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December 28, 2005

It has to be noted that Rand was attacking altruism both as justifier and motivator. Altruism isn't simply other-motivated behavior. It is other-oriented justification. At its essence is not merely one displaying concern for the welfare of others, but its selflessness, because at its root is the belief that it is some other thing, something alien and foreign to the interests of the self, that is the irreducible motivator and justifer of an action, principle, etc. There can be self-regarding other-oriented actions, principles, etc., that aren't irreducibly other-oriented. If it is irreducibly other-oriented, then Rand has a basis for attacking it, and for attacking the belief upon which such actions can be motivated. It is the irreducible-other-ness aspect of the action, principle, etc. that has to be exposed, rooted out, isolated, identified, etc., because that does truly explain a number of evil ideologies that had real-world implementation in modern times. (More to come, presumably....)

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Further notes: the "conventional" egoism-altruism opposition presupposes a self-other dichotomy; the moral altruist, accepting that dichtomy, opts for the other. But let's instead speak of the proper integration of self-regard and other-regard -- something like: One indentifies with, and/or responds to, something about others that one recognizes in oneself. So let's speak of a philanthropist who is moved by the condition of others, and is not acting with a tit-for-tat mentality, which is contingent upon expectation of others doing something to benefit one in return. Rather, one gets the psychic benefit from the act of the philanthropy. Now, an important question: Why does one benefit from that act? Why is it in one's value-set to help others in such a way? We have granted that one gains genuine value from such acts; this makes it a matter of something, besides the mere fact of its being in our present value-set, being a "truth-maker" generating real value. What's that, you say? Okay, take hedonism -- it says that whatever one gets pleasure from, is what one ought to do. Except that this doesn't provide any specific guidance, because it says that whatever you happen to have in your preference set, you ought to satisfy. In hedonic calculus there is no acknowledged truth-maker as to what is actually good for you, since people can have preferences that, upon further reflection and analysis, would be considered bad for them (e.g., would end up more greatly frustrating the other values in their preference-set) if they indulged them. We need something more besides the mere fact of its being in one's value set, for it to be good for one to pursue it. That is, the truth-maker of something's being good for you is something besides that mere fact. (In Rand's moral theory, the truth-maker is that our nature as rational, conceptual beings requires exercising the virtue of rationality in order to achieve the satisfaction of our ends, which involves discovering what in our preference set is worth pursuing long-term.)

So, what is the truth-maker for a philanthropic act's being good for the actor, and what is the attitude one takes towards having that preference in one's set of values? Does one have that preference because it is good to have that preference -- i.e., that one helps others because it is good to help others -- or do things run the other way, i.e., that it is good to help others because helping others is part and parcel of one's value set?

I think that the latter answer in essence has to be the correct one. It is not true that helping others in itself is a good thing, and being motivated by a belief that it is, is to be motivated by a false belief. Rather, it has to do with how helping others fits into the whole of one's value-set. And, as it happens, it is part and parcel of a normal and healthy, and well-considered-upon-reflection/analysis/deliberation, motivational and preference set to be (self-regardingly) other-regarding, to some degree or other. Why so, in the absense of staunch adherence to a tit-for-tat policy? Because one is responding to others what one recognizes in oneself. This is stated as something like: responsiveness to and/or identification with agent-relative value in others.

And it so happens that this kind of responsiveness and identification is everywhere in the behaviors of heroes in Rand's novels. How else could it be? In interacting with others, they have to know what it is in or about others to which they are responding to and identifying with, in order to determine who it is that they should decide to interact with. So you don't get blanket philanthropy much less blanket altruism: there is something about the recipients of their help that they deem worthy. The mere fact of other people's being other people with needs doesn't move them. That makes all the difference in determining whether an act of philanthropy constitutes self-regard or self-sacrifice.

And, since other-regard is only part and parcel of a value-set, it has to be integrated as harmoniously as possible with the rest of one's value-set. Again, contra the same rationale that's behind hedonism, the fact that it happens to figure prominently into one's value-set isn't by itself a reason to indulge it; it takes proper reflection and deliberation so that the other things in one's value-set aren't frustrated to a greater extent. That's what the virtue of rationality is for.

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Additional question to ponder for the time being: is altruism a species of selflessness, or is it selflessness, period? Is it specifically a reference to other in the sense that one is oriented toward other human beings, or is a reference to other in the sense that it is something or anything other than the self (e.g. God) that justifies actions? Rand suggests in various places that it's both.

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Also the case of Gail Wynand, contrasted with Howard Roark. Roark had a self-interested other-regard. He had clients in order to build; he served the interests of his clients but only if at the same time he could maintain the integrity of his ideas. Wynand finds his identity and defines his mission by whatever the mob wants; via such form of other-regard, he finds that there is no self. It isn't the fact of other-regard that defines the difference between these characters; it's whether they have self-regard. ("The fact of other-regard" also allows that the kinds of other-regard they exhibit are fundamentally different in kind from one another.)

End entry for 12/28/2005

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December 27, 2005

Note to self: Compose an entry in the near future clarifying issues having to do with supposed altruistically "selfless" motivation. A major distinction lies between Katherine Halsey's initial attitude and Elsworth Toohey's attitude as each express them around p. 374 (hardcover) of The Fountainhead, but some elaboration should be useful. In what sense could virtuously egoistic people with healthy, normal motivations hold in their value-set a willingness to help others because one values their well-being? An egoistic ethics justifies principles ultimately in terms of the agent's own well-being, but let's say that it's conducive to an agent's well-being to have a motivational set that includes purportedly "selfless" motivations or attitudes towards others' well-being. This looks like a distinction has been raised between motivation and justification. But how exactly does that "settle" into a consciously egoistic mindset? An egoist wanting to understand the bases of the principles upon which he is acting will approach the matter of helping others (in either general terms or in a particular action -- at least I think) with "does it make my life go better?" in mind. There seems to be at least two different ways that it could be approached: (1) The egoist is looking for the egoistic angle in any other-oriented action, or (2) The egoist knows, at the justificatory level, that his actions must be done on the basis of what makes his own life go better, and that if adopting an attitude of supposedly "selfless" concern for others (suitably worked out in specifics -- e.g., it's virtuous others one has concern for) is part of a healthy human psychology most conducive to the actor's own flourishing, then that's an attitude he will adopt.

