In other news, I'm slowly getting used to my new reading glasses, which have been instrumental in my not getting piercing headaches after two or more hours of reading. Now, I only get headaches when I try to look at things more than three feet from my face while wearing my glasses! All-in-all, it's a good thing, since I'm having to do four or five hours of reading every day just to get by. As it is, I haven't left the university campus in nearly a month (except for groceries) and I'm still behind. On the upside, my T.A. class has finally moved past the Bible segment of the course, and moved on to St. Augustine. Since I'm already reading Augustine for my reading course with Prof. Emberley, it's a pretty convenient situation. Having, for the sake of teaching, to take time-off from my own reading in order to review the Gospels and the Epistles of St. Paul was definitely not an ideal situation.

At the moment, I'm thirteen books into Augustine's City of God, and a little over one-hundred and fifty pages into Volume IV of Voegelin's Order & History. In the meantime, I'm due to submit some sort of reflection paper on Voegelin and Michael Oakeshott, as well as one on the aforementioned Bishop of Hippo. I haven't really got an idea of what to write regarding the first topic -- I've got some vague interest in looking into Oakeshott's equation of poetic imagining with contemplation, and his presentation of contemplation as the activity of "delighting" -- and my thoughts on the second have me trying to parse-out the significance of the different doctrines of the Trinity which were adopted by the Eastern and Western churches...

Yeahhhhh... So I'll be thinking about Trinitarianism all weekend. If anyone wants to pop-in and shoot me at any time, please feel free! ;-)

It's been a while since I've taken to time to write a proper entry, so we'll have to make due with something like an executive summary of the month. The month began with a trip back to Montreal to visit Dove and to take her on a surprise visit to the Dalai Lama's lecture-appearance at Molson Stadium. Roughly half the stadium was open, and nearly every seat was filled -- I'd have to strain to even remember an empty spot anywhere below the most inaccessible bleachers. The evening began with a pair of performances; a traditional Tibetan number, and one solo-performance by a local Québecois artist whom I'm not familiar with. The talk itself was faced by a few technical difficulties involving the wireless mics; the local monk tasked with translating the Dalai Lama's talk into French couldn't get a working microphone to save is life. At one point, he was surrounded by six or seven different microphones, none of them working properly, and was quite literally becoming entangled in the cords. It was around that point that His Holiness joked that the poor fellow was being haunted by evil spirits... about two minutes before his own wireless mic stopped working! This, we may assume, is definite, empirical proof that evil spirits are indeed living in the Molson Stadium.

With the entire cast switching over to good-ole'fashioned wired mics, the rest of the talk went relatively smoothly. On a few occasions, His Holiness forgot himself a bit and spoke for nine or ten minutes before realizing that he hadn't given his fellow monk the chance to translate anything that he'd said. During those lengthy interludes, he took the time to do such things as wiggle the feeling back into his toes (he took off his shoes at the very beginning of the talk, and was sitting in a half-lotus position in his chair), to re-arrange his robe, and to dig through his bag full of earthly possessions for his sun-visor (the spotlights were rather bright). The audience, perhaps understandably, was almost a bit more fixated on the sight of a major religious leader on stage, wiggling his toes and wearing a bright-yellow sun-visor than they were on the translator's voice.

In any event, the talk, though not aiming at any deep esotericism, had a few revealing moments for those who were paying attention. One was the open profession that only two existing practices had, in a satisfactory way, addressed the fundamental necessity of the practice of compassion for existential fulfillment (obliquely referring to religious, social, economic, and political practice) -- the Theistic and Hindu-Buddhist, with the former vision finding its grounds for compassion in devotion to a God of love and reason, and the latter in the realization of the laws of causation (in the sense of karma) and their existential implications. He then put forth that it was the necessary task of human beings -- for the sake of evading the bloodiest deprivations of the 20th century -- to add to these two ways an essentially secular third-way, one which would justify compassionate practice to those of a secular bent. One senses the presence of a certain amount of upaya at play in this sort of speech, a sort of skillful pragmatism being exercised to persuade a skeptical audience, which was unlikely to leave the Stadium and immediately take up either the Faith or the dharma, but which might be convinced to think about things a bit, and maybe to adjust their own practice in day-to-day life...

"It is practically impossible to render the terms ascholia and schole adequately in English. In Greek (as in the Latin otium and negotium) leisure, schole, has the positive connotation, while business (ascholia) negatively denotes the absence of schole. The etymological connection with schein (from echo) suggests a stopping from activity, a rest, resulting in a "having of oneself" or holding of oneself, as the basic meaning, while ascholia would correspondingly suggest a losing of oneself in perpetual activity." -- Eric Voegelin, Order & History, Volume III, Book II, section 9, fn.11.

A couple of weeks ago, a paper of mine (The Concept of Plato: An Exegesis of the Sixth Through Eighth Lectures of Kojve's 1938-39 Series on the "Phenomenology of Spirit") was published in Gnosis, which is the graduate journal of Concordia University's philosophy department. I probably should have noted that in my log a bit earlier, but it just goes to show how distracted I've been lately.

In other news, my father and I are trying to work out an arrangement whereby it wouldn't be necessary to put Alex, Tiffy, and Beauty up for adoption. The jist of those efforts entails searching for friends or friends of friends willing to work as dog- or cat-sitters, and my father searching for another apartment. At the moment, the latter consists in seeing if my great Uncle B.C. happens to be selling-off any of his properties in LaSalle, and whether he would be interested in keeping the property within the family.

Meanwhile, I'm in the midst of another round of grant applications, this time to the SSHRC and FQRSC. I missed the deadline for the OGS applications, unfortunately, due to the fact that I couldn't figure out if I was eligible if I hadn't yet received an offer to study at an Ontario university in 2010. Apparently, I was, but that's a bit of water under the bridge.

