness and master the forces of his inner “will to power”. Contrarily, the eternal recurrence condemns us to history and supernatural fate. The notion of “eternal recurrence” reeks too much of his youthful dalliance with Schopenhauerian metaphysics.
This is perhaps why Nietzsche rarely mentioned it, and made even less effort to explain it in the books published in his lifetime. It seems too much of a flight of fancy, and the only time he spoke of it in all seriousness is when he recounted one day in August 1881, when walking in the Swiss mountains, when he had a kind of strange, rapturous religious experience – the day when the notion of “eternal recurrence” came to him in the first place.
Patrick West, “Nietzsche and the struggle against nihilism”, Spiked, 2018-08-03.
October 18, 2020
QotD: Nietzsche’s concept of “eternal recurrence”
October 17, 2020
History Hijinks: Greek Wise Guys
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 16 Oct 2020When I first studied Ancient Philosophy in college I thought it was engaging and interesting to discuss and whatever, but only years later did I come to appreciate the true hilarity of these Wise-Guys.
SOURCES & Further Reading: Plato’s Dialogues (Apology & Republic), Aristotle’s Ethics, Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen, and when direct sources aren’t available, there’s a bucketload of great write-ups from Stanford: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pr…, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/de…, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ar…, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pl…, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/so…
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October 16, 2020
“The Art of War” – Wisdom of Sun Tzu – Sabaton History 089 [Official]
Sabaton History
Published 15 Oct 2020Sun Tzu says: “The Art of War is of vital importance to the state. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin.” The Chinese Art of War by Sun Tzu is one of the most influential books in history. Throughout the centuries it would accompany generals, statesmen, and philosophers alike. Those who follow his teachings, who safeguard themselves against defeat and make sure of victory before the battle is fought, will triumph. Those who know everything about themselves and their enemies will achieve supreme excellence.
The Art of War by Sun Tzu Text: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/132/1…
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Archive: Reuters/Screenocean – https://www.screenocean.comVisual Sources:
– Pictures of Ming Dinasty courtesy of Yprpyqp from Wikimedia
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– Major National Historical and Cultural Site in China
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– Metmuseum
– Picture of Eastern Han Calvary courtesy of GaryLee Todd from Wikimedia
– Granger Archive
– Hallwyl Museum
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October 13, 2020
QotD: Generalizations
H.L. Mencken, Men versus the Man: A Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H.L. Mencken, Individualist, 1910.
October 12, 2020
QotD: Three lessons on weapons handling in moments of danger
The first and most important of these lessons is this: it all comes down to you.
No one’s finger is on the trigger but your own. All the talk-talk in your head, all the emotions in your heart, all the experiences of your past — these things may inform your choice, but they can’t move your finger. All the socialization and rationalization and justification in the world, all the approval or disapproval of your neighbors — none of these things can pull the trigger either. They can change how you feel about the choice, but only you can actually make the choice. Only you. Only here. Only now. Fire, or not?
A second is this: never count on being able to undo your choices.
If you shoot someone through the heart, dead is dead. You can’t take it back. There are no do-overs. Real choice is like that; you make it, you live with it — or die with it.
A third lesson is this: the universe doesn’t care about motives.
If your gun has an accidental discharge while pointed an unsafe direction, the bullet will kill just as dead as if you had been aiming the shot. “I didn’t mean to” may persuade others that you are less likely to repeat a behavior, but it won’t bring a corpse back to life.
These are hard lessons, but necessary ones. Stated, in print, they may seem trivial or obvious. But ethical maturity consists, in significant part, of knowing these things — not merely at the level of intellect but at the level of emotion, experience and reflex. And nothing teaches these things like repeated confrontation with life-or-death choices in grave knowledge of the consequences of failure.
Eric S. Raymond, “Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun”.
August 5, 2020
Red Toryism, limited government and other Canadian political sinkholes
In his latest article in The Dominion, Ben Woodfinden talks about the political void where most Canadian conservatives keep their notions about what “conservatism” actually means in the Canadian context:
Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.
This passage is from the Red Toryism essay:
Modern Canadian conservatism champions “small government”, seemingly without having any theory of what the state is actually for. Absent such a framework, it is difficult to identify governing priorities let alone to develop a philosophically coherent blueprint for action. When Conservatives get elected, they often have no idea of how to achieve the “fiscal responsibility” they preach. A series of ad hoc actions and policies follow, and the predictable result is failure to roll back the state in any significant or lasting way.