But note here that certain distinct aspects of such behavior have to be worked out. One aspect is the human-psychological, but that can't be treated the same as the justificatory. You also have to be careful to avoid a state of "happy delusion," something like: If I'm deluded into thinking that my actions are to be done exclusively for the sake of others as a matter of what justifies my actions, I'll live a happier life. What we want is a theory that adequately accounts for both motivation and justification so that they align harmoniously. (That's not the only thing we want out of a theory, of course, but that should be a necessary component of a good moral theory.) In thinking on this subject, I'm reminded of the hypothetical "altruism pill" that Rob Bass discusses in "What's Wrong With Egoism?", where people take a pill to alter their motivations to bring about the better end result egoistically. Needless to say, I'm perturbed by the idea of splitting up motivation from the end-result of action, smacking of false dichotomies as it does; even speaking of "end-result" in the context of a neo-Aristotelian virtue theory, where well-being is just as much an activity as a "result" of that activity, suggests something wrong with the very terms of the proposal at hand. (I am also quite aware that my own name pops up there, from a ca. 1998 mailing list discussion, regarding the Kitty Genovese incident. That incident does indeed point to something about what people should have in their motivational sets, but I have my doubts that it shows much of anything about egoism in anything like Rand's sense. But I need some time sorting these issues out further....)


End entry for 12/27/2005

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December 23, 2005

I don't have a "top/favorites" listing for favorite classical symphonies yet, because the only ones I've really caught onto are Beethoven's #3, 5, 7, 9. As of yet, none of the other symphonies I've listened to really compare. (This fact and the way the following list appears basically establishes that Beethoven is easily my favorite classical composer thus far.)

I do have a crude "top 20" list now of favorite piano concertos, likely to shift in order in various ways as I keep listening to them and solidifying my opinions. So far, the piano concerto has to be my favorite classical music "format". Also, I am proceeding based upon a limited range of listening, based mainly on what I've been able to obtain on CD so far, which isn't a lot, but it so happens that I now own nearly all (Liszt #2 being a primary exception, though I have listened to it a couple times elsewhere) of what appears in the top 20 on the DigitalDreamDoor.com list, so it would seem that I'm not working off too bad a base for starters. I do think the order in that list is a bit screwed up (as to the placement of Beethoven #4 more than anything else). Here's my own list, balanced somewhat between "favorite" and "objectively great":

1. Beethoven #4
2. Beethoven #5 "Emperor"
3. Mozart #20
4. Mozart #21 "Elvira Madigan"
5. Brahms #2
6. Rachmaninov #2
7. Beethoven #3
8. Mozart #23
9. Mozart #22
10. Brahms #1
11. Liszt #2
12. Rachmaninov #3
13. Grieg
14. Chopin #1
15. Chopin #2
16. Liszt #1
17. Tchaikovsky #1
18. Schumann
19. Shostakovich #2
20. Prokofiev #3

How about a primitive amateur list of favorite composers? I have to cheat a bit and put in Morricone to make it not such a wide gap between #1 and #2 on the list:

1. Beethoven
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.
2. Morricone
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3. Mozart
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4. Chopin
5. Brahms
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6-10. Liszt/Schubert/Haydn/Rachmaninov/Dvorak

End entry for 12/23/2005

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December 9, 2005

Some scribbling/doodling regarding goodness and the "naturalistic fallacy": For someone like me, it isn't a perplexing or complicated metaphysical or epistemological issue to identify what the human good is, and what that means. I have an Aristotelian-inspired view that the human good consists in living well in accordance with the human function. Or, perhaps to put it another way: a human being is seeking his own good when he is pursuing a life of rationality. Now, some question arises as to the metaphysical or conceptual causation going on here. The realist or the intuitionist (I'm guessing there is some distinction, but what it is, and if it is significant, I don't know) wants to speak in terms of whether goodness is or is not a property. If it's not a "natural" property, then it's a non-natural one, grasped via some intellectual, non-sensible means. I have to wonder why the realist or intuitionist would frame the question of goodness that way. The realist-intuitionist somehow got it in his mind that if we want to define goodness, we run into the so-called naturalistic fallacy -- more or less, that if we define goodness in terms of some natural property, e.g., pleasure, then goodness hasn't really been usefully defined. If a human being seeks his pleasure, why not just say that the human being seeks his pleasure. What further does it add to say that the human being seeks his good? (Interesting assumption going on here, BTW: goodness is either definable or it isn't; if it's definable, it's empty of meaning, but if it isn't, it's not grasped directly or indirectly via the senses. Fee fi fo fum, I smell the stench of a false dichotomy, shades perhaps of the analytic-synthetic or any number of its analogues.)

Here's the question: how do we non-illicitly speak of goodness, without buying into an illicit-sounding dichotomous assumption? What are the facts of reality that give rise to our conceptual identification of goodness? Do we speak of goodness as a property of some things? I'm not sure why such a question would arise. Should we speak of the good as meaning such-and-such? I think it's unavoidable that we must, if indeed we want to speak meaningfully about the good, and I think that we can. Indeed, I think I point above to an Aristotelian understanding of the meaning of goodness. Further, can we speak of something's being good for a human being because, or for the reason that it involves the human being's acting in accordance with his living well? Yes, I believe that this is the way we understand what a human being's good is. So, does a conception of a human being's living well lead to a naturalistic fallacy? Right off, I don't see such a thing. After all, living well isn't defined by reference to seeking pleasure, or wealth, or some other worldly object or state. It's defined by reference to a specific kind of activity: acting rationally. You are acting rationally when you do the things that you ought to do -- that is, doing the things that lead to comprehensive success in achieving your well-considered goals. I don't see much more meaning to "goodness" than a human being's doing as he ought to do. A human being is acting virtuously if he is acting rationally, i.e., exercising the virtue of rationality and its derivative virtues. I think that the realist-intuitionist is going to have a tougher time at this point arguing that a naturalistic fallacy is being foisted. Can the virtue of honesty be reduced to empirical content without rendering the virtue conceptually or metaphysically superfluous? I do believe it can. So where does that leave us now? To be continued . . . ?


End entry for 12/9/2005

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November 25, 2005

It's been a while; I know. I do have a submission to be published in a philosophy journal soon; stay tuned . . .

The latest great music discovery: film composer Ennio Morricone. Some of his great film scores: Once Upon a Time in America, Once Upon a Time in the West, Cinema Paradiso, The Mission, Lolita ('97), Bugsy, Days of Heaven, and Duck, You Sucker (a.k.a. A Fistful of Dynamite). His most famous scores are for the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns (namely, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly). There are many compilations of his work out there, though the one I've liked best is Itinerary of a Genius. The world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma plays Morricone in the CD by that title.

This has prompted me to find out about other film composers as well, as their music seems to be the only prominent melodic classical-style music of the last half-century or so. So far I've also liked some of the works of John Barry (e.g. Out of Africa) and Bernard Herrmann (especially Taxi Driver and Vertigo, where the music really helps make the movies), with CDs of others one the way. Sooner or later I'll probably compile music lists like I did with movies . . .