PhD applications are also coming-up, but I've yet to put together a complete list of universities which would prove fruitful for studies on Michael Polanyi and Plato. I'll have spent most of an entire year studying Voegelin by the time I've finished my thesis, so I'll likely have gotten that out of my system for a bit. Funnily enough, one of the better Polanyi scholars in North America is my old undergrad prof, Prof. M.W. Poirier of Concordia U. Unfortunately, a PhD in political science from Concordia doesn't carry much gravitas with it...

'Still studying Ancient Greek (I need to memorize the present, past, and future participle declensions in active, middle, and passive voices by Wednesday, as well as the aorist tense), 'still T.Aing (this time on Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and the New Testament), and still trying to exercise regularly.

Somehow, I seem to be fitting it all in... Can you imagine that I wanted to pick-up Latin while doing all this?

Snipped from my friend Alisha's Facebook page: a review of John Paul II's Love and Responsibility. The general tone recalls to mind Plato's Symposium, though with less, errr... homoerotic tension.

I've just noticed (on my sixth reading of the book) that Plato wrote about the difference between inductive and deductive logic, formal and final causation, and the epistemology of the whole lot in Book VI, Stephanus 510b of The Republic. That would contradict Aristotle's claim that his old teacher only contributed the discovery of formal causation to material and efficient causes. In addition, if Voegelin's view of the over-arching meaning of the Republic-Timaeus-Critias trilogy is correct -- if the first is meant as the final nod to the philosophy of Socrates, the second to the Pythagoreans, and the last to the aristocratic tradition of Athens -- and the incidental remarks made by Adeimentus regarding the interests of the literary Socrates [506b] can be taken for generally true of the original model, then the first consideration of both formal and final causation would antedate even Plato, and originate with Socrates.

Interesting.

Edit: Originally wrote Stephanus [506a] when I meant to write [506b].

"Two Theological Languages" by George Grant

Assertion and thesis: "...Philosophy and theology are faith seeking understanding", "Theology... is necessary so that men may not forget the truths of the past... [and] so they may purge the past of its errors."

i) Thoughtful theology is necessary to communicate with a culture of educated specialists.
ii) The Presbyterian and Methodist traditions provide no such thing.
iii) These failures, by various creeds, to provide a message of unifying meaning applicable as equally to doctors as to engineers as businesspersons, leaves open the door to the naturalist church of psychiatry and social science.
iv) Theology must be rethought and relieved with every generation, with every crisis in which the temporal confronts the eternal.
v) Action proceeds from theory or theoretical understandings of purpose.

    Regarding the two theological languages which he is interested in describing, one is the Platonic/Aristotelian, from which Grant predicates the thought that "Reason not only gives us the idea of the highest good, but makes us desire that good", and that "freedom, means the individual's acceptance, conscious and intelligence of what he most truly is."

"Time as History" by George Grant

i) "Is Christianity fundamentally committed to the unicity of the historical process [linear time, with one sacrifice]? If so, one has to give up Platonism. I hope not, but I am not sure." (p.xxx) ed.note

ii) "Like sexuality, or religion, or music, language transcends the inward-outward distinction." (p.8)

iii) "Like food, language not only makes human existence possible, but can also confine it." (p.7)

iv) "The word 'history' [in the English world] does not mean a particular kind of reality, because it is used about all forms of reality [natural studies, religious studies, anthropology]." (p.11)

v) Man as accidental God, as the final God made by history, or as God's co-creator. (p.13)

vi) Those who "concieve time as history are turned towards...the future." (p.16)

vii) The determination to make the future different from the past; 'characteristic' (p.16)

viii) "Will" as also an "auxilary of the future tense" (p.17)

ix) The tension between [reasonable] planning for the future and necessity (p.18)

x) The greater ability of a collectivity to control chance. (p.18)

xi) "The presence of the future in out imagining is one reason why men are so effective in their doing." (p.19)

xii) "But human beings have more history [than birds] because they are capable of a more differentiated doing [due to our imagining of the future and power to plan; thus to introduce 'novelty']" (p.19)

xiii) Men more historical than animals, Western men more historical than others. (p.20)

xiv) 'Will' has seperated from both thinking and feeling. (p.21-22)

xv) Willing as the cessation of deliberation in favour of creating history, one way or another. (p.22)

xvi) "Desiring" as the language of dependence, distinct from the language of control expressed by "willing". (p.23)

xvii) Grant's re-reading of the Greek heroes, tacitly against Nietzsche, as meant to bring "into immediacy the beauty of a trusted order"; not a re-creation of a new one. (p.24)

xviii) "Upon our will to do has been placed the whole burden of meaning" [; meaning must be created in a act of will] (p.24)

xix) "The coming together of willing and reasoning lies essentially in the method [objectification] that has made possible the successes of modern science." (p.25)

xx) When Marx wrote of changing the world, he still belonged that changing was not an end in itself..." (p.26); now, endless negation. (p.27)

*Essay III*
xxi) The equal participation of the Greeks and the Bible in both thought and reverence. (p.29)

xxii) Philosophers study man as eternal, while Nietzsche, following Darwin argued for his historicity. (p.36)

xxiii) "Nietzsche uses the word 'bridge' to describe the human process... between the beasts we were and what we may yet be..." (p.37)

xxiv) Nietzsche and the finality of becoming (Heraclitean overtones). (p.37)

xxv) Nietzsche: natural science has purged other species of purpose, why not Man? (p.38); "Purpose" has been preserved only in the domain of morality, to save the idea of good and evil.

xxvi) Nietzsche laments the loss of the last, great horizon of Christianity, thus admitting chaos and the truth of meaninlessness into the world. (p.38-41)

xxvii) "Only that which has no history can be defined." (p.41)

*Essay IV*
xxviii) The last man and the nihilists at the end of history (p.44-46)
        a) The last men: secularized Christians with a bare, dry, inherited rationality (p.45), base happiness.
        b) The nihilists: cannot give-up their will. (p.45-46), those who have nothing to will v. those who would will nothing. (p.46)

xxix) Neither deserves to be masters of the Earth. (p.47)

xxx) Nietzsche: progression without necessity, "Marx without a safety net or pseudo-Christian faith". (p.48)

xxxi) " I may be allowed to note that the absence of all nets is a truth that those of us who trust in God must affirm." -- Grant, (p.48)

xxxii) Nazis' "hysterical self-pity" disqualified them (along with their vengefulness) from being ubermensch. (p.49)

xxxiii) "Should the last-men or the nihilists control the e-media (an aside on Leni Reisenshtahl)" (p.50)

xxxiv) The will denied and the spirit of revenge (p.51); history as revenge events.

xxxv) Amor fati as teh overcoming of the spirit of vengeance (p.54); outside of the shelter of eternity (as in Plato, Christianity).

