I know the Gee Chronicles have been sporadic lately so I’m gonna help you out. My fellow bridge blogger, anarcho-capitalist Floyd McWilliams, aka the Declarer, has a couple of interesting hands up. (Yes, we’re dorks. But if Cosh can write about curling…)
The Nobel shortlist is out. (More like medium-length: there are 156 nominees.) I’ll leave Bono and Chirac to everybody else; it’s George Ryan who interests me. No matter what you think of capital punishment, how does a governor who commutes the sentences of 150 convicted murderers to life from execution contribute to world peace?
Too late; I should have read this before my last post. (Via Chris Bertram.)
Six hours today, from 11 to 5 EST. Finally straightened out my domain reregistration, which involved figuring out who registered me in the first place. Uptime remains at a solid 99%+, my poor organization notwithstanding.
Eddie Thomas of One Good Turn, a normally sensible man, takes up the cudgel for Hegel. (Twice!) This makes two rational people, him and Andrew Sullivan, describing Hegel as “great” in the space of a week. Has the world gone mad?
Eddie is impressed by Hegel’s breadth, and it is true: his works include a Philosophy of Law, a Philosophy of Aesthetics, a Philosophy of Mind, a Philosophy of Right, a Philosophy of Science, a couple of Logics, a Philosophy of History, a History of Philosophy, and several odds and ends. This would impress me more if any of these works were intelligible. “We ought to contemplate what knowledge means if all anyone can hope for is to have hold of just one piece of the puzzle,” writes Eddie. Maybe so. Fortunately Hegel lost no sleep over this question.
Then we have this:
Hegel’s generosity as a philosopher is second to none. For him, as for Parmenides, all speech must be a speech about something, even if that something isn’t entirely clear to the one speaking. Thus, there are no utterly false philosophies; the trick is to rescue the insights that motivate those philosophies and set aside the ways in which such philosophies are partial. There is still a kind of condescension involved, in that Hegel tells everyone else what they really mean, but it is an approach far superior to the polemical approach that looks to “refute” all competitors.
If my choice is “polemic” or to be patted on the head and told not to worry, my argument is just another a datum in the historical world-consciousness, happens to the best of us, then I’ll take polemic, thanks just the same. Preserve me from such generosity.
This most generous of all philosophers buried his greatest German contemporary, Schopenhauer, with silence, in the customary way court favorites deal with their obscure betters, much as Goethe treated Kleist. German even has a special word for this, Radler, or cyclist, from the posture: bent back above, legs pumping below. Eddie writes that Schopenhauer was “resentful”; quite so.
I characterized Hegel’s philosophy as “the apotheosis of the State,” which Eddie disputes with an anecdote, from Knox, about Hegel toasting the French Revolution every year on Bastille Day. He spares his readers any quotations from the master himself. I will be less solicitous. Hegel wrote on the State as follows:
The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth… We must therefore worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on earth, and consider that, if it is difficult to comprehend Nature, it is infinitely harder to grasp the essence of the State.
The State is the march of God through the world.
The State exists for its own sake… The State is the actually existing, realized moral life.
The really living totality, that which preserves, and continually produces, the State and its constitution, is the Government… In the Government, regarded as an organic totality, the Sovereign Power or Principate is the all-sustaining, all-decreeing Will of the State, its highest Peak and all-pervasive Unity. In the perfect form of the State in which each and every element… has reached its free existence, this will is that of one actual decreeing Individual (not merely of a majority in which the unity of decreeing will has no actual existence); it is monarchy.
…ultimate decision…absolute self-determination constitutes the power of the prince as such.
the absolutely decisive element in the whole…is a single individual, the monarch.
These are odd thoughts for a classical liberal.