End entry for 11/25/2005

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September 25, 2005

Of major interest of late has been an increased and accelerated exposure to classical music. Once you become acclimated to this music, most other pop and rock just doesn't sound the same any more. Seeing as I'm still much of a novice to classical music (and once you're no longer a novice, you realize that "classical" merely denotes a period between Baroque and Romantic, but short of a generalized term for this non-pop, non-rock, non-jazz genre, ... .), I'm basing a lot of my present evaluations on near-first impressions, relatively speaking. (Nothing like my store of knowledge and impressions about movies, roughly 2400 film opuses and counting.) What do I like so far? Some composers and pieces:

Mozart - Piano Concertos 22, 27, 15, 20, 21, segments of the Requiem. Violin concerto 3, or part of it. I need to listen more to the late symphonies to catch on to what all the rage is about. At this point I still regard the Amadeus soundtrack a fine intro/overview to WMA's sound. Sir Neville Marriner conducts this and the Great Piano Concerto sets and a Requiem recording I have.

Beethoven - Symphonies 3-9 (I now own two different Furtwangler Ninths [the famous '42 and '51 renditions], a Solti 9th, two Bernstein Thirds, the "standard-setting" Kleiber Fifth & Seventh and Bruno Walter's Sixth), Piano Concertos 3-5, movements from the late string quartets, the adagio from the Pathetique piano sonata. I've bought easily quite a bit more of Beethoven's music than of the other composers', quite a bit of which I still need time to listen to (e.g. the Missa Solemnis, the Archduke and Ghost piano trios, the late piano sonatas [28-32], the Kreutzer and Spring violin sonatas, the violin concerto, the other major piano sonatas between Pathetique [#8] and Les Adieux [#26]). The Immortal Beloved soundtrack (and the movie!) are good intros/overviews, but what really turned me onto Beethoven was a compilation of his adagios, truly quite extraordinary for a music compilation.

Bach - I need to give him more time. I've bought various of the most prominent works -- The Brandenburg Concertos, the Goldberg Variations (I have the Glenn Gould "State of Wonder" box set with both the '55 and '81 renditions), the Mass in B Minor and the St. Matthew Passion (a portion of which is used in the Andrei Tarkovksy film The Sacrifice, among uses of Bach in Tarkovsky films) -- but it hasn't really clicked yet. Amazingly enough, the piece of Bach music that sticks most in my mind comes from the Barry Lyndon soundtrack.

Brahms - I also need to give him more time. Already I'm finding the opening of his Third Symphony to be catching on.

Wagner - Amateur that I am, I wasn't aware he was an opera composer until I bought a "Highlights of The Ring" CD, having only heard the overtures and preludes. Needing to listen to plenty of other music first, I'm far from venturing into, purchasing, listening to, etc. opera music. So for now, for all intents and purposes, I only have the orchestral portions by which to be exposed to his sound.

Chopin - So far I've enjoyed a few of the Nocturnes and I'm presently getting into the famous Artur Rubinstein presentation of the Ballades and Scherzos. Before too long I expect to find myself purchasing the famous Martha Argerich '65 Chopin recital.

Mahler - I've purchased symphonies 1, 4, 5, 6, and 9, and about the only thing I've liked is the most well-known movement, the Adaghietto from #5. (Film buffs will recognize its use in Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice.) Now I see endless references to Symphony #2 but I don't know if I have it in me to shell out the dough unless I have reason to think I'll get something out of any symphony of his. Obviously more time and listenings are needed before I can tell for sure. Too many of his symphonies strike me as loud, clashy, and heavy.

The composers above are the ones, so far, that I've given any significant amount of listening time to. It's actually been about 80% Beethoven and Mozart. There are about 12-25 other composers comprising the Usual Suspects (e.g., Schubert, Debussy, Dvorak, Rachmaninoff, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, etc.) that, as a beginner, I could only purchase some kind of intro CD for. Thankfully, there is a series put out by Deutsche Grammophon called Panorama that are actually 2-CD sets for each composer, giving you the complete recordings of, usually, at least a couple of the composers' most prominent works, and by well-established performers in the DG lineup. The Schubert CD, for instance, has Symphonies 8 & 9 and the "Trout" quintet along with a couple other works.

So far, the compositional "styles" my hearing is most accustomed to would be the symphony and the piano concerto. I've got to get accustomed to other formats like "chamber" music (trios, quartets, quintets, etc.), sonatas (piano and violin), non-piano concertos, choral works and, of course, opera.

As with movies, I make a good effort to make my music purchases well-researched. So far some valuable resources have been the Amazon.com Classical Music section, various lists at DigitalDreamDoor.com and on its forums, and a just-purchased book, The NPR Guide to Building a Classical CD Collection. I guess public broadcasting isn't all for nought . . . :-)


End entry for 9/25/2005

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August 31, 2005

Item 1: Hot off the electronic presses! My Usenet post exposing a false dichotomy in moral theory. (Some Ethics 101-equivalent background helpful. For threaded discussion in response, click on the post title at the top.)
Addendum September 1: There are a couple posts closely related to this one, one prior and one subsequent.

Item 2: The New York Times Headline on Hurricane Katrina:
"The Misery Is Spread Equally"

And that is relevant . . . why? The suggestion is ominously there, though by no means enunciated in open terms, that equal-opportunity destruction provides some modicum of comfort over unequal-opportunity destruction. That is the naked soul of egalitarianism after all, right?


End entry for 8/31/2005

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August 19, 2005

Well, it's clear that the mainstream media outlets like The Washington Post have no cause for complaint when their influence is sucked away from openly "conservative" media sources like Rush Limbaugh. Their latest editorial-as-news (Headline: "Roberts Resisted Women's Rights") is just a prominent new case-in-point. My only question is: who exactly does the Post expect to fall for this shameful dishonesty? Who actually falls for negative campaign advertising ("Representative Jones sided with special interests against clean air and water") as unbiased commentary?

(The sort of "rights" resisted by John Roberts? The anti-market (read: anti-reality) anti-concept of the "right to equal pay for equal work." If there's a nice concrete instantiation of the intellectual bankruptcy and essential anti-capitalist ideology of the contemporary American Left, it's the notion of a "right to equal pay for equal work." Above all, Lefties, do not consider the [selfish, egoistic, individualistic] profit-motive of the payer of the wage! So much for left-wing views about "human rights" contra capitalism and property rights.)

I just knew there was a tie-in between this and the years-long saga of proving supposed Objectivist Peter Schwartz's commentary on "Libertarianism" to be less than unbiased even as Miss Rand herself was spot-on. :-) (I'd say, "proving Schwartz wrong," but Schwartz's thesis would need to consist of objective propositional content in order to be wrong.) My latest efforts at promoting conceptual clarity contra smear-job epistemology is in the "Comments" section of a recent Diana Hsieh NoodleFood blog article.