*Essay V*
xxxvi) The revolt of the youth in N.A. strikes deeper notes of Nietzsche than Marx. (p.58)

xxxvii) "The thought of Nietzsche is a fate for modern men..." (p.58), "In partaking in it, we can come to judgements about the modern project..."

xxxviii) "[Time as history] It is not a conception we are fitted for." (p.58)

xxxix) Intimations of perfection goes against amor fati. (p.60)

xxxx) Nietzsche's contemplation of endless time (not timelessness) would not free us from the spirit of revenge, but "drive men mad". (p.60)

xxxxi) Amor fati would require us to love the technological necessity which created our circumstances. (p.63)

"Technology and Justice" by George Grant

One quote which summarizes the theme of Grant's book: "Take what you want;" said God, "take it, and pay for it." -- Spanish proverb (from preface

0) Three threads of thought or argument: (which play into his final argument on justice)

• i) "technology" as the very essence of modern civilization, which has come to shape the very way we think and perceive, thus altering our "civilizational destiny";
• ii) a comparison of our "technological civilization" to that of the Ancients (Greek and Christian chiefly).
• iii) an analysis of the theoretical sources (cf. Nietzsche, Kant, Bacon) of this novel Age.

I) Grant's "technology": (characteristics)

• i) Co-penetration of knowing and making.
• ii) The belief that technology and technical knowledge are the means to universal liberty and equality.
• iii) The impersonal objectification of nature, the natural world... and now human beings.
• iv) A disinterest or disdain for forms of knowledge which aren't positivistic and don't contribute to making.
• v) An exaltation of what is possible over what is given.

II) Grant's Ancient civilization: (mainly Platonic and Christian)

• i) Knowledge/scientific knowledge separate from techne.
• ii) An emphasis on embracing Otherness rather than seeking to control it.
• iii) A de-emphasizatio of personal willfulness in one's relationship to the Other/the Given.

III) The sources of modernity: (cf. Kant, Nietzsche)

• i) Kant's exaltation of the intellect/reason as the basis of morality and society.
• ii) Nietzsche's dismissal of the noumenal order and embrace of the irrational will standing before the Abyss.
• iii) Contractualism.
• iv) Skepticism without trust.

Timeline:
Lack of trust (Descartes) --> technical science used to control and unravel nature (Bacon) --> technical results --> triumphalism --> Kant realizes the inability to "know" the noumenal order --> noumenal order dismissed --> contractualism begins to lose belief in "owing" to a "given" --> Nietzsche overturns rationalism and re-emphasizes the Will-to-Power through the technical fruits.

IV) What then does Grant think technology mean for justice?

• i) The disbelief in out "owing" anything to a given (or even the very existence of a given order).
• ii) The call for the dispassionate objectification of research subjects.
• iii) The drive to radically alter the world and ourselves in search of "quality of life" (Nietzsche).
• iv) The subjectivization of beauty, the ridicule of love of the Other, and the anthropocentrizing of "Good"...

V) ...Leads to:

• i) A belief that justice is only the fulfillment of contracts between rational beings.
• ii) That justice could only be something created by "Man" rather that something intrinsic to the cosmos.
• iii) That "justice" becomes little more than the exercising of the ubermench's will, through technology, upon a pliable world for the sake of "quality of life".

*Preface*
i) Grant's concern with technology as fate.
ii) Concern with the quest for conquest of "human and non-human nature".
iii) His organizing thought: "Take what you want, said God, take it and pay for it", Spanish proverb (p.9).
iv) Thus, he explored the consequences (or price) of our discovery of this paradigm of knowledge.

*Chapter 1*
I) The word "technology", as opposed to "technique", captures the novelty of the age.

• i) The co-penetration of knowing and making for the purposes of mastery (p.12).
• ii) Versus the lack of such a desire in Greek, Chinese, and Sanskrit civilizations (p.13).
• iii) The expectation that this mastery will bring about a world of free and equal people, without poverty or hunger (p.15)
• iv) Plato's warning is now a forseeable reality, yet our response is to call upon to technology to fix things (p.15-16).

II) To meet the goals of modern society, and to curb its problems...

• i) Technology is now called upon to master human nature in both developed and undeveloped countries (p.16).
• ii) Yet the inclination is always to master others, rather than ourselves (p.16).
• iii) Psychology and psychiatry are wedded to administration a law-enforcement (p.16-17).
• iv) Biochemistry, in turn, justified by physics, is recruited by the social sciences.
• v) ...all the while human betterment is the agreed-upon goal.

III) What is so novel?

• i) In the eyes of moderns, it is the systematic application of reason for the creation of instruments for our use (p.17-19).
• ii) A computer scientist: "The computer doesn't impose upon us the ways it should be used." (p.19)
• iii) ... clearly a statement meant to alleviate public anxiety (p.20).
• iv) ... but the manufacture of computers requires a certain type of society, inhabited by massive corporations, whose operation itself demands both the devices, and society, to be deployed in a fashion that enables the manufacture of *more* computers (p.21-23).
• v) ... furthermore, computers are developed from within the new paradigm of knowledge which assumes a particular end in all makings (p.22-23).
• vi) ... the existence of computers is a byproduct of our 'civilizational destiny' (p.22); those set of presuppositions about the world that are taken for granted.
• vii) Why is it novel? Because the ease with which classification (pigeonholing) can be done in a sophisticated technological state increases the tempo of the homogenizing process (p.23). The car as an example of a "neutral" yet homogenizing technology.
• viii) Because the modern argument concerning *justice* merely argues about which ideology will make the best use of technology for the emancipation of human kind (p.26).
• ix) Because in our love of freedom, we think ourselves "free" from technology, yet are blind to the slavery required to bring it into being (p.27-29).
• x) Because we have a difficult time condemning as "wrong" or "unjust" any action or technology which has no immediate problems or consequences (p.33). All objections cite "problems", but if we can't think of any...
• xi) **Because the possible is exalted above what is** (p.34).