This, predictably, did not please everyone, and in a political landscape where we often still think that the divides between left and right are really about “big” versus “small” government, this was to be expected. But a conservative theory of government needs to escape this paradigm.
While conservatism is a broad tent, one unifying feature should be a commitment to limited government. But limited government is a term that often gets conflated with ideological “small government” that sees most of the modern state as illegitimate, and would eliminate most of it and leave the state to provide just the most minimal night-watchman functions. But small government, while a valid view to hold, is not limited government, and conservative government cannot just be about small government.
Limited government means constitutional government that is accountable and constrained by the rule of law, and while there are aspects of the modern state that need to be reformed, tamed, and limited, conservative government cannot just be about trying (and failing) to shrink the state. Conservatives have too often, I think, adopted the rhetoric of small government, without actually being true believers, and in the process they find it very difficult to actually reform and shape the state because they have put little thought into what government actually ought to be about.
Let me give you an example. Recently my friend Asher Honickman and I wrote a column for the National Post calling for a “parliamentary revival.” One specific and important reform we want to see is an expanded House of Commons to 500 MPs. More MPs would make for better party, and parliamentary government. But multiple people, including well connected conservatives, privately told us that while they think this is a good idea, one reason it won’t happen is because conservatives will just look at it through the lens of more spending of tax dollars on politicians. Instead the conservative impulse is to just try and shrink the size of legislatures to save a little bit of money.
In this case small government ideology actually gets in the way of reforms that would help make government more accountable, and limited. MPs should be held accountable and have their spending and salaries heavily scrutinized, but the cost of 150 more MPs would be nothing in the grand scheme of things.
This misses the point. More MPs would make for more accountable and better parliamentary government, and allow parliament, instead of both the bureaucracy and judiciary to increasingly take over more and more of lawmaking and governing that should be done by elected officials. The choice isn’t between more government or less government, in this case it’s a choice between who you’d rather be governed by; MPs who can scrutinize the government more, legislate with more freedom, and who you can hold to account, versus unelected bureaucrats with minimal oversight and limited accountability to elected officials.
In short, a conservative theory of governance should prioritize limited government, but in some cases this might require an attempt to strengthen (and more spending) on certain parts of government to constrain other parts.
It’s a rare Canadian conservative who’s willing to be quoted as saying that any part of human life is not automatically part of the remit of the federal government … how do you carve a “limited” government philosphy out of that?
QotD: Responsibility
The sort of thing I mean is when a British Conservative Party politician says, perhaps to a room full of people who, like me, take the idea of personal liberty very seriously: Yes, I believe, passionately, in personal liberty. The politician maybe then expands upon this idea, often with regard to how commercial life works far better if people engaged in commerce are able to make their own decisions about which projects they will undertake and which risks they will walk towards and which risks they will avoid. If business is all coerced, it won’t be nearly so beneficial. We will all get poorer. Yay freedom.
But.
But … “responsibility”. We should all have freedom, yes, but we also have, or should have, “responsibility”. Sometimes there then follows a list of things that we should do or should refrain from doing, for each of which alleged responsibility there is a law which he favours and which we must obey. At other times, such a list is merely implied. So, freedom, but not freedom.
The problem with politicians talking about responsibility is that their particular concern is and should be the law, law being organised compulsion. And too often, their talk of responsibility serves only to drag into prominence yet more laws about what people must and must not do with their lives. But because the word “responsibility” sounds so virtuous, this list of anti-freedom laws becomes hard to argue against, even inside one’s own head. Am I opposed to “responsibility”? Increasingly, I have found myself saying: To hell with it. Yes.
I have often been similarly resistant to the language of Christianity, of the sort that dominates what is being said in churches around the world today. How many times in history have acts of tyranny been justified by the tyrant saying something like: We must all bear our crosses in life, and here, this cross is yours. “God is on my side. Obey my orders.” The truth about the potential of life to inflict pain becomes the excuse to inflict further pain.
Brian Micklethwait, “Jordan Peterson on responsibility – and on why it is important that he is not a politician”, Samizdata, 2018-03-30.
August 4, 2020
QotD: Epicureans are not hedonists
Many people consider that a fair summary of the Epicurean philosophy, named for its founder, the Athenian philosopher Epicurus who lived from 341-270 B.C., a few generations after Plato. It is a natural mistake. After all Epicurus did say that “Pleasure is the starting-point and goal of living blessedly.”