As for my recent foray into classical music, it would appear that I should devote much of my available listening time to "The Big Three" -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach -- before devoting substantial time to the other composers. It got me to thinking if the film world has a "Big Three" of directors as of yet, considering the relative youth of this medium as an art. Not being as big on Andrei Tarkovsky as I was a year ago, I'm not so sure he'd definitely be in "The Big Three." The one I'm most sure definitely belongs is Stanley Kubrick, whose Barry Lyndon I've been very big on for a long while now, and for good reason (namely, that it's a perfect film). The other director who I'm pretty sure falls into the "genius" category is Orson Welles, and on the strength of much more than just Citizen Kane. After that, I think the next best candidate, before we get to Tarkovsky, is Ingmar Bergman, who could qualify on the strength of Persona alone, but he's known amongst film lovers for a large number of other masterpieces as well.

On a related note, I just added an addendum to my page on the Objectively Greatest Films yet made. Coming up with a Top Ten list is tough, but I do have it narrowed down to eight that definitely belong.

As to what else has been on my mind lately, a bunch of it is stuff I've been writing on HPO (see the "General" section at the top of this Journal), though I'm hoping I can consolidate points scattered here and there on HPO into summaries here hopefully within the coming days. I was thinking of filling the recent journal void with a listing of tracks on CDs I've burned by favorite musicians, but that can wait until some other time.

Oh! As to that bit of nostalgia about pro wrestling, I felt it obligatory to go buy a copy of Hulk Still Rules (on 2 DVDs). Boy, it brought back some fun memories. The only essential and relevant history of pro wrestling any normal human beings would ever need, covered in about 5 hours. The Hulkster was a hoot, a fine marketing machine more than anything. No finesse, no technique, just raw power and the inexplicable "hulking up" (the act of becoming invincible, represented in part by getting very wide-eyed) 15 minutes into a match after taking a tremendous beating. Why not "hulk up" at the very beginning of every match and get it over with? :-)


End entry for 8/19/2005

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July 25, 2005

It's been over three weeks and I figured I had to put in some entry, however lame. Aside from vegging out with a higher-than-average movie-watching pace as of late, and aside from having vented off a good deal of 9/11 Rage on HPO about the evils of radical Islamists and what should be done with them (cue Jack Torrance from Kubrick's' The Shining: "What should be done with them?" and then cue Delbert Grady: "Perhaps they need a good . . . talking to, if you don't mind my saying so. Perhaps . . . a bit more."), there are some nostalgic comments I made over in an otherwise publicly-inaccessible (read: pay-subscription only) RateBeer.com "off topic" discussion board, about the brief True heyday of professional wrestling. The subject header was "favorite WWF/E wrestlers." First off, the favorites I listed:

Good Guys:

Hulk Hogan
Hacksaw Jim Duggan
Brutus "The Barber" Beefcake
Jake "The Snake" Roberts
Ultimate Warrior
Bam Bam Bigelow
Randy "Macho Man" Savage
George "The Animal" Steele

Bad Guys:

Andre the Giant
King Kong Bundy
Ravishing Rick Rude (I’m not a fag or nothin’, but I remember being most
impressed with those abs)
Bret "The Hitman" Hart
Greg "The Hammer" Valentine
Ted "The Million Dollar Man" DiBiase
"Mr. Wonderful" Paul Orndorff
Honkytonk Man
Bobby "The Brain" Heenan

Then, in response to a comment that Bam Bam Bigelow was remembered as a "Bad Guy":

I remember him best from when he was a good guy. He went up against King Kong Bundy once and was on the verge of winning before he lost by countout, literally by half a second. He was doing that final move of his propelling himself over the ropes onto his opponent.

King Kong Bundy was a hoot in his own right. That rivalry of his with Hulk Hogan was truly classic-era WWF stuff, right along there with Hulk-Andre.

The WWF post-’88 seems never to have been the same. Hulk was the last guy to hold the title for significantly longer than a year; he had that aura of invincibility about him that was worn away by lame WWF scripting. One of the nicest things of legend was that in the very few times he went up against Andre, there was never a winner everyone could agree was clear-cut. It was like the WWF was making it so that these two titans were so unbeatable that none could ever defeat the either. The Wrestlemania III (’87) pinning was always overshadowed by the perfectly-scripted "3-count non-pin" earlier in the match. The scandal-ridden Feb ’88 "Main Event" matchup where Hulk finally "lost" the title and subsequent Wrestlemania IV double-DQ only reinforces that legend.

Hulk vs. Ultimate Warrior a couple years down the line was all rather anti-climactic after all this, and that’s when my interest in pro wrestling dropped off. I doubt it could hardly ever regain the magic of the Hogan 4-year-reign era. Hulk was like verging upon being a cultural icon by ’88, and the WWF screwed it up. (Consider this: Hulk beats out MICHAEL JORDAN in a Nickelodeon poll of kids on who the top athlete of the year was.) If memory serves, this was the same time-period that Million Dollar Man comes along and creates the spectacle of his wanting to buy the WWF title from Hogan, with Hogan, heroically, challenging him instead to "come and try and get it! Grrrr!"

Back to King Kong Bundy. Part of that Hulk-era mystique was the Wrestlemania II steel cage match against KKB. That match was what originally what got me so enthusiastic about pro wrestling. If it could be *this* deadly and over-the-top, the "sport" had some hope for it as an entertainment form. And it was that Saturday Night Main Event match in ca. Dec. ’87, an epic match between Hogan and Bundy with Andre at ringside, and Andre invading the ring during Hogan’s victory routine and choking him nearly half to death, that brought on the Feb ’88 matchup-cum-debacle.

So it was about a two-year stretch there, starting with ’II and ending with ’IV, very nicely coinciding with the age for me at which pro wrestling most appeals to kids, that the WWF happened to be at a high point. I guess it half-retained its magic for the year afterward until Hogan won back the title at ’V from Macho Man. That was the title Hogan was all-too-obviously scripted to lose to the Ultimate Warrior at ’VI (the Hulk mystique was that he was *never* pinned that easily), and that pretty much did it for me in terms of my interest in pro wrestling.

How could wrestling today possibly have the mystique of budding cultural icon Hulk Hogan with his 24-inch-pythons and legions of Hulkamaniacs vs. the 500-pound, 7-foot-7 Andre the Giant? These guys today HAVE to pale in comparison to this.

Shortly after this, an addendum in another post:

A further note about that Feb ’88 "Main Event": that’s the first and only time I can remember a pro-wrestling event being put onto prime-time network television. Not just like those Saturday Night Main Event shows that would pre-empt Saturday Night Live once a month. No, this was prime-time, NBC, and I even think it was live. I think that is the sign that the WWF reached a peak right then and there.