*Chapter II, Faith and the Multiversity*

I) The multiversity desires "objective" knowledge of "objects of study", as opposed to (p.35-57):

• i) Erotic science; the love of the other in its otherness (p.38-40) (Darwin as example, p.63). The former disposition lends itself to self-centeredness, to the belief that our survival depends on our efforts alone, and a solipsistic disposition towards others, even in sexuality.
• ii) ... this is Plato's mad, self-centered tyrant, who abhors true otherness. "Hell is other people" vs. "Hell is to be one's own" (p.39, 43).
• iii) "Faith is the experience in which intelligence is enlightened by love" -- Weil (p.38) vs. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

II) Platonic v. Objectivist thought

• i) While the "objective" reasoner attempts to maintain an emotional distance from the object of study, Plato stressed the need to love the other in order to hope to know it in its otherness, to accept its otherness and not destroy it.
• ii) The beauty of the other/the given v. detachment from it.
• iii) Love as a necessity for understanding v. Love as an obstruction to knowledge.

III) The Good and the Beautiful (p.40-41)

• i) Whereas the Platonic understanding identified the Beautiful with the Good, and vice versa, the word Good has first been stripped (to ethical-good), and then replaced with Value.
• ii) Beauty, of course, has been subjectivized into a quality bestowed upon an object by the beholder, rather than something intrinsic to the thing itself.

"Technology and Empire" by George Grant

    It would seem that Grant's history of the technological disposition of North America might be summed-up thusly:

i) Calvinists  (radical inscrutability of God, rejection of natural theology and the Greeks, will needed for the creation of God's kingdom on Earth).
    *adopt*
ii) Contractualism (rejects natural theology, will needed for the creation of a social contract).
    *and adopt*
iii) Technological science (useful for the the creation of the "city on the hill" in the confrontation with the primal wilderness).

    Ultimately, though, these beliefs are not compatible. One must go.

*Essay II*

    The most important thought in this essay is on the place of religion in a progressivist liberal society within the specific cnotext of the Ontario School Question of the 1960s. In summary: should religion be taught in school, and, if yes, which religion? Grant's (abbreviated) answer: a constitutional state must have some involvement in religious matters, if only to prevent the spread of creeds which might undermine it. However, neither pragmatism nor natural theology can say what, if any, religion may be considered most 'true', and cannot put-forth a candidate for the 'true' religion, but only possible 'public' religions or civil theologies.

    Conservatives, for Grant, solve this dilemma by simply sticking with tradition when they themselves have no true religion (or in spite of tehir own beliefs). The problem in Ontario is the lack of any such clear, unmuddled, and shared tradition among the ruling classes; particularly given the (then newfound) sacralization of 'efficiency' and the implied positivistic goals to which efficient action strains. The danger in such a situation is that the Church will truly be 'used' in the sense of put-to-work, for the purposes of such dreary, positivistic individuals.

*Essay III*

i) Technological progress is the religion of modernity.
ii) England (the UK) was the first modern culture.
iii) The US and Canada were founded by that most modern empire.
iv) No relevant ties bind Canadians, now, to traditions preceeding modernity.
    a) Even Quebecers are buying-in (Quiet Revolution).
    b) Out "Locke with a dash of Anglicanism" has given way to simply Locke.
v) Those who feel alienated from their societies/Empires have only other progressive cultures to run to (Sartre), drugs, or nothing.
vi) Man is zoon politikon, and does not have the option of simply opting-out.

"Philosophy in the Mass Age, Essay 1", by George Grant

I) The old traditions are losing their grip and influence

• i) The spread of corporation capitalism -- even to Nova Scotia (p.5).
• ii) The assimilation of art and church for the edification of the new system (p.9-10).
• iii) The assimilation of reason and education to the purposes of control and domination of nature and others; pragmatism & Dewey, William James (p.10-11).
• iv) Mass repression, but also the potential for liberation result with the elimination of scarcity (p.12-13)

II) The Owl of Minerva takes wing at twilight."; perhaps the best of the oppressed youth will be driven to philosophy and theology (p.13).

III) "By their fruits you shall know them." (p.14)

• i) Philosophy as the negation of the self, self-transcendence, and negation of what is most dear to society (p.15)
• ii) Modern man: Man makes history, 'meaning' created in unique acts (p.15).
• iii) Ancient man: Living out divinely established patterns, 'meaning' a given, ritual a re-enactment of an archetype, samsara and cycles (p.16-17)(p.18-19).
• iv) History as a process v. History as irrelevant (p.19-20).
• v) Important now: engineers, businesspeople and administrators -- those who change the world (p.22).
• vi) Not important now: idle lovers, artists, pray-ers, and thinkers -- the old and the useless (p.22).