Eddie says that my mocking Hegel for “proving” things like magnetizing iron increases its weight has nothing to do with his liberalism. True; but it might make a dent or two in his “greatness.” “If Aaron means that somehow he argues for these matters in an a priori fashion, I’ll let him supply the evidence.” Demanding that your interlocutor read Hegel is a shrewd tactic, even when arguing about Hegel; but of course he argued for these matters a priori. Does Eddie really believe these are lab results? A priori was the whole point. Any ordinary genius could induce Kepler’s laws from astronomical charts; only the greatest genius of all time could deduce them, without the benefit of any facts whatever. Hegel’s definition of heat may provide some insight into his method:
Heat is the self-restoration of matter in its formlessness, its liquidity the triumph of its abstract homogeneity over specific definiteness, its abstract, purely self-existing continuity, as negation of negation, is here set as activity.
Eddie warns us against the metaphysics of the scientists; he might also spare a thought for the science of the metaphysicians.
Hegel is one of the first allegedly serious thinkers to write nonsense, word salads with literally no meaning. (Parse the above passage on heat if you doubt me.) There is an excellent book to be written on nonsense, in which 19th century German idealist philosophy would figure prominently. Kant verged, in places, on nonsense; Schelling tipped over into it; and Hegel raised it to an art. Contemporary academics in the humanities, present company of course excepted, have no idea how much they owe to him.
“And I was just starting to think of these guys [me and Jim Ryan] as friends!” Eddie exclaims. We’re all still friends. Friends don’t let friends take Hegel seriously.
Why is nearly all war poetry anti-war, and not just now, but always? Stanley Kunitz thinks it’s because “[war] is contrary to the humanitarian position that is at the center of the poetic impulse.” Poets oppose war because they care more deeply about humanity than the rest of us. If this satisfies you then stop reading now, by all means.
A poem motivates, through technical means like rhythm, meter and rhyme, the emotion proper to its rational statement. Emotion derives from personal experience. Thus the statement of poetry tends to be personal. This is not to say that poems cannot make complex logical arguments. But these arguments will relate, in the end, to a personal experience.
War is, at the level of the statesmen (and the pundits), where one decides whether to wage it, or even at the level of the generals, where one decides how, as impersonal a subject as one could wish for. To decide rationally to wage war one must put one’s emotions aside, which is the opposite of what poetry asks you to do.
Therefore most poetry about war is written at the level of the soldier, the best of it often by the soldier, and it’s understandably not very favorable to the enterprise. For the soldier war is a bloody, muddy, destructive, terrifying, chaotic smash — hell, as Sherman said. At this disastrously personal level it is impossible to be pro-war: no one enjoys war, for itself, except the morally deranged. This poem by Yvor Winters limns the difficulty:
Night of Battle
Europe: 1944
as regarded from a great distance
Impersonal the aim
Where giant movements tend;
Each man appears the same;
Friend vanishes from friend.
In the long path of lead
That changes place like light
No shape of hand or head
Means anything tonight.
Only the common will
For which explosion spoke;
And stiff on field and hill
The dark blood of the folk.
Winters fiercely supported the Second World War, but this poem is neither pro nor anti. To support a war one must regard it “from a great distance,” while poetry tends, on the contrary, to regard matters up close. As much room as there is for the individual, there is that much room for poetry; when one disappears the other must as well.
This is why pro-war poetry like Kipling’s sounds like tub-thumping. Kipling had little poetic talent: his poetry resembles great poetry as Sousa marches resemble great music. But mostly he chose a medium that does not suit the subject.
The problem of war resembles the problem of “what is seen and what is not seen,” as Bastiat put it, in economics. Unsound economic policies like tariffs win support because the benefits are seen, while the costs are invisible, being good things that never happen. (Not coincidentally, very little poetry has been written on economics.) War is the opposite. The costs are seen, while the benefits are invisible, being bad things that never happen. All art, and poetry especially, deals best with what is seen. So poems about war will tend to be against, or ambivalent, but always myopic. Anyone looking for geopolitical wisdom from poetry should look elsewhere. And when faced with a subject that’s out of their ken, poets, like actors, should just shut up.
(Update: Jim Ryan comments.)