A couple further comments a day later:

Over in the NWA, as it was called at the time (the one that played on TBS, not McMahon’s gig), I liked Sting. I remember him going up against Nature Boy Ric Flair and going the full 60 minutes to a draw, I think. What was that, Clash of the Champions ’88 or something like that?

[Turns out, indeed, that it was that event, though the draw was after a 45 minute time limit. I was so obsessive about this stuff at that age, it's great that I remember all this with such reasonably-accurate detail.]

Finally:

’87-’88 was also the heyday of GLOW. Now *that* I really miss. Not even really attempting to be about W, but mainly about the GL.

Those were some days. I’d stay up every Saturday night way past my bedtime when all the weekly wrestling shows would come on in succession. GLOW would come on around 1 in the morning. Plenty of off-brand wrestling federations came down the pipe, too. Even ESPN for a while had the AWA, where I first remember seeing Curt Henning, winning the AWA title by cheating, as it happens.

Well, now, aren't all the pitifully small number of readers of this journal much better off from this cultural enrichment?

End entry for 7/25/2005

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July 3, 2005

I now have pictures of my cat, Minoune (pronounced "Mee-Noon"), up on the web:

http://geocities.com/cathcacr/minoune1.jpg
http://geocities.com/cathcacr/minoune2.jpg
http://geocities.com/cathcacr/minoune3.jpg
http://geocities.com/cathcacr/minoune4.jpg

I did some updating of my Objectivism & Philosophy section, to include a number of more useful, relevant, and/or hard-hitting links.

Been listening to: a lot of Mozart, mostly. Particularly the 2-volume, 4-disc-encompassing Great Piano Concertos (so much fun stuff in here; great deal at about $28 altogether) and the Reqiuem. The complete soundtracks to Amadeus and Immortal Beloved are on their way from Amazon, and I can barely wait right now.

I think I've figured out my music-listening MO: Focus mainly on one artist and go through a large number of that artist's works before moving onto the next one. So it's going to be time-consuming before I familiarize myself with a large number of artists/composers. (Mozart may really take a while; looks like the man composed hundreds upon hundreds of works, many of them considerably lengthy. The 10 "Great Piano Concertos" alone run to over 5 hours.) It's nice that I do this now with musicians other than just Steely Dan.

Finished reading: Tara Smith's Viable Values. Was certainly worth the time, particularly as a fleshing-out of Randian virtue-ethical themes, for instance: what it means to flourish, the relation between survival and flourishing, what it means to be egoistic. I can't remember encountering literature that elaborated on these Randian themes indepth like this -- that is, apart from broader, general groundings and outlines. So, best as I can tell, it's a unique contribution to the Randian literature and worth reading on that basis.

Recently purchased and loaded into the reading queue: Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl's Liberty and Nature and R. Kevin Hill's Nietzsche's Critiques. So which do I read next? Don't I still need to finish This is Orson Welles as well as Total Freedom first? And I certainly want to get Norton's Personal Destinies read next. Or wasn't it a further excursion into Human Action? Wait, maybe it was Hunt's Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue, or perhaps some history with Windelband's History of Philosophy. Wait, no, I wanted to re-chew Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology first. Wasn't I supposed to do another re-reading of Rand's two big novels two months ago? Popper's Open Society and its Enemies is still sitting there in the stack, too. This is frustrating. And don't I have some movies I need to get to watching?

End entry for 7/3/2005

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June 28, 2005

It's time to write a bit about Pink Floyd. I've been listening to a lot of their earlier stuff (Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Saucerful of Secrets, Soundtrack to More, Ummagumma, Atom Heart Mother, and at the moment, Obscured by Clouds), and I'm struck by their musical inventiveness. Not a new observation here, of course, but I notice that, for their time, they were cutting-edge enough to capture the attention of film producers seeking soundtrack work. Floyd started out in the late-'60s psychadelia stuff, and suffice it to say that not being an acid-dropper or mind-alterer of some related sort, I can't relate to quite a bit of it. In fact, the really early Floyd, their first two albums, doesn't do much for me. There are some single tracks, Syd Barrett-driven, that are good but some of those don't even show up on these albums, released as singles I assume (e.g., "See Emily Play" and "Arnold Layne"). Floyd was all into this artsy sonic experimentation early on, a lot of it yielding more noise than music. Ummagumma gets pretty wacked-out in most parts. But it strikes me how fascinating, sometimes irresistable, even a lot of their noisy experimentalism is. Better yet is how they mix in some beautiful music amidst all the noise. I detect a need for a selective CD-burn in the near future. Their album Meddle may represent the best, the crossroads between their sonic experimentalism and their melodic, "commercial" work they are most famous for. I'd say it may be about the most beautiful collection of songs they put together. Actually, what seems to have happened is that Waters and Gilmour decided that they had enough fun with their wacked-out psychadelic experimentalism and went for some cutting-edge melodic experimentalism of their later, "mature" work, from Dark Side onward. They have the musicality to pull it all off, and by happy coincidence, bring in a wide audience with the use of melody. The rest as they say is history. Still, I believe I will be burning a CD of their mostly less-well-known earlier stuff (combined with some later masterpieces like "Sheep" from Animals) that will manage to outpace their most famous output.

All that said, I get a nice, erie feel about the supposed reuniting of Floyd band members this July for an aid concert. One of the foremost sonic marvels of our age, back in action.

End entry for 6/28/05

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June 22, 2005

I came back from vacation about a week ago, but hadn't had any great or important emerging thoughts to impart right away. Okay, been listening to: Some more Elton, particularly his album Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. It may now be my favorite album by him. Various classical. Some Stevie Wonder. Nice to know that Stevie produced a number of great songs that don't appear in "hits" compilations or even more extensive boxed sets. His 1970s output should be legendary. I've also been delving into the early, less-well-known Pink Floyd work, pre-Dark Side.

Been watching: well, not a whole lot; my movie-viewing has slowed down somewhat. The listing of my recent viewings is always available, of course, elsewhere on this website (hint: go to the movies section, or just click on the relevant link at the top of this page).

Been reading: This is Orson Welles, a series of interviews between Welles and protege Peter Bogdonavich. Some fun stuff in there, as Orson was evidently a fun and irreverent guy. I guess he doesn't really like talking about movies, so much as making them. So the point of the whole book? To set the record straight, I guess.