"Philosophy in the Mass Age, Essay III" by George Grant
"Natural Law"

I) "Only a madman could maintain that the distinction between honourable and dishonourable, between virtue and vice is only a matter of opinion" -- Cicero, "a practicing lawgiver" (p.32)

II) "Aristotle once said that the belief that there was a moral law depended ultimately on how we interpreted the movement of the stars (an allusion to final cause)." -- Grant, (p.28)

III) Modern "philosophy" turns reasoned minds away from the question of meaning and purpose, to practical pursuits which satisfy the passions by dismissing the natural law or its very invocation. All law is argued to be conventional." (p.32-33)

IV) Modern Man no longer considers himself as part of the natural order or subject to a divine law. "We are authentically free since nothing beyond us limits what we should do." -- Grant, (p.38)

V) Hegel's "cunning of reason" -- the unintended effects of acts such as Luther's. (p.39)

VI) Judaism replaced the religions of re-enactment and eternal re-occurance with the revelation of a God who intervenes continuously in history, along with a final purpose represented by the redemption by the Messiah. The "Great Day", therefor, was no longer in the past, but the future." (p.40-41)

VII) "Time no longer repeats itself endlessly as the moving image of an unmoving eternity." -- Grant, (p.41)

VIII) "It becomes, rather, the vehicle of God's will." -- Grant, (p.41)

IX) "As belief in God was driven from men's minds it was not (as in the classical world) replaced by a sad humanism [of whittling away time pleasantly...] but with a progressive humanism." -- Grant, (p.46)

"Philosophy in the Mass Age, Essay VI" by George Grant
"American Morality"

I) "Do we reject spiritual freedom and law more or less than marxism?" (p.76)

II) The N.A. of today is built upon the ashes of Puritanism -- a unique occurance in the world (p.77); our moral language is thus inherited from them.

III) "Calvinism was an immensely practical faith [as opposed to the mysticism of Lutheranism]" (p.77)

IV) Hidden God, totally transcendent, no natural law or other "hints" outside of the Bible of revelation (p.78).

V) "One could only contemplate God in Jesus Christ, and go out and act as best one could" (p.78)

VI) Calvinist egalitarianism -- a priesthood of believers.

VII) Sputnik elicited a sigh of relief -- "Finally, a practical goal... further excuse not to think about what will make life meaningful after practical problems are settled." (p.81)

VIII) N.A. pragmatism:

• i) James and Dewey claimed to be freeing us from Protestant transcendentalism (p.83).
• ii) In reality, theirs is a Protestant humanism (Santayana) (p.83); (observe their telling attacks on Greek thought and emphasis of work in the world).
• iii) "An idea is true as long as it is expedient in our lives" -- William James.
• iv) "To believe in the absolute, James said, was to take a moral holiday." -- Grant (p.83).
• v) Pragmatism is thus progressivism without end.
• vi) Captures the popular imagination and its focus on ordinary comforts in life (p.84).

IX) Commentary on pragmatism (Grant):

• i) Is a philosophy which exalts action and life over thought, cannot condemn any action as categorically wrong.
• ii) Any such philosophy is iniquitous (p.85).
• iii) "As would be expected from its Puritan origins, pragmatism has a fuller account of freedom than law." (p.87)
• iv) Dewite education has produced students where there is intellect without purpose (p.88).

"Philosophy in the Mass Age, Essay VI" by George Grant
"The Limits of Progress"

I) Why Marxism failed in the West but succeeded in the East.

• i) It actually subordinates human freedom to the "objective conditions of the world". (p.66)
• ii) After being made even cruder by Engels, then Lenin, the Party came to ruthlessly suppress individuality with newfound "scientific" justification. (p.67)
• iii) Marxism in the East was adapted to simple, materialist, practical goals rather than the realization of human freedom; it could not address the spirit of freedom which the West had already gone through (p.67).
• iv) Freedom has actually been suppressed for the sake of practical objectives (p.67).
• v) Eastern Marxism does away with those very Christian, escatological goals which were at its heart.

II) Ancient v. Modern (p.70-71)

• i) Acceptance of the conditions of life v. the rebellion against them.
• ii) Acceptance or not in the relationship with the world.
• iii) Acceptance or not in our relationship with each other.
• iv) Acceptance of God v. negative, then positive, rejections of God as a limit.

"Philosophy in the Mass Age, Essay VIII and Appendix II" by George Grant
"Law, Freedom, and Progress"

I) "How can we think an absolute morality that does not deny human freedom and the hope that evil will be overcome?" -- Grant, (p.91)
II) "It is indeed the failure to resolve this contradiction [of the unchangableness of God, together with the God who works in history] which makes me unable to accept any of the traditional theologies as adequate." -- Grant, (p.91)
III) "The justification of moral law would involve showing that without such a conception [that all of our agonies] must count as nothing, and why they do not so count." (p.93)
IV) Modern Protestantism condemned for being an uncharitable, uncommunicative, intellectual ghetto (p.94).
V) A moral language must be concerned with communication; appeal to faith insufficient (p.95).

"Appendix II"

I) Written in 1966; seven years after the original publication.

II) "If a man still hungers for the bread of eternal life in the midst of the modern dynamism, he must seek to satisfy that hunger, even though he knows his talents are limited." (p.118)

III) Living traditions all destroyed, most turn back to the past.

IV) Grant's loss of faith in the reconciability of the old traditions with the new (p.119)

• i) ...loss of faith in Hegel (p.120).
• ii) ...loss of trust in human redemption in the form of leisure (p.120).

V) Hegel did not do better than Plato (p.121-122)

VI) Thanks to Strauss (p.122).

Day three of my second year at Carleton University began with my immediate awareness that it was both a) twelve in the afternoon, and b) that I had cramps all over my body as a result of too much promenading about the city with friends following a day of lifting heavy boxes. After breakfast/lunch, while sitting at the cafeteria counter with a caffeinated beverage, I had the time to recall the previous night, and to relate it, with new found appreciation, to the problems outlined in Plato's Gorgias. Specifically, the problem of speaking to an enlightened nihilist. In the dialogue, Socrates is faced with the challenge of carrying on a civil dialogue with three consecutive figures of the Sophistic Enlightenment in Athens -- Gorgias the Orator; his younger and less decent student, Polus; and the completely indecent politician Callicles.

