Religion

American Liberty

by on May 27, 2011 @ 5:37 pm · 0 comments

in (Austrian) Economics, College Essays, Philosophy, Politics

Part of my college essays series: This is one of the essays I wrote during the political theory general exam for my PhD. The exam was an approximately 15-hour marathon session, involving 6 out of 12 essay questions, for a final total of 33 double-spaced pages written without access to any notes or sources.

In this essay I will address how the American framers conceived of liberty as well as how the Constitution they designed was supposed to secure it and whether it has in fact done so. Stating my conclusions right out, which I will then seek to explain and justify as best I can in the space and time allotted, I think that though the Constitution was a grand and very admirable attempt at securing liberty it was at the outset doomed to failure in the long run in large part due to inner contradictions and inadequate safeguards.

By and large the framers, and the American people in general, conceived of liberty in Lockean and republican terms. Locke’s influence was particularly prevalent owing largely to the influence of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s Cato’s Letters, which popularized and enhanced the popularity of Lockean individual rights arguments. This is not to neglect the importance of republicanism and of Christianity; the framers in particular were steeped in republicanism, and Christianity was indeed a formative influence on the early Americans, particularly through the thousands of fiery political sermons of the day, many of which also employed Lockean rights language (such as Elisha Williams in particular, but also Jonathan Mayhew and John Allen).

However, liberalism and republicanism were in tension from the outset, and Christianity has been employed effectively in support of both sides. On the one hand, the sole justification and purpose of government is the protection of each and every individual’s rights to life, liberty, and property. Consistently applied this means that all morals legislation and economic regulation are unjust and invalid. On the other hand, republicans like Algernon Sidney and John Adams feared that liberty unrestrained will degenerate into license, that virtue ought to be promoted and/or required, and vice discouraged and/or prohibited, with the coercive and legal power of the state; and that republican or civic virtue is necessary and must be somehow enforced and inculcated in the people if liberty and the republic are to be sustained. While some liberals have and continue to deny the virtue of virtue, ethical neutrality or relativism is not an inherent feature of liberalism and many liberals do indeed hold and advocate firm moral convictions.

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Is Libertarianism a Gnostic or Utopian Political Movement?

by on April 24, 2011 @ 10:03 pm · 1 comment

in College Essays, Featured Posts, Philosophy, Religion, The Right, Vicarious Politics

This post is excerpted and adapted from the concluding chapter of my dissertation (so I suppose it might qualify as part of my college essays series), wherein I addressed two related objections to libertarianism in general and to my account of Aristotelian liberalism in particular: utopianism and gnosticism, the latter being sort of a theological version of the former. Does the theory of virtue ethics and natural rights described in my dissertation represent an impossibly high standard of ethical excellence? On a related note, is it foolishly impractical given the current shoddy state of the world? And is the ideal society suggested by my nonstatist conception of politics and severe critique of the state an impossible goal? Even if it is achieved, will it ring in a perfect world of peace, love, and happiness without violence, misfortune, and suffering? Naturally, my short answer to all of these questions is “No.”

First, I wish to answer the charge of gnosticism that might be leveled by followers of the political philosopher Eric Voegelin. Voegelin is very popular in certain conservative and communitarian circles, particularly those averse to philosophical systems and principled, as opposed to practical or pragmatic or “realist,” politics. I should know; I studied political science and philosophy at Louisiana State University where Voegelin had been a prominent professor. Indeed, LSU is home to the Eric Voegelin Institute for American Renaissance Studies. I was introduced to the work of Voegelin by Professor Ellis Sandoz, a student of Voegelin himself and the director of the institute.

Gnosticism, as Voegelin uses the term, essentially means a “type of thinking that claims absolute cognitive mastery of reality. Relying as it does on a claim to gnosis, gnosticism considers its knowledge not subject to criticism. As a religious or quasi-religious movement, gnosticism may take transcendentalizing (as in the case of the Gnostic movement of late antiquity) or immanentizing forms (as in the case of Marxism).” Now, does that sound like it applies to libertarianism, much less Austro-libertarianism? Rather, it makes me think in particular of the constructivist rationalism, criticized incisively by Friedrich Hayek, that arose out of the Enlightenment and pervades various forms of modern statism.

In his political analysis, Voegelin uses the term to refer to a certain kind of mass movement, particularly mass political movements. As examples, he gives “progressivism, positivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism, and national socialism.” In his view, the consequences wrought by these movements have been disastrous. With few and only partial qualifications, I do not disagree. What makes them gnostic are certain similar characteristics they share with the original Gnostic religious movement of antiquity. Before listing the main characteristics, it first bears pointing out that even the broad libertarian movement as a whole might not yet qualify as a mass movement. However, as Voegelin points out, “none of the movements cited began as a mass movement; all derived from intellectuals and small groups,” so contemporary libertarianism and Aristotelian liberalism are not off the hook yet! With regard to the following list, Voegelin cautions that the six characteristics, “taken together, reveal the nature of the gnostic attitude.”