Anyway, that reading has been interrupted by my starting into Tara Smith's Viable Values. As it stands I had just finished up another writing project for possible publication on ethics, of all subjects, and hadn't had the benefit of reading this book prior. While my own writing stands quite well in its own right, Ms. Smith covers much of the same conceptual ground in helpful ways. One point of similarity, though this point is just now to be made most explicit: lots of issues, in ethics as well as epistemology and metaphysics, can be stated in terms of form/matter, and philosophers can be approached on the basis of how well they actually treat form and matter as a unity, rather than something to be sundered. Take Kant's ethics, for instance: he "grounds" ethics on reason's form alone, divorced from matter or content, i.e., our ends. Or take the analytic-synthetic dichotomy. The "analytic" side only gives you the definition of a concept. You've got to unite that concept (actually, just the definition) with another concept (i.e., definition), to get a synthetic statement. It's all about definitions, i.e., formal components of concepts. The matter? It's all abstracted from, and we pretend that we can divide statements about classes of entities into formal and material statements that are, in turn, classified as necessary or contingent. Isn't something fishy going on here? Or (to borrow a point I just made on HPO), take the traditional concept of God, which is more or less the formal components of our knowledge abstracted and reified in its own right. Somehow, on his better days, Kant saw the problem with this: we're taking a concept that hasn't a basis in sensory experience, which is empty of all content, and treating it as if it's an actual concept. What's an integrated epistemology that has form/content unity as its model to make of this? Reasoning is the application of form (logic) to content (sense data). You see how Plato had to posit a world of Forms: by divorcing form from content. As good epistemologists we're not supposed to grant him that from the outset.

Also currently reading, interrupting the Smith reading about 1/3 the way through: the last chapter of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, entitled "A Framework for Utopia." Some really great germinations here on the relation between the good, freedom, liberalism, and "utopia." Say that we have a view of human beings such that, while we may not know what, for every individual, the matter or content of his good is, we know that the form of the good for him is the exercise of his rational faculty in identifying, discovering, or formulating a life for himself that is good for him and then using that same faculty in acting to achieve that good. (So much for empty Kantian formalism in ethics, yes?) So we do know for sure at least what the good for every human being consists in: exercising his rational faculties. Beyond that, it's a matter of empirical discovery for each person what makes his or her own life go well. As an outside observer we're not really in the best position to know what each person's particular good consists in; that's a matter to be determined and discovered within each person's own context, knowledge, and values. So it's futile to impose on each person some universalist conception of the good, some right way of life for everyone. This, I think, is a way to resolve a tension that otherwise exists between those seeking an objectivist conception of the good and a relativist one. Say, for instance, that you have confused followers of Ayn Rand's ideas who insist, without understanding her conception of egoism, that everyone ought to go out and pursue their own interests -- that everyone ought to be self-centered, selfish, greedy, pursue money, pursue a long life, pursue pleasure, and the like. Of course, that rather overlooks that Rand's ethics is an ethics of virtues where each person ought to exercise the virtue of rationality and its derivative virtues in pursuing what is the best life for themselves. At this juncture it leaves quite open the question of what is the best life for oneself, but that's really all that Rand's egoism and individualism amount to, in full context. Her heroes are known for pursuing money, but not at the cost of their own integrity. In fact, not every hero of hers is defined by pursuit of money as such -- notice Richard Halley the composer. But think also of Catherine from The Fountainhead and her wanting to enjoy helping others, and Toohey countering that her own personal enjoyment should count for nothing in order to be truly praiseworthy and selfless. Rand, of course, thought that this was an abomination, and I think decent modern theories of ethics see it the same way. (Whether Kant literally held an idea like this is another matter. As I can tell, he'd have said that personal enjoyment doesn't make an action morally worthy, but doesn't nullify its worthiness either; it is, to put it bluntly, simply irrelevent to its worthiness. That's a different, and only slightly less severe, problem I see with his ethics.)

Okay, hopefully that's enough background. Individuals' good is a real thing, and individuals ought to seek a comprehensive fulfillment of that good and, concommitantly, enjoy it. Socially and politically speaking, the only thing this requires is freedom: freedom to make one's own decision and determination of one's good and to pursue that. No other social condition, besides freedom, is consistent with the good of each person. That's a basic tenet of political liberalism, though self-labeled liberals will vary widely on exactly what they think freedom consists in. But here is where Nozick makes a wonderful point: imagine a society in which people get to freely choose a way of life for themselves. Money is important to them? They are free to seek out membership in a society of money-pursuers. They want to be "altruists," or more usefully, they want to be in a society that relies heavily on mutual aid and other-interested cooperation rather than competition? They want to live in a society where membership includes contributions to a social-insurance fund to protect more vulnerable or temporarily unfortunate members? Who knows, there may be Randists who'd voluntarily join such a community. Nozick rattles off a long list of famous names whose lives are all so varied that one couldn't come up with a best kind of life that they'd all agree upon. But isn't the best kind of society one where each is free to pursue the kind of life he believes best? Whether one is a socialist altruist at heart or a capitalist egoist, the best society is one where each is free to join associations that are expressive of such preference. This idea does echo 19th-century-style anarchist ideas in a way, though Nozick does insist that a minimal protective state is necessary to at least preserve and protect this imagined framework of communities. (The communities may not even have to be spatially-divided. Consider the possibilities, especially in this day and age of globalization and the internet.) So whatever each person decides to do, he is free to enter or exit (perhaps with some kind of constraints, perhaps of a contractual sort) the communities of his choosing. But the important point is that each person is free to decide. Indeed, isn't that the only decent social condition compatible with each person's nature as a rational being? Does a decent society demand more (or less)?

End entry for 6/22/05

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May 25, 2005

My pre-vacation thoughts and notes; probably my last entry for three weeks. I've been listening mostly to the classical composers, primarily Beethoven and Mozart. The adagio movement from Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 is maybe the most beautiful piece of music I've heard so far. Mozart has a number of excellent piano concertos of his own, usually numered between 20 and 25. I've got some more listening of them to do on vacation. I bought a crapload of other CDs of classical composers to listen to as well, usually 2-disc intro compilations by composer. I'm learning some of the tricks of buying in this area; it seems that the releasing label (e.g., Deutsche Grammaphon or Decca) is important to the quality.

On the movie front, extra-special mention goes to Team America: World Police. This movie is absolutely marvelous; its only flaw may be that (however otherwise funny this aspect turns out to be) it goes a bit over the top in portraying how much leftwing Hollywood-actor elites are willing to go to oppose American foreign policy, even to the point of attending a bogus "peace conference" put on by Kim Jong Mentawwy Iw. The rest of the movie is perfection: great comedy, great innovation. I daresay it represents something of a quantum leap in the art of filmmaking, beyond anything that's gone before it, and there is a great and sound political message that goes along with it, however vuglar the terms in which it was put.

I was very active on the HPO front the past week; consult the link at the top of the page for details; I'm too hurried right now to list out all the topics (funny or otherwise) covered.