As the dialogue proceeds, the tension mounts while the direction and end of the conversation changes. With Gorgias, conversation merely reveals that the relatively decent man is doing a less than bang-up job of instilling a sense of justice into his pupils -- a failing which the sophist is existentially healthy enough to recognize as an embarrassment. His pupil, Polus, however, seems to be lacking his teacher's basic sense of decency (which only furthers Gorgias' embarrassment), for he is determined to demonstrate that Socrates too secretly believes that that which society deems "injustice" is preferable to "justice" for those strong enough to get away with it; Socrates, he charges, is only making tricky logical arguments to trip-up his opponents for the sake of winning-out in conversation, while actually conniving in their disdain for the moral "conventions" of the polis. In the end, however, Polus is forced to admit that his own definitions of "justice", "injustice", "strong", "excellent", and so forth lead to the logical conclusion that justice is in fact preferable to injustice. Though he is beaten logically, however, he remains existentially unbowed; though logic has forced him to admit the superiority of justice, he still desires the lifestyle of the perfectly unjust man -- the tyrant. In his confusion of opinions, he is forced to lapse into a sulking silence.

Callicles, however, has no qualms whatsoever in taking-up the banner of "injustice" and pressing it with full vigour, and, in the end, remains unconvinced and unpersuaded that he is, in effect, spiritually diseased -- full of contrary opinions and desires which threaten to wreak havoc on the political order of Athens. For, while the spiritual disorder of a Polus, a by-gone era's graduate student, might be put off as a merely personal failing, the disorder of the ruling class threatens to spill-out and overturn order of the city itself. And, in the democracy of Athens, the ruling class is the demos itself, represented in its menagerie of demagogues, which includes Callicles...

One perennial question which is thus presented by the dialogue is one that is increasingly apropos to our own era: what is one to do to persuade others of the value of decency and justice when everyone "knows" that human existence is nothing more than the mad scramble to fulfill their natural desires and impulses to eat, drink, copulate, reproduce, and to dominate others for the sake of doing so without limits -- when everyone "knows" in their guts that they're but the conveyance for so many thousands of selfish genes?

These are the concerns which come-up the morning after speaking frankly with Canadian university graduates.

I felt an urge towards self-castigation earlier this evening, in view of the seemingly poor progress which I've made in my Summer readings -- I'm only up to volume three of Order and History, for instance. Then the throbbing in my eyes prodded me to remember that I've been driving myself blind, and so it might be a bit too much to level a charge of sloth or laziness.

Presentation notes, March 2009, Carleton University
"The Human Condition" by Hannah Arendt, ch.2 "The Public and the Private Realm"

Cyclical time
i) Animal existence of birth, labour, death, ad infinitum; maintainance and perpetuation of species
ii) Human existence as a member of the species, which is immortal or eternal

Linear existence
i) ...but individuals experience themselves to be unique events in history.
ii) ...know themselves to be unique events which threaten to pass away forever.
iii) Hence, a concern with finding immortality.
iv) Greeks and Romans develop the public realm as a forum for speech and deeds; immortality.
v) ...but must escape necessity and labour to do so. Transcend species-fate/cycle.

Private realm -- Hierarchy, labour, necessity, unending household management, rulership, shame, survival.
Public realm -- isonomia, freedom from both rulership and being ruled, un-necessary, action, honour, braving death for the sake of eudaimonia (the good life).

Barriers/Walls
i) To maintain the dignity of the public and protect the necessity of the private, the one should not cross the boundary into the other's realm.
ii) Private property was thus respected, for citizens needed to take care of necessity/labour for the sake of entering the public realm and questing for immortality.
iii) Private matters also too shameful for political consideration, too animalistic.

Social realm/Society
i) Mixes characteristics of both the public and the private within itself.
ii) Characteristics which are unique to itself; hybrid.
iii) Conformity, family unit writ large, no-man rule (rulership without personality), bureaucracy, concern with social status, dissolution of individual into their status/class/job, restrictive, equalizing, knows neither shame nor honour, over-riding concern is with the...
iv) Engorgement of the life process, metabolism with nature.

"The Human Condition, ch.6" by Hannah Arendt
"Vita Activa and the Modern Age"

• On the mapping of the world and the loss of horizons (p.250)
• "Not destruction but conservation is the enemy of modernity." (p.253)
• Expropriation --> world alienation (p.253)
• Property --> wealth --> world alienation (p.253)
• Cartesian egotism and the spirit of capitalism (world alienation) (p.254)
• Wealth and labour --> capital (p.255); capital --> expropriation --> capital
• Society, social classes have replaced family in the new life-process (p.256)
• Nation-state became to society what homestead was to the family (p.256)
• Unification (blending) of Earth & Sky (loss of boundries) in modern physics (p.262)
• Archimedian point, standpoint outside of nature and the world (p.269)
• Dichotomy between technical ability and prudence (p.270)
• Greek thaumadzein v. Cartesian doubt (p.273)
• Kierkegaard and Cartesian doubt (p.275)
• Loss of certainty in salvation (p.277-8)
• Lying suddenly becomes a sin (p.278)
• Knowing through making (p.282)
• Common-sense v. common-sense (p.283)
• Modern science as vita contemplativa (im-practical) (p.289)
• Homo faber and science (p.294-5)
• Aristotle elevates technical knowledge above the practical?? (p.301)
• Homo faber always at the head of the vita contemplativa (p.304)
• Ancient v. modern hedonism (Epic v. Bentham) (p.310-11)
• Two reversals (of dyads) which made the modern world (p.320)
• Why the polis? To provide a forum for extraordinaty deeds and then immortalization (p.197); i.e. Pericles' Funeral oration
• The political realm rises [thus] directly out of acting together, "the sharing of words and deeds" [logon kai pragmaton koinonein] Aris, (p.198)
• The polis exists for the sake of immortalizing great deeds (p.198)
• Definition of "power", anti-Weberian (p.200); Strength-Force-Power
• Tyrants and force (p.202); tyranny destroys power, undermines itself
• The will-to-power and the weak (p.203)
• Power preserves the public realm, but needs the raison d'etre of speech and action (p.204)
• The polis as means for immortal action, unaided by homo faber (p.204)

Animal	Greatest Good
zoon politikon	immortal speech and deeds
homo faber	immortal works
animal laborans	life itself, p.208

*But even these later two need a public realm in order to onto reality, though they subvert politics to their own ends.