A common Greek word for pleasure is “hedone,” whence our word “hedonism.” A hedonist, we know, is someone who devotes himself to sensual pleasure. Add that to the fact that Epicureanism is a deeply materialistic philosophy — “all good and bad,” Epicurus says, “consists in sense experience” — and it is easy to see why people often conclude that Epicureanism advocates sensual abandon.
Easy, but mistaken.
For in fact, Epicureanism is a deeply ascetic philosophy. It preaches the gospel of pleasure. But it defines pleasure in such a way that no hedonist worth his salt would embrace it.
A hedonist is someone devoted to pleasure in the positive sense: he seeks to gratify his senses.
An Epicurean is devoted to pleasure in the negative sense: he seeks to avoid pain. “We do everything we can,” Epicurus wrote, “for the sake of being neither in pain nor terror.”
It is a melancholy fact that the human frame, while capable of great joy and pleasure, is susceptible to even greater pain and misery. The pleasures afforded us are delicate blossoms; the pains we are susceptible to are like a raging wildfire in comparison. Epicurus and his followers took note of this fact. Indeed, it was a fact that mesmerized their imaginations.
Epicurus says that pleasure is the goal of life. But what he taught was immunity to pain. “The removal of all feeling of pain,” he wrote, “is the limit of the magnitude of pleasures.” There was a core of common sense about the Epicurean approach to life. He advised his followers to live simple, healthy lives, to shun extravagances of all sorts. Of course, that is something many philosophers, indeed many friends and parents, would also advise. There is nothing distinctively Epicurean about the injunction to live simply and soberly.
There are three things distinctive about Epicureanism. One is its identification of pleasure with the absence of pain. Another is its emphasis on sense experience as the ultimate reality. The third is its identification of tranquillity as the aim or goal of life. (The Greek word is “ataraxia,” i.e., not troubled, not disturbed: note the privative character of the Epicurean ideal.)
If it is to succeed, Epicureanism must deliver us not only from physical pain but also from anxiety and mental anguish. The prospect of death, Epicurus knew, upset many people. Hence he and his followers expended a great deal of effort trying to remove the sting, the fear, from the prospect of death.
Epicurus offered two things to battle the fear of death: an attitude and an argument. The attitude was one of mild contempt: the right sort of people, he implies, do not get in a tizzy about things, not even about death. The argument is equally compelling. “Get used to believing,” he says, “that death is nothing to us.”
Roger Kimball, “Coronavirus, Flynn and Epicureanism”, American Greatness, 2020-05-02.
July 10, 2020
QotD: Marcus Aurelius for the incel demographic
You just can’t beat it. But […] Our Thing has lots of potential Trigglypuffs. They’re called “incels,” I’m informed, but whatever the nomenclature, there are a lot of young single dudes out there who while away their pointless hours with video games and porn. Those are our potential storm troopers (it’s a metaphor, FBI goons). Why haven’t we weaponized them? (again: metaphor).
It’s probably as simple as giving them a role model. It goes without saying that your “incel” (or whatever) was raised by women. Even if there was a biological male living in the house during his childhood, it’s a thousand to one he was just that: a cohabiting male. Certainly not a father. And even if by some miracle he was, the poor guy can only do so much. You’ve got to let your sons out of the house sometime … where they’ll immediately be snapped up by the sour, shrieking cat ladies that control our educational system, our media, our professions, our culture. Both the son and his father have to be very, very hard-headed, and not a little lucky, to escape a poz infection …
… and that’s the best-case scenario. For the worst, look around — you’ll find incel and his soy-enfeebled twerp of a “male” parent cowering under the bed, scrubbing their hands and faces with Lysol, while Mommy scolds and caterwauls on Facebook.
There are role models out there, y’all. Stoicism in general, and Marcus Aurelius in particular, have seen a real upswing in popularity, especially on “Game” sites. This doesn’t represent a return to a Classical education; it’s that Marcus seems to be — Marcus is — a worthwhile role model for a fatherless boy. Strip out the “credits” at the start of book one and a few of the denser, more philosophical passages, and you could subtitle Meditations “how to drop your nuts on the carpet and act like a fucking man for once.” Loosely translated, of course.
Severian, “Be a Centurion!”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-04-07.
