An intriguing passage from Berel Dov Lerner’s review of Moshe Halbertal’s On Sacrifice (2012):
‘Halbertal claims that despite all its transcendent glory, adoption of the notion of “sacrifice for” can generate especially terrible consequences: “misguided self-transcendence is morally more problematic and lethal than a disproportionate attachment to self-interest” (78, italics in original). How does this work? First of all, people may think that “since it is the mark of the good that it deserves sacrifice, the reverse must be true too – namely, that sacrifice makes something into a good” (69). 
Now martyrdom can be motivated by the urge to prove the nobility of one’s cause. Worse yet, willingness to kill others for one’s cause may also be taken as a token of its righteousness; perpetrators of terrible acts of cruelty can come to see themselves as the true martyrs who sacrifice their very humanity for the sake of the cause, or they may hold the psychological burden of their guilt to outweigh the suffering of their victims. Similarly, as in the case of Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Abraham, morality itself may be sacrificed for the sake of some greater value. Halbertal soberly comments that “when morality is depicted as a temptation to be surmounted in the name of a higher good, it is always someone else who pays the price” (74).
Source: Philosophy in Review 33:2 (2013).
Related: My short video lectures on “Kierkegaard, Luther, and Tertullian,” “The story of Abraham,” and “Kierkegaard’s lesson: Abraham as model of faith.”
Posted 1 week, 2 days ago at 9:44 am. 2 comments
This is the sixth and final chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.
Chapter Six: Postmodern Strategy [mp3] [YouTube] [54 minutes total]
Connecting epistemology to politics [mp3] [YouTube]
Masks and rhetoric in language [mp3] [YouTube]
When theory clashes with fact [mp3] [YouTube]
Kierkegaardian postmodernism [mp3] [YouTube]
Reversing Thrasymachus [mp3] [YouTube]
Using contradictory discourses as a political strategy [mp3] [YouTube]
Machiavellian postmodernism [mp3] [YouTube]
Machiavellian rhetorical discourses [mp3] [YouTube]
Deconstruction as an educational strategy [mp3] [YouTube]
Ressentiment postmodernism [mp3] [YouTube]
Nietzschean ressentiment [mp3] [YouTube]
Foucault and Derrida on the end of man [mp3] [YouTube]
Ressentiment strategy [mp3] [YouTube]
Post-postmodernism [mp3] [YouTube]
Previous:
Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes]
Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [72 minutes]
Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [50 minutes]
Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube] [102 minutes]
Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube] [74 minutes total]
Related:
The Explaining Postmodernism page.
Posted 3 weeks, 2 days ago at 8:35 am. 2 comments
His life of crime started early. “Stalin’s Bank Robbery of 1907: A Tale of Blood and Murder.”
Speaking of bank robbers, Bonnie and Clyde were killed by police on this day in 1934. Too bad the Tiflis police weren’t as successful in 1907.
Posted 3 weeks, 6 days ago at 4:03 pm. 2 comments
Those of us in the democratic-republican West often find it impossible to understand how the world could go to war so often in the 20th century. We were raised in a culture that had internalized Locke, Jefferson, Mill, and others — for whom the goal of peace and respect for others’ rights to life, liberty, and property were fundamental. 
We (still) have little-to-no grasp of an alien modern ideology that makes conflict and waging war fundamental to its cultural health.
For the German National Socialists and the Italian Fascists, for example, war was natural, normal, and essential to a nation’s progress. How did they come to believe that?
Part of the story is intellectual: National Socialists and Fascists admired Nietzsche’s positive philosophy, for example — this earlier post collects several quotations from Nietzsche on the necessity and desirability of war. And between Nietzsche (who was no longer functioning intellectually after 1889) and the Nazis (who assumed power in 1933) were many prominent German intellectuals — historians, sociologists, political theorists, jurists — including Werner Sombart, Moeller van den Bruck, Ernst Junger, Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt — whose advocacy of the authoritarian state shaped a generation’s thinking.
Werner Sombart’s 1915 Händler und Helden (Merchants and Heroes) is representative. Sombart was early an admirer of Karl Marx, though he drifted to the right after repeatedly being disappointed when the communist revolution failed to materialize. Merchants and Heroes contrasts two types — the merchant (represented in his era by the English) and the hero (represented by the Germans). Merchants are of a lower order: they are calculating, interested in profit, money, and the physical comforts of life. Heroes, by contrast, are of higher historical significance, motivated by the ideal of the great deed and sacrifice for a noble calling. Early in Händler und Helden Sombart explains his purpose: “at issue in this war are the merchant and the hero, the mercantile and heroic Weltanschauung, and the culture that pertains to each. The reason why I am trying, by means of these terms, to isolate a profound and comprehensive antagonism between world-views and experiences of the world is the subject of the following analysis.”
Here is Rohan d’O. Butler’s 1942 summary of Sombart’s views: “Before 1914 all the true German ideals of heroic life were in deadly danger before the continuous advance of English commercial ideals, English comfort, and English sport. The English people had not only themselves become completely corrupted, every trade-unionist being sunk in the ‘morass of comfort,’ but they had begun to infect all other peoples. 