• "No man [no artistic genius] can truly reify himself, disclose himself" (p.211)
• Knowing = making in modernity (p.228)
• The language of efficiency (p.229), language of means and ends
• The false identification of freedom and sovereignty (p.234-5)
• Putting an end to action with forgiveness and promises (p.236)
• Non-political action can have no forgiveness or promises, thus no end (p.237)

Practiced mindfulness today, un-mindfully embarked on the wrong bus, but then spent an hour at the gym. I later read a bit of Eric Voegelin's interpretation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, which I found to be quite interesting and illuminating (Why should you care about an ancient playwright called Aeschylus, you may ask? Well, for starters, he sharply affected or inspired a range of figures including Socrates, Plato, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Campbell...). Also, found Marc; will proceed in hunting him down a bit later.

"The Human Condition, ch.5" by Hannah Arendt
"Action"

Part 31
(I) The Traditional Substitution of Making for Action
i) Stemming from the threefold exasperation with action:

1. Unpredictability of its outcome


2. Irreversibility of the process


3. Anonymity of its authours (p.220)

ii) Which arise from the human condition of plurality
iii) The commonly proposed solution is to treat politics as another sort of fabrication, requiring:

1. Mastery (mon-archy) (p.223)


2. Seperation of those who know from those who do not (p.223)


3. Bringing together of beginning and achieving (archein kai prattein) i.e. control of processes (p.222)

iv) The violence required for making is thus transposed and justified in the political realm (p.228)
v) The language of "means and ends" will tend to overpower all moral qualifications (p.229)

1. This language is endemic in all classical talk of higher "ends" (p.229)

Part 32
(I) The Process Character of Action
i) Exploration of natural laws
ii) Fabrication of objects out of natural material replaced with...
iii) Acting into nature, and beginning new and spontaneous processes; "basic research is what I am doing what I don't know what I'm doind -- Werner Von Braun, Dec. 16, 1957; the attempts to eliminate action because of its uncertainty has resulted in its re-channeling. (p.230)

(II) The Unpredictability of Action
i) "While the strength of the production processes is entirely absorbed in and exhausted by the end product..."
ii) "...the strength of action processes is never exhausted in a single deed but, on the contrary, can grow while its consequences multiply;"
iii) "...what endures is the realm of human affairs are these processes, and their endurance is as unlimited, as independent of the perishability of material and the mortality of men as the endurance of humanity itself... action has no end." (p.232-3)

(III) In-sovereignty over Action
i) He who acts never quite knows what he is doing.
ii) He always becomes "guilt" of consequences he never intended or had even forseen.
iii) He can never undo his deed.
iv) Only the historian, who does not act, may look back upon the deed or event, and disclose its meaning (p.233-4)

(IV) Turning Away from Action
i) Freedom is condemned of luring man into necessity -- a net of predetermined relationships.
ii) Salvation from this kind of freedom seems to lie in non-action, in abstention (Quietism or Stoicism)
iii) But only in monotheistic systems can sovereignty and freedom be the same; in all other cases it is imaginary.
iv) "If we look upon freedom with the eyes of the tradition... the simultaneous presence of freedom [to begin processes] and non-sovereignty... seems almost to force us to the conclusion that human existence is absurd [i.e. existentialism], [or tragic, i.e. Kant]." (p.243-5)

Part 33
(I) Irreversibility & the Power to Forgive
i) "We have seen that the animal labourans could be redeemed from its predicament of imprisonment in the ever-recurring cycle of the life process only through..."
ii) "...the capacity for making, fabricating, and producing of homo faber, who as a toolmaker not only eases the pain and trouble of labouring but also erects the world of durability."
iii) "The redemption of life, which is sustained by labour, is worldliness, which is sustained by fabrication."
iv) "We saw furthermore that homo faber could be redeemed from his predicament of meaninglessness, the 'devaluation of all values' and the impossibility of finding valid standards in a world determined by the category of means and ends, only through interrelated faculties of action and speech, which produces meaningful stories as naturally as fabrication produces use objects."
v) The redemption for those comes from activities outside of themselves.
vi) The redemption from the irreversibility and unpredictability of action comes from action: the faculty of forgiving against irreversibility, and promising against unpredictability. (p.236-7)

(II) Forgiveness, radical evil, and revenge
i) "...men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish..."
ii) "...and they are unable to punish has turned-out to be unforgivable. This it... [Kant's] 'radical evil'... All we know is that we can neither punish nor forgive such offenses and that they therefor transcend the realm of human affairs and the potentialities of human power, both of which they radically destroy...:
iii) It is nor completely true that love [being unworldly] is necessary for forgiveness; respect may do as well. (p.242-3)

Part 34
(I) Unpredictability and the Power of Promise
i) While forgiving, perhaps due to its connection to unworldly love, has oft been deemed unfit for the public realm.
ii) The promise has been with is since Roman Law (pacta sunt servanda) and the covenantary drive of Abraham. (p.243-4)

(II) The Purpose of Promising
i) To work against "the darkness of the human heart"... of men who can never guarantee who they will be tomorrow.
ii) ...and against the impossibility of for-telling the consequences of an act... where everyone has the same capacity.
iii) It is the only alternative to mastery which relies on domination of one's self and rule over others.
iv) "It corresponds exactly to the existence of a freedom which was given under a condition of non-sovereignty -- * "The moment promises lose their character as isolated islands of certainty in an ocean of uncertainty, that is, when this faculty is misused to cover the whole ground of the future and to map out a path secured in all direction, they lose their binding power, and the whole enterprise becomes self-defeating." (p.244)

(III) Natality v. mortality
i) Action ontologically rooted in natality
ii) Action is man's one miracle-working faculty, which allows him to start something new, break out of cycle.
iii) Fullness of this faculty only realized w. Jesus' insights into the miracle of forgiving.
iv) This faith in natality most gloriously expressed in the NT, 'glad tidings: A child has been born to us.'"