June 30, 2020
QotD: Ideologies and belief systems
People get unbelievable upset when you poke them in the axioms, so to speak, and it is not by any stretch of the imagination obvious why. There’s a fundamental truth that they’re standing on. It’s like they’re on a raft in the middle of the ocean. You’re starting to pull out the logs, and they’re afraid they’re going to fall in and drown. Drown in what? What are the logs protecting them from? Why are they so afraid to move beyond the confines of the ideological system? These are not obvious things. I’ve been trying to puzzle that out for a very long time. […]
Nietzsche’s idea was that human beings were going to have to create their own values. He understood that we had bodies and that we had motivations and emotions. He was a romantic thinker, in some sense, but way ahead of his time. He knew that our capacity to think wasn’t some free-floating soul but was embedded in our physiology, constrained by our emotions, shaped by our motivations, shaped by our body. He understood that. But he still believed that the only possible way out of the problem would be for human beings themselves to become something akin to God and to create their own values. He talked about the person who created their own values as the overman, or the superman. That was one part of the Nietzschean philosophy that the Nazis took out of context and used to fuel their superior man ideology. We know what happened with that. That didn’t seem to turn out very well, that’s for sure.
Jordan B. Peterson, “Biblical Series I: Introduction to the Idea of God” {transcript], jordanbpeterson.com, 2018-03-12.
June 28, 2020
QotD: Nietzsche’s views on Christianity
Nietzsche believed that Christianity died of its own hand, and that it spent a very long time trying to attune people to the necessity of the truth, absent the corruption and all that — that’s always part of any human endeavour. The truth, the spirit of truth, that was developed by Christianity turned on the roots of Christianity. Everyone woke up and said, or thought, something like, how is it that we came to believe any of this? It’s like waking up one day and noting that you really don’t know why you put a Christmas tree up, but you’ve been doing it for a long time and that’s what people do. There are reasons Christmas trees came about. The ritual lasts long after the reasons have been forgotten.
Nietzsche was a critic of Christianity and also a champion of its disciplinary capacity. The other thing that Nietzsche believed was that it was not possible to be free unless you had been a slave. By that he meant that you don’t go from childhood to full-fledged adult individuality; you go from child to a state of discipline, which you might think is akin to self-imposed slavery. That would be the best scenario, where you have to discipline yourself to become something specific before you might be able to reattain the generality you had as a child. He believed that Christianity had played that role for Western civilization. But, in the late 1800s, he announced that God was dead. You often hear of that as something triumphant but for Nietzsche it wasn’t. He was too nuanced a thinker to be that simpleminded. Nietzsche understood — and this is something I’m going to try to make clear — that there’s a very large amount that we don’t know about the structure of experience, that we don’t know about reality, and we have our articulated representations of the world. Outside of that there are things we know absolutely nothing about. There’s a buffer between them, and those are things we sort of know something about. But we don’t know them in an articulated way.
Jordan B. Peterson, “Biblical Series I: Introduction to the Idea of God” {transcript], jordanbpeterson.com, 2018-03-12.
June 20, 2020
History-Makers: Confucius
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 19 Jun 2020Welcome to the challenge run of History-Makers, where I attempt to give insightful historical context to someone whose backstory is almost entirely blank.
SOURCES & Further Reading: Confucius: A Very Short Introduction by Gardner, China: A History by Keay, The Analects of Confucius, The Mencius.
This video was edited by Sophia Ricciardi AKA “Indigo”. https://www.sophiakricci.com/
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June 10, 2020
QotD: “God is Dead”
People turn to things like ideologies, which I regard as parasites on an underlying religious substructure, to try to organize their thinking. That’s a catastrophe and what Nietzsche foresaw. He knew that, when we knocked the slats out of the base of Western civilization by destroying this representation, this God ideal, we would destabilize and move back and forth violently between nihilism and the extremes of ideology. He was particularly concerned about radical left ideology and believed — and predicted this in the late 1800s, which is really an absolute intellectual tour de force of staggering magnitude — that in the 20th century hundreds of millions of people would die because of the replacement of these underlying dream-like structures with this rational, but deeply incorrect, representation of the world. We’ve been oscillating back and forth between left and right ever since, with some good sprinkling of nihilism and despair. In some sense, that’s the situation of the modern Western person, and increasingly of people in general.
Jordan B. Peterson, “Biblical Series I: Introduction to the Idea of God” {transcript], jordanbpeterson.com, 2018-03-12.
June 8, 2020
QotD: Death and life
Michael Shermer, Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia, 2018.
May 30, 2020
QotD: The “Americanization” of German philosophy
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 1987.