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The Randian Argument Against God

by on January 25, 2011 @ 12:39 am

in Ayn Rand, Religion

I found this brief restatement of what I take to be Ayn Rand’s epistemological argument against God in my files. I had jotted it down years ago  in college.

Existents have identity.                                                   E + I
Identity constitutes specific characteristics.              I + S
Infinity denotes unspecifiable characteristics.         N + ~S
If God is infinite, then God has no identity.              G + N > G + ~I
God is infinite.                                                                   G + N
Therefore, God has no identity.                                    G + ~I
Something has identity or it does not exist.              I v ~E
Therefore, God does not exist.                                      G + ~E

Basically, in her view, God is an invalid concept. He is indefinable, described by what he is not, by way of analogy, unique and therefore not within the conceptual realm (a concept involves reference to two or more concretes in reality). Infinity in the metaphysical or ontological sense used above (as opposed to its epistemological meaning, say in mathematics) is another invalid concept, since something that is infinite would not be limited by anything, would have characteristics that are unspecified; it is everything and therefore nothing (or, the concept omits everything and is therefore nothing); it is not definable.

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Aristotle's Prime Mover

by on December 4, 2009 @ 9:05 am

in Philosophy, Religion

This is from a page of notes I put together in grad school for a presentation on Aristotle’s Prime Mover.

Sources: De Anima III.5, Metaphysics XII (especially 7 & 9), Physics VIII (especially 8-10).

PDF version.

Characteristics of the Prime Mover (Divine Nous)

  • First principle
  • First mover (logically, not temporally); itself unmoved and unmovable/unalterable
  • Substance (and arguably form) without matter
  • Self-thinking thought
  • Eternal and in eternal possession of its object (thought); therefore always active and never passive, always actuality and never potentiality.
  • Simple and one
  • Final cause; that for the sake of which; moves others by love; produces movement through infinite time (not a temporal first cause)
  • Necessary
  • Most good
  • Living, insofar as thought itself is the highest expression of life
  • No magnitude (and so neither finite nor infinite)
  • Without parts and indivisible

The Ordered Universe

  • “[T]he universe is of the nature of a whole” (M XII.1). “[T]he world is not such that one thing has nothing to do with another, but they are connected. For all are ordered together to one end” (M XII.10). “There always was motion and always will be motion throughout all time” (P XIII.9), i.e., the universe is eternal; not created or generated ex nihilo. The Prime Mover is the original source of motion in the universe and is the ordering principle that makes the universe a whole. The Prime Mover, God, the Divine, “encloses the whole of nature” (end of M XII.8).

Human Nous and Divine Nous

  • Men participate in the divine insofar as they contemplate the higher things (Nicomachean Ethics and M XII.7).
  • Can the human soul survive death? In Metaphysics XII.3 Aristotle suggests that it can, “albeit not all soul but [only] the reason.”

Contra Plato (M XII.5-6)

  • For Plato everything in the phenomenal world is a mere imperfect, particular manifestation of the Ideas or Forms. Each Idea or Form is universal in the sense of being one. In Metaphysics XII (and also in NE), Aristotle rejects universals of this sort. “The primary principles of all things are the actual primary ‘this’ and another thing which exists potentially. The universal causes, then, of which we spoke do not exist. For the individual is the source of the individuals. For while man is the cause of man universally, there is no universal man” (M XII.5). For Plato, the Agathon (the Good), at least in the Symposium and the Republic and prior to the Sophist, is beyond being. One might argue that Plato’s “mature metaphysics” expressed in the Sophist precludes this, however.
  • For Aristotle it is particulars that exist and the forms are always forms of individual particulars. Aristotle’s universals are not physically separable and independently existing things but rather are aspects of the nature of particulars, which we can separate out mentally by a process of abstraction. For example, the universal ‘man’ does not exist for Aristotle except insofar as it can be located in all the individual men who have ever lived, are living, or will ever live. The same might be said of the Prime Mover; insofar as it is the first mover, the organizing principle of the universe, and encloses the whole of nature, it might be reasonable to say (although I’m not certain that Aristotle would agree) that it is the form of reality, the logical structure of reality. Arguably the Metaphysics introduces separable substances, but even so for Aristotle nothing, not even the Prime Mover, is beyond being.

~~~

Now, I’m an atheist, but I believe there is a logical structure of reality. I don’t think my views are entirely inconsistent with Aristotle’s idea of the Prime Mover. For more on this, see Roderick Long’s “Theism and Atheism Reconciled” and “The Unspeakable Logos.”

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Extra Extra: The Devil is Pro-Life!!!

August 8, 2005 @ 7:49 am

I was driving home from Mises University 2005 in Auburn, AL when much to my surprise I ran across Satan himself. What he was doing heading west in an SUV on I-10 in Mississippi I won’t venture to guess, but if you look closely enough at the license plate – my apologies for the blurry [...]

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