File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2003/bhaskar.0311, message 112


Subject: RE: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, war, Abraham
Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2003 14:32:23 -0500
From: "Moodey, Richard W" <MOODEY001-AT-gannon.edu>


Hi James,

One of the advantages of a list is that we are forced to be more explicit about what we mean, and can review exactly what we said before.  I think Bourne, and Hegel, are partially right, and partially wrong.  A state can be "healthy" only in a metaphorical sense -- it isn't really an organism.  So they are wrong.  But the metaphor suggests a number of propositions about the state that I think are right.  Such as: war tends to decrease internal conflicts within a state; war tends to empower officials of the state; war increases the legitimacy of the state in the eyes of the people; etc.

>From my persective, the good effects of war upon the state are outweighed by the evil effects, not just in terms of injury, death, and destruction, but also in some of the very things that constitute the metaphorical "health" of the state.  Truth might be the first casualty of war, but genuine democracy is not far behind, even in wars that are honestly fought to "save" democracy.

Some further comments after your comments about Kierkegaard.

-----Original Message-----
From: James Daly [mailto:james.irldaly-AT-ntlworld.com] 
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 8:59 AM
To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: Re: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, war


Hi Dick, and all in the "nature good/bad" thread,

One of the drawbacks of a list exchange is that unlike in a face-to-face conversation ambiguities are not quickly resolved. For instance, Dick, you write "I take very seriously Randolph Bourne's aphorism, 'War is the health of the state.' " Of course it has to be taken seriously -- Hegel also said words to that effect. But is it right? And is a healthy state a good thing? If one accepts the Hobbesian view of permanent nature -- not changed, only organised for maximum utility by the state -- it is.


I think Kierkegaard saw the particularity of Benthamite hedonism as the first "stage on life's way", and the *Hegelian* universality of state-conformist "ethics" (Sittlichkeit) as the second. Despair, conscious or not -- Kierkegaard compared it to sickness, of which one can be a carrier without knowing it -- is failure to reach the third stage, that of faith, for Kierkegaard the Christian religious.

For this I would substitute, despite Kierkegaard's protests, the more over-arching secular term "ontological", seen as the existential, the particular human being facing one's finitude -- death -- and trying to reconcile it with the infinitude we are capable of imagining and even thinking, which goes beyond even the immensities of astronomical space and time. "Immortal longings" are a possible *possessive* (having) response. "Progress" has been both a bourgeois and a Marx*ist* secular response. I agree with Walter Benjamin's critique of that, and his substitution for it of the more spiritual concept of "redemption" (a phrase found in *Marx*).

MY COMMENTS:

Although I see Kierkegaard as one of the good guys, his writing has never "grabbed" me the way it does others.  I see the "aesthetic," the "ethical," and the "religious" as different aspects of a full human life, rather than as stages of human development.  Nor am I wholly comfortable with your substitution of the "ontological" for the "religious."  I can see myself praying to God, even to Krisha, but not to "being."

Nor do I see "progress" and "redemption" in either/or terms.  Why not both?

YOU WROTE:

Faith for Kierkegaard meant something like "trust" -- Abraham is his model. Faith is akin to hope, but not hope for something finite. It is more like what is expressed in the phrase "Everything has a reason". Reason after all is the highest and defining human faculty. It is a trust that the universe of being is responsive to human values, and that human goodness is not ultimately wasted, as it was for the Sophists, for whom Gyges was a model: having a magic ring which gave him invisibility and hence impunity, he murdered the King and married the Queen (as a real life Greek general named Gyges in fact did).


PS -- "Gaines" was part of an elaborate joke based on someone's repeated misspellings of Mervyn's name, to which Mervyn replied by signing himself "Marvell", without anyone except Tobin and me seeming to notice.

I REPLY:

I thought it was kinda funny, but kept quiet out of fear of giving offense -- not sure just where.  As a non-Bhaskarian critical realist, I always feel like something of an outsider on this list, even though I have always been given warm reassurances whenever I have expressed this.

Anyway, back to SK.  His admiration for Abraham has always been a source of my dislike for him.  I have read many sophisticated theological and philosophical apologies for Abraham's behavior, but I don't buy them.  He's a jerk.  (Sorry, I probably have given offense by this, but I am being quite restrained in using the term "jerk.")

Best regards,

Dick



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Moodey, Richard W" <MOODEY001-AT-gannon.edu>
To: <bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU>
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2003 2:10 PM
Subject: RE: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, war


> Hi Mervyn,
>
> To say that love triumphs over evil sounds to me much more like an
expression of hope than a statement of accomplished fact.  That is my hope, but I don't believe that love has already triumphed, or that it will do inevitably.  To say that it will necessarily triumph sounds so much like a "force of history" argument, something like the belief that a global communist society is inevitable.
>
> Perhaps my reading of the historical record is different from yours,
but it seems to me that one of the major contributors to fellow-feeling, or love, within a collectivity, is their common need to protect themselves from external enemies.  It is a commonplace that a major task of the political representatives of a collectivity is to organize it for protection against other, similarly organized, collectivities -- "tribes," "city-states," "nation-states," "alliances," "empires."  I take very seriously Randolph Bourne's aphorism, "War is the health of the state."
>
> Best regards,
>
> Dick
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mervyn Hartwig [mailto:mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2003 1:18 PM
> To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
> Subject: Re: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, etc.
>
>
> Hi Dick,
>
> But it hasn't, i.e. notwithstanding inter-(and intra-)specific
aggression, species have proliferated and flourished. If aggression dominated both inter- and intra- the whole show would come to a halt (as of course it might yet owing to contingent aggression within a contingently powerful species, i.e. ours; it would remain the case that there could be no process of biological evolution if love did not triumph over evil, Eros over Thanatos).
>
> Mervyn
>
>
>
>
>  "Moodey, Richard W" <MOODEY001-AT-gannon.edu> writes
> >Hi Mervyn,
> >
> >You wrote:
> >
> >"One can argue that, given that biological evolution proceeds, it
must
> >be the case that co-operation, care etc prevails over 
> >self-preservation, aggression etc within species."
> >
> >But isn't it possible that conflict among (between)different 
> >communities may prevail over co-operation among (between)them, even
as
> >this conflict requires high degrees of co-operation within each of 
> >these communities?
> >
> >I don't write this out of any basic disagreement with the other 
> >arguments for the either the existence or the fundamental goodness
of
> >something (not yet fully specified, perhaps) that we can point to
with
> >the heuristic concept, "human nature."
> >
> >Regards,
> >
>
>
>
>      --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
>
>
>      --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
>




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