On the book, front, I haven't gone very far, but I did finish the Introducing Hegel book, and it was decent. I have a thought (this converges with some of my HPO topics) as I neared the end of the book and the author discusses certain 20th century thinkers who've been touched by Hegel's influence. Hegel himself doesn't come off so bad himself, mind you, if you get past his rather weird-sounding dialectical method. (I suppose it has its plausibility in virtue of rejecting the idea of static identity. How exactly this presents a fundamental alternative to Aristotle I don't know, seeing as Aristotle did himself seem to acknowledge this within his system.) But it goes over various 20th century thinkers in what (in more sympathetic terms) I'd call the Continental tradition, and I'm struck by what I take to be the stunning irrelevance of so much of it to the advance of history here and now. What relevance does any of this stuff have to our lives? Marxism has failed as an analysis of capitalism, so what's left? Capitalism has truimphed, is truimphing, and will continue to triumph, because it's right and true, so what's going on with all these wankers?

One thing I came to realize in most explicit terms: the evil, having no power in itself, needn't be taken seriously once identified. The evil thrives and falsehood and absurdity, so what it really is reduced to is the level of the laughable, intellectually. Intellectually, it's the object of ridicule. In practice, as long as it tries to act on its false and absurd premises, you've got to beat it back by force. But deprived of any intellectual power and acknowledged for such, evil need not have any sway in the world. I think we're seeing this in practice in however otherwise misguided American foreign policy. Lots and lots of talk about America doing all this bad stuff, but the fundamentally evil around the world isn't exactly looking strong as of late once America asserts itself. What, after all, can evil do once it's confronted and beaten back and all sanction withdrawn? There's something about this that I really like: we are showing that we aren't putting up with bullshit from the likes of Saddam and Iran and, eventually, South Korea. Kim Jong Mentawwy Iw? He gets all the intellectual respect and treatment he deserves in Team America.

Did I mention that Team America is a great movie? America is being a dick right now, but at least it's not a pussy or an asshole.

End entry for 5/25/05

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May 11, 2005 -- My first journal entry!

Been listening to: Quite a lot of Elton John. I've been liking a song called "Hercules" quite a lot, off his Honky Chateau (1972) album. My favorite album by him or anyone for that matter has to be Madman Across the Water (1971).

Speaking of favorite music, I've had a Steely Dan burnout of sorts, so I haven't been listening to them a lot lately, with the exception of Everything Must Go (2003). But how 'bout other favorites? Here are some: Pink Floyd, "Sheep" (Animals, 1977), "Echoes" (Meddle, 1971), "Comfortably Numb" (The Wall, 1979). Something about their epic pieces that I like. If I had to name a favorite album of theirs, it would be Meddle.

I've recently gotten into listening to a lot of classical music, which is good because it's so inexpensive to purchase. Mozart Collection: 100 Masterpieces is a 10-disc set that could be had from Best Buy for about $20, for instance. Some favorite classical pieces as of late: Mozart's "Piano Concerto No. 23" (very fun), Beethoven's 9th Symphony, Puccini's "Nessun Dorma" from the Turandot opera (no-brainer there, of course).

I was somewhat burned out recently from Frank Zappa's output, though if you want a really good intro to his sound, there is One Size Fits All and Over-Nite Sensation.


Recent subjects raised on HPO (consult link above for full texts):

"Essence as epistemological" -- Rand's funny employment of the term "epistemological." She wanted to distinguish her view of essences from Aristotle by saying that he considered them metaphysical while she regarded them as epistemological. But essences are a subject of investigation in epistemology, whatever you may think of their metaphysical status; saying they're epistemological is like saying values are ethical or rocks are geological. What Rand meant to say and would have been more clear in saying is that essences are mental, i.e., conceptual, not extra-mental or intrinsic to reality.

Form & universal: Every individual is a unity of form and matter. Form is, in this sense, inherent in reality. Does that make universals inherent in reality? No, but we need a good way of making the right distinction without falling into either realism about universals or subjectivism. Short story, I think: Each individual is a composite of form and matter, and it's in virtue of similarities in form that we form concepts.

Multiculturalism vs. America -- Sparked by a rant that Rush Limbaugh made the other day. What, really, is "multiculturalism," that is, what is really being accomplished under that banner? More or less, it's cultural relativism which has as its aim the downgrading of the good and the shelterting of evil against criticism. Who and what loses in this analysis? America, and more fundamentally, capitalism. Rush pointed out that there is an American culture (identified with: capitalism and individualism), and that previous generations of immigrants learned to assimilate with this culture while still maintaining respect for their own heritage. Now, the aim of "multiculturalists" is to do away with America as we know it. That's basically what the radical Left is up to nowadays in its various dressings and labels, now that Marxism and its associations with the horrors of Communism are now out of style. Don't be fooled by the new and recent tricks. It's the anti-capitalists just looking for new ways to undermine America as we know it.


What I've been reading:

I've just recently started back into reading philosophy indepth after a few years away from it. I am starting what I call a general re-education on the comprehensive science of human action. Let me back up a little bit. Last year I lost about 120 of my favorite books in a flood, so I did a little rebuilding of my collection, and cheap. What I've bought recently:

Rand, The Fountainhead (neat softcover "Centennial Edition")
Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
Chris M. Sciabarra, Total Freedom
Plato, The Republic
Aristotle, Basic Works (ed. by McKeon, now available in new paperback for a very affordable $15 or so)
Kant, Basic Writings (ed. Allen Wood; same publisher as A's basic works)
Nietzsche, Basic Writings (ed. Walter Kauffman; ditto)
W.T. Stace, The Philosophy of Hegel (this came via a recommendation from a Leonard Peikoff lecture course from many years back)
Wilhelm Windelband, A History of Philosophy (ditto)
Loren Lomasky, Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community
David L. Norton, Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism
Lester H. Hunt, Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue
Tara Smith, Viable Values

My intention is to do what I didn't do too well before, and that's to actually read these before I decide to go out and buy more books.

Oh, and at a recent stop at a brick-and-mortar B&N, I picked up a few Introducing... books to get me started into -- re-oriented with, rather -- the major thinkers. They had these for Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel.

I already went through the Kant one, and it deserves some special mention, for what I found so maddening about it. It wasn't due to Kant's ideas. It was due to passages such as the following:

"The concept of presence is equivalent to the metaphysical concepts of absolute Being and divine Essence, which are equated with Truth. Metaphysics relies emphatically upon a concept of presence. Yet it also depends on absence: the (relative) absence of Being from the phenomenal or corporeal world, as well as the (absolute) absence of Being from Hell or the simulacral. Both concepts depend on each other. This paradox can be referred to as a dialectic, wherein each term -- presence (plus) and absence (minus) -- implies the other, such that neither of them can be given an absolute identity. The failure fully to conceptualize or conceive of absence, other than in terms of an implied relation to presence, converts this concept into a notion of a 'lack' (i.e. lack of presence). As a consequence, neither presence nor absence can be fully thought or substantiated."