Another: Andrea Harris notes this pro-war poetry site. The poems are not very good, but they’re better than the anti-war stuff.)
As Steven Den Beste, Arthur Silber, and others have pointed out, war with Iraq is no longer an abstract question. We’ve already threatened Saddam with force, many times and with increasing shrillness, unless he disarms. He’s failed to do so, as everyone acknowledges, even Inspector Magoo and the French. Arthur writes:
But here is the problem that confronts us now: after all the posturing, preparations, and speech-making, especially over the past year, if we were to do nothing now, we might as well hand out engraved invitations to terrorists to come and attack us again. Paper tiger wouldn’t even begin to describe the problem. We might as well be defenseless — because, in effect, we would have rendered ourselves defenseless.
One could describe this policy as unilateral moral disarmament.
Opponents of the war continue to argue in a vacuum, as though we have not promised to disarm Saddam by any means necessary. It’s certainly possible to argue that we shouldn’t have made any such promise. What I’d like to see is an argument that, having promised to disarm him, we should then proceed not to do so. Just asking, is all.
Eddie Thomas at One Good Turn on what war really is.
Not Ayn Rand; Harvard Professor of Government Harvey Mansfield, in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Harvard is afraid to look ambition in the face. To Harvard, ambition and the responsibility that accompanies it look elitist and selfish. (“Elitist” is the fancy, political version of “selfish.”) Harvard gives its students to understand that the only alternative to selfishness is selflessness. Morality is held to be sheer altruism; it is service to the needy and the oppressed. A typical Harvard student spends many, many hours in volunteer work on behalf of those less fortunate. But what he or she plans for his own life — a career — seems to have no moral standing. To prepare for a career is nothing but to make a selection under the regime of choice. It is careerism — a form of elitism and selfishness — that seems unattractive even to those contemplating it.
Selfless morality is fragile and suspicious: Who believes a person who claims to be unconcerned with himself? Yet mere selfishness is beneath one’s pride. Harvard is caught between these two extremes; it has lost sight of its virtue. It cannot come to terms with the high ambition that everyone outside Harvard sees to be its most prominent feature.
(Courtesy of Erin O’Connor.)
Eugene Volokh complains that his C programs used to crash, and his JavaScript still does, because the languages distinguish comparison (==) from assignment (=). (Volokh, at 14 the world’s youngest law professor, also worked as a programmer for several years as a preadolescent.) On the one hand it’s a lousy idea to use the single equal sign for assignment. The best-known operator should be reserved for the best-known operation, which is comparison. Many other languages keep the equal sign for comparison and use other symbols (:=, .=, =:) for assignment instead. Java inherits much of its syntax from C, including the equal and double equal signs, with the annoying consequence that if we assign a boolean variable, say x, the value false, then in this code snippet:
if (x == true)
doSomething();
doSomething() will not execute, whereas in this one:
if (x = true)
doSomething();
it will. The second snippet, though shorter, contains two bits of business: we assign the value true to x, and we then evaluate x. In Java this is done right to left, so by the time we arrive at the if, x is true.
This is a smaller problem in Java, however, because Java is strongly typed. If x is a String, or an Integer, or anything but a primitive boolean, the line if (x = true) will not compile.
But annoying and confusing as this is, it still beats languages, like Visual Basic, that use the same symbol for comparison and assignment. Consider this legal statement:
a = b = c
Even if we assume an execution order of right to left this is ambiguous. It might mean “assign the value of c to b, then assign the value of b to a.” Or it might mean “assign true to a if b and c are equal, otherwise assign false to a.” No way to tell.
The first language, to my knowledge, to distinguish comparison from assignment was APL (A Programming Language) in the 1950s, in which a left arrow (<â €”) indicates assignment. There is a famous, perhaps apocryphal, story of Ken Iverson, APL's inventor, watching some hapless Fortran programmer increment a loop counter by typing a = a + 1. “But that’s false,” Iverson said.