Thoughts 24 November 2021

Published this fall 

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

When on May 21–22, 2020, the two sessions [of the Chinese Communist Party] finally convened in Beijing, the story that the regime had to tell was one of heroic national recovery. The failure of the West handed the CCP a historic triumph.

After Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre

What then the conjunction of philosophical and historical argument reveals is that either one must follow through the aspirations and the collapse of the different versions of the Enlightenment project until there remains only the Nietzschean diagnosis and the Nietzschean problematic or one must hold that the Enlightenment project was not only mistaken, but should never have been commenced in the first place. There is no third alternative and more particularly there is no alternative provided by those thinkers at the heart of the contemporary conventional curriculum in moral philosophy, Hume, Kant and Mill. It is no wonder that the teaching of ethics is so often destructive and skeptical in its effects upon the minds of those taught. 

But which ought we to choose? And how ought we to choose? It is yet another of Nietzsche’s merits that he joins to his critique of Enlightenment moralities a sense of their failure to address adequately, let alone to answer the question: what sort of person am I to become? This is in a way an inescapable question in that an answer to it is given in practice in each human life. But for characteristically modern moralities it is a question to be approached only by indirection. The primary question from their standpoint has concerned rules: what rules ought we to follow? And why ought we to obey them? And that this has been the primary question is unsurprising when we recall the consequences of the expulsion of Aristotelian teleology from the moral world.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue (pp. 118-119). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition. 

 

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

Lachman quoting Jurij Moskvitin:

A mind looking into a world external to itself will receive a picture of a world in which there are some phenomena that cannot be explained in terms of the laws generally ruling in that world. The reason is that a mind—any mind—is creating its world by means of a process of selection. The thing that will be missing in that world . . . is the law governing the total system because the mind is a part of the total system, and what it cannot perceive is itself. . . . The world as we see it is determined by the structure of what to us appears as its smallest components. To move deeper in this direction is to change the world. . . . 

[T]he total system of which the point (consciousness) is itself an element will forever remain unknown to the point. It is itself governed by a system of which it can never grasp the totality. . . . Fully to grasp and understand what it is in itself would be to grasp the totality. Therefore there will in itself forever remain something unknown, and so there will remain something unknown in the world that it perceives as external to itself. That unknown will appear as life. The increasing approach to the unknown—the blind spot in itself—is the creation of life itself.

Lachman, Gary. A Secret History of Consciousness (p. 190). Lindisfarne Books. Kindle Edition. 

 

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The nation might bind the people, but what bound the nation? Schmitt’s answer came in the Der Begriff des Politischen (The Concept of the Political, 1927). In sixty pages, Schmitt touched on political obligation, sovereignty, group identity, and life’s purposes. To tie those disparate topics together Schmitt used a single emotive term, “the enemy.” The presence of an enemy, he wrote, engendered the nation, bound people to the state, created need for a sovereign, and lifted politics out of the mundane.