Only the war had helped the Germans to remember that they were really a people of warriors, a people among whom all activities and particularly all economic activities were subordinated to military ends. Sombart knew that the Germans were held in contempt by other people because they regard war as sacred — but he glories in it. To regard war as inhuman and senseless is a product of commercial views. There is a life higher than the individual life, the life of the people and the life of the state, and it is the purpose of the individual to sacrifice himself for the higher life. War is to Sombart the consummation of the heroic view of life, and the war against England is the war against the opposite ideal, the commercial ideal of individual freedom and of English comfort, which in his eyes finds its most contemptible expression in—the safety razors found in the English trenches.”
Sombart has in mind Englishmen such as Richard Cobden and John Stuart Mill. Here is Cobden in 1835: “The middle and industrious classes of England can have no interest apart from the preservation of peace. The honours, the fame, the emoluments of war belong not to them; the battle-plain is the harvest-field of the aristocracy, watered with the blood of the people.”
And here is Mill: “It is commerce which is rapidly rendering war obsolete, by strengthening and multiplying the personal interests which are in natural opposition to it.” Mill again: “Finally, commerce first taught nations to see with good will the wealth and prosperity of one another. 
Before, the patriot, unless sufficiently advanced in culture to feel the world his country, wished all countries weak, poor, and ill-governed, but his own: he now sees in their wealth and progress a direct source of wealth and progress to his own country. It is commerce which is rapidly rendering war obsolete, by strengthening and multiplying the personal interests which are in natural opposition to it. And it may be said without exaggeration that the great extent and rapid increase of international trade, in being the principal guarantee of the peace of the world, is the great permanent security for the uninterrupted progress of the ideas, the institutions, and the character of the human race” (Principles of Political Economy, Book III, Chapter XVII, Section 14).
Despicable, believed Sombart. The German way of war will cleanse humanity and raise it to a sacred height.
Source:
Rohan d’O. Butler, The Roots of National Socialism, E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc. (1942), pp. 170-171.
Related:
Sombart is part of the story told in “The Crisis of Socialism” [pdf] which is Chapter 5 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.
Quotations on German Militarism, which is Appendix 4 to Nietzsche and the Nazis.
Posted 4 weeks ago at 8:44 am. 9 comments
This is the fifth chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.
Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube] [74 minutes total]
Marx and waiting for Godot [mp3] [YouTube]
Three failed predictions [mp3] [YouTube]
Socialism needs an aristocracy: Lenin, Mao, and the lesson of the German Social Democrats [mp3] [YouTube]
Good news for socialism: depression and war [mp3] [YouTube]
Bad news: liberal capitalism rebounds [mp3] [YouTube]
Worse news: Khrushchev’s revelations and Hungary [mp3] [YouTube]
Responding to the crisis: change socialism’s ethical standard [mp3] [YouTube]
From need to equality [mp3] [YouTube]
From Wealth is good to Wealth is bad [mp3] [YouTube]
Responding to the crisis: change socialism’s epistemology [mp3] [YouTube]
Marcuse and the Frankfurt School: Marx plus Freud, or oppression plus repression [mp3] [YouTube]
The rise and fall of Left terrorism [mp3] [YouTube]
From the collapse of the New Left to postmodernism [mp3] [YouTube]
Previous:
Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes]
Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [72 minutes]
Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [50 minutes]
Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube] [102 minutes]
Forthcoming:
Chapter Six: Postmodern Strategy [mp3] [YouTube]
Related:
The Explaining Postmodernism page.
Posted 1 month ago at 9:31 am. 1 comment
This is the fourth chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.
Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube] [102 minutes]
From postmodern epistemology to postmodern politics [mp3] [YouTube]
The argument of the next three chapters [mp3] [YouTube]
Responding to socialism’s crisis of theory and evidence [mp3] [YouTube]
Back to Rousseau [mp3] [YouTube]
Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment [mp3] [YouTube]
Rousseau’s collectivism and statism [mp3] [YouTube]
Rousseau and the French Revolution [mp3] [YouTube]
Counter-Enlightenment politics: Right and Left collectivism [mp3] [YouTube]
Kant on collectivism and war [mp3] [YouTube]
Herder on multicultural relativism [mp3] [YouTube]
Fichte on education as socialization [mp3] [YouTube]
Hegel on worshipping the state [mp3] [YouTube]
From Hegel to the twentieth century [mp3] [YouTube]
Right versus Left collectivism in the twentieth century [mp3] [YouTube]
The Rise of National Socialism: Who are the real socialists? [mp3] [YouTube]
Previous:
Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes]
Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [72 minutes]
Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [50 minutes]
Forthcoming:
Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Six: Postmodern Strategy [mp3] [YouTube]
Related:
The Explaining Postmodernism page.
Posted 1 month, 2 weeks ago at 6:48 pm. 1 comment
Philosophers David Bourget & David J. Chalmers have a paper forthcoming in Philosophical Studies 
that presents the results of a survey of 1,972 contemporary philosophers, most of them in the Anglo-American world. The survey’s main results on thirty issues:
1. A priori knowledge: yes 71.1%; no 18.4%; other 10.5%.
2. Abstract objects: Platonism 39.3%; nominalism 37.7%; other 23.0%.
3. Aesthetic value: objective 41.0%; subjective 34.5%; other 24.5%.
4. Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes 64.9%; no 27.1%; other 8.1%.