But wait, it goes on:

"This makes any description or representation problematic, as it always depends on the absence of what it appears to make present. The paradox of metaphysical philosophies is that they depend on the possibility of representing Being and claiming the right to make such representations. Yet, from a logical point of view, the notion of representation cannot be reconciled with the concept of an absolute Being. If the absolute exists, it exists absolutely, outside the dialectic or presence and absence. This would preclude the very possibility of, and need for, representation." (p. 40-41)

Hmmmm....

Starting on p. 66, under the heading "Understanding and Apperception," we get this:

"Self-consciousness -- the awareness that 'I think' -- arises in understanding's recognition or apperception that it is entirely separate from imagination, yet already implicated within, and generative of, its processes. Understanding obtains the right to apply its concepts to all objects of possible experience through reason's 'Ideas' which go beyond the possibility of experience. Kant states that reason says, 'Everything happens as if . . .". Reason exists as an absolute condition of all conditions, yet this does not restrict understanding from applying variable concepts to objects of possible experience. Everything happens to, and for, understanding as if reason is absent.

"As Kant reaches the point of affirming that 'nothing happens,' he also recognizes that nothing ever happens for the subject to witness or represent. The subject is dispossesses from the event of nothing happening, as even that is absent by the very act of thinking and affirming it. This is what seems inconceivable [a Rand-like "!"]: that the thought of 'nothing' is different from nothing 'itself' -- or that 'process' is different from 'object', and 'concept' is different from 'Idea'."

On p. 103-104, under the heading "The Noumenon or 'Thing in Itself'" and then "Mourning and Sacrifice," these passages comes as if out of left field:

"In the Critique of Pure Reason, Understanding possessed a 'consciousness' of its inability to form a consciousness of the 'thing in itself' (noumenon). The 'thing in itself' resided in a site beyond Understanding's consciousness. The very absence of the 'thing in itself' allowed Understanding to form a consciousness or representation of something outside itself: the faculty of Reason. In other words, Understanding's consciousness of the absence of the 'thing in itself' was, in fact, a consciousness of the absence of Reason.

"It could be said that the purpose of the Critique of Pure Reason is to mourn for that which might have presented the 'thing in itself' to Understanding, i.e Reason.

"In the Critique of Practical Reason, the situation is radically changed. Understanding no longer possesses a 'consciousness' of Reason as such: the representations of the Understanding are always already shattered and broken apart. This is because a reciprocity develops between Understanding and Reason which does not allow for a sense of grieving or mourning. The faculty of Reason as an 'object' of grief for Understanding has entirely disappeared."


Now, what does any of this stuff mean? I couldn't tell as I was reading through it carefully the first time, and I can't tell now. It's excruciating, perhaps even moreso than Kant's writings themselves. After slogging through this book, I found the otherwise somewhat-difficult and jargon-riddled sections of Total Freedom discussing Hegel to be a breeze. Come on, I'm not stupid. Some stuff is just written as if to befuddle the reader. Indeed, I suspect that whatever his faults, Kant deserves much better than this in popularizations. But this is not just any popularization; it's advertised in any number of ways as an entry-level book with illustrations on every page, like the other three in this series that I got. I'm going through the Hegel one right now and it's, again, a relative breeze despite the difficult subject matter. This Introducing Kant book, though, seems almost nothing like it at all.

But it's really worse than that: The passages I quote come with next to no explication in any simpler terms that relates what's being said to what came before or after. To any lay-reader, it's pure gibberish, worthless nonsense. To me, it's semi-understandable at best. I'm trying to figure out why the f--- the series editors picked out this particular author to "introduce" Kant, because he does such a shitty job of it. Kant is difficult enough without some interpreter muddying up the waters even further, in an "intro" no less. It took me a while to figure out why it was so difficult to slog through this book, but the p. 103-104 passage finally tipped me off: the phrase "always already." Where had I heard that before, I thought. Because I had heard it before.

Where else, but an undergraduate course on Heidegger. I was similarly befuddled, for an entire semester. Secondary literature was of little help there, either. Anyway, that's when it occurred to me to look for an author bio, and there it was, on the next to the last page. I offer it without comment, none really being needed:

"Christopher Want is an Art Historian and Philosopher. He teaches Art Criticism and Theory at Kent Institute of Art and Design, and Critical Theory at Goldsmith's College. He has published widely on Romantic and Postmodern art and philosophy."


Okay, what else? . . . Well, the aforementioned Kant book is the only book lately that I actually finished (well, got through). I'm reading a few books simultaneously at the moment: Introducing Hegel (as I said, a much better and more engaging read); I'm at about p. 100 of Sciabarra's Total Freedom, and I got about 20 pages into Ludwig von Mises' Human Action a couple weeks back before getting into these other books, but I hope to get back to it again soon. There is some of it that I was pleased with and some I'm not particularly pleased with, or just a little skeptical, like when he characterizes all human action as necessarily rational. (Is that meant as a tautology or is he actually saying something substantive [and false]?) Anyway, there is already, early on, this riveting quote from p. 5-6, copied and pasted from mises.org:

"[T]he situation is not quite the same with regard to economics as it is with mathematics and the natural sciences. Polylogism and irrationalism attack praxeology and economics. Although they formulate their statements in a general way to refer to all branches of knowledge, it is the sciences of human action that they really have in view. They say that it is an illusion to believe that scientific research can achieve results valid for people of all eras, races, and social classes, and they take pleasure in disparaging certain physical and biological theories as bourgeois or Western, But if the solution of practical problems requires the application of these stigmatized doctrines, they forget their criticism. The technology of Soviet Russia utilizes without scruple all the results of bourgeois physics, chemistry, [p. 6] and biology just as if they were valid for all classes. The Nazi engineers and physicians did not disdain to utilize the theories, discoveries, and inventions of people of "inferior" races and nations. The behavior of people of all races, nations, religions, linguistic groups, and social classes clearly proves that they do not endorse the doctrines of polylogism and irrationalism as far as logic, mathematics, and the natural sciences are concerned.

"But it is quite different with praxeology and economics. The main motive for the development of the doctrines of polylogism, historicism, and irrationalism was to provide a justification for disregarding the teachings of economics in the determination of economic policies. The socialists, racists, nationalists, and etatists failed in their endeavors to refute the theories of the economists and to demonstrate the correctness of their own spurious doctrines. It was precisely this frustration that prompted them to negate the logical and epistemological principles upon which all human reasoning both in mundane activities and in scientific research is founded."

He's got those assholes nailed pretty well, eh? My thoughts exactly when I think of "multiculturalism" and other left-wing offshoots of today. That goes for you, too, you freakin' post-modernists.

End entry for 5/11/05
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