"The Human Condition, ch.4" by Hannah Arendt
"Work"

Quotes --
i) "...in a strictly utilitarian world, all ends are bound to be of short duration and to be transformed into means for some other end." (p.154)
ii) The end (the experience of instrumentality) literally justifies the means employed by homo faber (violence against nature). (p.153)
iii) "The perplexity... of all consistent utilitarianism... can be diagnosed theoretically as an innate capacity to understand the distinction between utility and meaningfulness... "in order to" and "for the sake of". (p.154)
iv) "It is 'for the sake of' usefulness in general that homo faber judges and does everything in terms of 'in order to'. The ideal of usefulness itself, like the ideals of other societies, can no longer be conceived as something needed in order to have something else; it simply defies questioning about its own use." (p.154)
vi) "Obviously, there is no answer to the question which Lessing put to the utilitarian philosophers of his time 'And what is the use of use?'". (p.154)
vii) "The 'in order to' has become the content of the 'for the sake of'; in other words utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness." (p.154)
viii) "The only way out of the dilemma of meaninglessness in all strictly utilitarian philosophy is to turn away from the objective world of use things and fall back upon the subjectivity of use itself." (i.e. man becomes the end) (p.155)
ix) "Yet the tragedy is that in the moment that homo faber seems to have found fulfillment in terms of his own activity, he begins to degrade the world of things... if man the use use the highest end, 'the measure of all things', then not only nature... but the 'valuable' things themselves have become mere means, losing their own intrinsic 'value'." (p.155)
x) "[Homo fabers'] perplexity lies in the fact that while only fabrication... is capable of building a world, this same world becomes as worthless as the employed material, a mere means to further ends, if the standards which governed its coming into being are permitted to rule after its establishment." (p.156)

On Protagoras -- "Man is the measure of all use-things..." (p.157)
On Kant -- Confusion of utility and meaningfulness in language. (p.154)
On the humiliation of great artists by their work. (p.210)

"The Human Condition, ch.2" by Hannah Arendt
"The Public and the Private Realm"

Language shift

• "Political" & "social" first confused in language when term translated from Greek to Latin
• Thoroughly confused w. Christianity and Aquinas "homo est naturaliter politicus, id est, socialis" (p.23)
• Aquinas mistakenly compares kingship to the pater familias, thus confusing political rule with household management (p.27)
• Modern language confuses "politics" with "economics", ie. "political economy" (p.28)
• The non-political activities concerned with survival of the species (ie. household management) thereby come to eclipse the political (public) realm.

Property

• Formerly, no respect of property in modern sense, rather knowledge that the household was the necessary pre-condition for participation in the world (p.30)

Private

• Hierarchical (p.31); slavery, rulership, division of labour, economic
• Associated with "privation" (p.38)
• Concerned with survival (p.30)
• Considered beneath the political (p.31)
• A necessary pre-condition to be transcended when and as much as possible (p.31)
• Cyclical labour, cyclical gods of the underworld (ie. Hades) who drive the life-death process (p.30).
• Life itself threatened where necessity eliminated (p.70-71); intimately tied together, eliminates distinction between freedom and necessity.
• Lack of privacy, of shelter from public, of a darkness to rise from, results in shallowness (p.71)
• Critique of modern, capitalist, private property arguments (p.72)
• Women and slaves hidden due to their labouring for the sake of bodily processes/functions, functions which must be hidden (p.72)
• Private/public; necessity/freedom; futility/permanence; shame/honour (p.73)

Public

• Isonomia (p.32); freedom from rulership, from being ruled, and from necessity
• Not concerned with survival, there one braved death (p.35-36)
• Transcended the biological life process (p.37)
• For the sake of the "good life", eudaimonia, not the sake of biological life (p.37).
• Associated with appearance, which "for us" constitutes reality (p.50)
• Pain (p.51); subjectivity, defies appearance
• Twilight of the private depends on the light of the public (p.51)
• Relevant->public; irrelevant->private (p.51)
• Love->private; friendship->public (p.52)
• Irrelevance, charm of small things "petits bonheurs" of the private, symptom of the retreat of the public (p.52)
• When the world loses it power to gather (p.53), world-gathering
• Christian charity as a different gathering-call (p.53), worldless-gathering
• Associated with immortality (p.55)
• Immortality now associated with the vice of vanity (p.56)
• Immortality requalified by Smith/society as another desire/pain to be dealt with (p.56)
• The problem of worldless/spaceless public administration; futile (p.56)
• Objectivity through many perspectives (p.57)
• The loss of plural perspective (p.58); trapped in subjectivity
•  
• Social -- Conformity (p.39); requires members to act as if they were part of one enormous family
• Excludes action (p.40)
• Bureaucracy is "the most social form of government" (p.40)
• No-man rule, rulership w/o a personality (to incarnate or represent it) (p.40)
• The arising of intimacy in reaction to the loss of the public as a theatre for individuality (p.38-41)
• Humans equated with their social status (p.41); semi-feudal, restrictive, mass-society, equalizes and controls all equally.
• Economics presupposes society (conformity and behaviour; economics requires stats, stats require few deviations (p.42)
• Society/stats require large numbers, politics requires small numbers (p.43)
• Liberalism, like communism, assumes "one interest of society as a whole" (p.44)
• Rise of the behavioural sciences for the sake of expanding behaviour beyond economics (p.45)
• Rise of society channels the life cycle/process into the public realm and exposes the private (p.45)
• Society of "labourers and jobholders" who consider what they do to be about sustaining their lives (p.46)
• Rise of society results in "un-natural growth" of the natural, which consumes the private, intimate, and political (p.47)
• Rise in "excellence" of public labour opposed to decline in excellence of public action and speech, which have been banished to the private and intimate (p.49); explainable as a phenomenon that requires both man and world, not mere psychology.

The Location of Human Activities

• Jesus and the hiddeness of goodness and good deeds (p.73-74)
• The Talmud's 36 good-men, for whom God saves the world, and who are known only to Him (p.75)
• The impossibility of being good; the impossibility of being wise; "turn the other cheek", etc... (p.75)
• Goodness must flee all appearance (p.75)
• On Machiavelli vs. Good, for the sake of the public (p.76).