5. Epistemic justification: externalism 42.7%; internalism 26.4%; other 30.8%.
6. External world: non-skeptical realism 81.6%; skepticism 4.8%; idealism 4.3%; other 9.2%.
7. Free will: compatibilism 59.1%; libertarianism 13.7%; no free will 12.2%; other 14.9%.
8. God: atheism 72.8%; theism 14.6%; other 12.6%.
9. Knowledge claims: contextualism 40.1%; invariantism 31.1%; relativism 2.9%; other 25.9%.
10. Knowledge: empiricism 35.0%; rationalism 27.8%; other 37.2%.
11. Laws of nature: non-Humean 57.1%; Humean 24.7%; other 18.2%.
12. Logic: classical 51.6%; non-classical 15.4%; other 33.1%.
13. Mental content: externalism 51.1%; internalism 20.0%; other 28.9%.
14. Meta-ethics: moral realism 56.4%; moral anti-realism 27.7%; other 15.9%.
15. Metaphilosophy: naturalism 49.8%; non-naturalism 25.9%; other 24.3%.
16. Mind: physicalism 56.5%; non-physicalism 27.1%; other 16.4%.
17. Moral judgment: cognitivism 65.7%; non-cognitivism 17.0%; other 17.3%.
18. Moral motivation: internalism 34.9%; externalism 29.8%; other 35.3%.
19. Newcomb’s problem: two boxes 31.4%; one box 21.3%; other 47.4%.
20. Normative ethics: deontology 25.9%; consequentialism 23.6%; virtue ethics 18.2%; other 32.3%.
21. Perceptual experience: representationalism 31.5%; qualia theory 12.2%; disjunctivism 11.0%; sense-datum theory 3.1%; other 42.2%.
22. Personal identity: psychological view 33.6%; biological view 16.9%; further-fact view 12.2%; other 37.3%.
23. Politics: egalitarianism 34.8%; communitarianism 14.3%; libertarianism 9.9%; other 41.0%.
24. Proper names: Millian 34.5%; Fregean 28.7%; other 36.8%.
25. Science: scientific realism 75.1%; scientific anti-realism 11.6%; other 13.3%.
26. Teletransporter: survival 36.2%; death 31.1%; other 32.7%.
27. Time: B-theory 26.3%; A-theory 15.5%; other 58.2%.
28. Trolley problem: switch 68.2%; don’t switch 7.6%; other 24.2%.
29. Truth: correspondence 50.8%; deflationary 24.8%; epistemic 6.9%; other 17.5%.
30. Zombies: conceivable but not metaphysically possible 35.6%; metaphysically possible 23.3%; inconceivable 16.0%; other 25.1%.
I’m in the minority on 16 of the issues, the majority on 10, and on four issues I don’t have an informed view.
Posted 1 month, 2 weeks ago at 1:14 pm. 3 comments
In an earlier post on Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, I offered two explanations for why the 1848 Marx held that communism could only come about by violent revolution.
In response to that post, Tibor Machan pointed me to this passage from an 1872 speech Marx gave in Amsterdam:
“We are aware of the importance that must be accorded to the institutions, customs, and traditions of different countries; and we do not deny that there are countries like America, England (and, if I knew your institutions better, I would add Holland), where the workers can achieve their aims by peaceful means. However true that may be, we ought to recognize that, in most of the countries on the Continent, it is force that must be the lever of our revolutions.”[1]
Interesting exceptions. America, England, and Holland are, arguably, the countries in which capitalism had achieved the most development. Machan’s explanation is that Marx came to believe that in such advanced countries workers’ advancement could come about by gradualist methods: “Bit by bit, step by step, at municipal, county, state, and the federal levels of government, socialism can be instituted by democratic process.”[2]
(And adding up the bits, according to my math Marx was right and we’re over 50% there.[3])
Sources:
[1] Karl Marx, Selected Writings, second edition. Edited by David McLellan (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 643.
[2] Tibor Machan, Revisiting Marxism: A Bourgeois Reassessment (Hamilton Books, 2006), p. 156.
[3] “Marx’s 10-point plan 50% realized in USA.”
[4] And just to be clear: “Am I really a Marxist revolutionary?”
Posted 1 month, 3 weeks ago at 3:59 pm. 2 comments
Now martyrdom can be motivated by the urge to prove the nobility of one’s cause. Worse yet, willingness to kill others for one’s cause may also be taken as a token of its righteousness; perpetrators of terrible acts of cruelty can come to see themselves as the true martyrs who sacrifice their very humanity for the sake of the cause, or they may hold the psychological burden of their guilt to outweigh the suffering of their victims. Similarly, as in the case of Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Abraham, morality itself may be sacrificed for the sake of some greater value. Halbertal soberly comments that “when morality is depicted as a temptation to be surmounted in the name of a higher good, it is always someone else who pays the price” (74).
