State intervention

The White House appointed “car czar” threatened an investment bank that was delaying the US government’s “plans” for Chrysler-

Perella Weinberg Partners, Lauria said, “was directly threatened by the White House and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under the threat that the full force of the White House press corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight. That’s how hard it is to stand on this side of the fence.”

This post (via K.M.) compares it to fascism, and I agree. I like the language the author has used, and have no doubt this is how the conversation must have taken place-

Who the fuck do you think you’re dealing with? We’ll have the IRS audit your fund. Every one of your employees. Your investors. Then we will have the Securities and Exchange Commission rip through your books looking for anything and everything and nothing we find to destroy you with.

As someone wondered, what are the czars doing in USA.

—
A guest post at Cynicus Economicus, by Lord Keynes, discusses the philosophical justification for state intervention. Among other things, he writes-

Natural law as a theory can be traced back to Plato…

Natural law was famously attacked by the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham as “nonsense on stilts.”

One of the main weaknesses of natural law theory is that its main historical justification was the belief in a “divine order” and a divinely-created human nature that makes us conform to “natural law.”

[...]

In the early modern period, rationalist European philosophers like Grotius tried to defend natural law theory by removing God and the previous supernatural justification for it.

However, in doing so, they destroyed the only convincing explanation for belief in natural law.

Thus anyone who accepts an atheistic and naturalistic scientific view of the universe, and who rejects all religion, has no reason to believe in natural law or natural rights.

It follows that all modern types of libertarianism or free market economics based simply on a “natural law” or “natural rights” foundation are severely flawed systems (e.g., the systems of Adam Smith or Murray Rothbard).

There is no reason to believe that the “natural law” that justifies placing inviolable property rights at the centre of our modern political or economic systems has any validity whatsoever.

He horribly misstates the case. From “An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law”-

It is significant that Greek thinkers always couple custom and enactment; things which today we contrast. These were the formal bases of legal authority. So Aristotle considers, not natural law and positive law, but what is just in itself—just by nature or just in its idea—and what derives its sole title to be just from convention or enactment. The latter, he says, can be just only with respect to those things which by nature are indifferent.

[...]

It must be borne in mind that that “nature” did not mean to antiquity what it means to us who are under the influence of the idea of evolution. To the Greek, it has been said, the natural apple was not the wild one from which our cultivated apple has been grown, but rather the golden apple of Hesperides. The “natural” object was that which expressed most completely the idea of the thing. It was the perfect object. Hence the natural law was that which expressed perfectly the idea of law, and a rule of natural law was one which expressed perfectly the idea of law applied to the subject in question; the one which gave to the subject its perfect development.

“Natural law” and “natural rights” emerge from the nature of man, and his relationship with society, and are connected to the concept of “justice.” Its a perfectly sound concept. What isn’t sound is Kantian deontological ethics, and (rule) utilitarianism, or the bastard child – “Utilitarian Kantian Principle” – emerging from their marriage. I can see how “rule utilitarianism” and Kantian ethics fit. Both are, to quote Bentham, “nonsense on stilts.”

Kantian mechanics

This article from Discover Magazine encourages metaphysical idealism. Time and space are all in your mind it says, and so is the universe-

Figuring out the nature of the real world has obsessed scientists and philosophers for millennia. Three hundred years ago, the Irish empiricist George Berkeley contributed a particularly prescient observation: The only thing we can perceive are our perceptions. In other words, consciousness is the matrix upon which the cosmos is apprehended. Color, sound, temperature, and the like exist only as perceptions in our head, not as absolute essences. In the broadest sense, we cannot be sure of an outside universe at all.

For centuries, scientists regarded Berkeley’s argument as a philosophical sideshow and continued to build physical models based on the assumption of a separate universe “out there” into which we have each individually arrived. These models presume the existence of one essential reality that prevails with us or without us. Yet since the 1920s, quantum physics experiments have routinely shown the opposite: Results do depend on whether anyone is observing. This is perhaps most vividly illustrated by the famous two-slit experiment. When someone watches a subatomic particle or a bit of light pass through the slits, the particle behaves like a bullet, passing through one hole or the other. But if no one observes the particle, it exhibits the behavior of a wave that can inhabit all possibilities—including somehow passing through both holes at the same time.

Some of the greatest physicists have described these results as so confounding they are impossible to comprehend fully, beyond the reach of metaphor, visualization, and language itself. But there is another interpretation that makes them sensible. Instead of assuming a reality that predates life and even creates it, we propose a biocentric picture of reality. From this point of view, life—particularly consciousness—creates the universe, and the universe could not exist without us.

[...]

According to biocentrism, time does not exist independently of the life that notices it. The reality of time has long been questioned by an odd alliance of philosophers and physicists. The former argue that the past exists only as ideas in the mind, which themselves are neuroelectrical events occurring strictly in the present moment. Physicists, for their part, note that all of their working models, from Isaac Newton’s laws through quantum mechanics, do not actually describe the nature of time. The real point is that no actual entity of time is needed, nor does it play a role in any of their equations. When they speak of time, they inevitably describe it in terms of change. But change is not the same thing as time.

[...]

There is a peculiar intangibility to space, as well. We cannot pick it up and bring it to the laboratory. Like time, space is neither physical nor fundamentally real in our view. Rather, it is a mode of interpretation and understanding. It is part of an animal’s mental software that molds sensations into multidimensional objects…

Kant didn’t agree with the second part, but he did with the first. From “The Critique of Pure Reason”-

What, then, are space and time? Are they real existences? Are they only determinations or relations of things, yet such as would belong to things even if they were not intuited? Or are space and time such that they belong only to the form of intuition, and therefore to the subjective constitution of our mind, apart from which they could not be ascribed to anything whatsoever?

[...]

Space does not represent any property of things in themselves, nor does it represent them in their relation to one another. That is to say, space does not represent any determination that attaches to the objects themselves, and which remains even when abstraction has been made of all the subjective conditions of intuition. For no determinations, whether absolute or relative, can be intuited prior to the existence of the things to which they belong, and none, therefore, can be intuited a priori.

[...]

It is, therefore, solely from the human standpoint that we can speak of space, of extended things, etc. If we depart from the subjective condition under which alone we can have outer intuition, namely, liability to be affected by objects, the representation of space stands for nothing whatsoever.

[...]

With the sole exception of space there is no subjective representation, referring to something outer, which could be entitled [at once] objective [and] a priori. For there is no other subjective representation from which we can derive a priori synthetic propositions, as we can from intuition in space. Strictly speaking, therefore, these other representations have no ideality, although they agree with the representation of space in this respect, that they belong merely to the subjective constitution of our manner of sensibility, for instance, of sight, hearing, touch, as in the case of the sensations of colours, sounds, and heat, which, since they are mere sensations and not intuitions, do not of themselves yield knowledge of any object, least of all any a priori knowledge.

The above remark is intended only to guard anyone from supposing that the ideality of space as here asserted can be illustrated by examples so altogether insufficient as colours, taste, etc. For these cannot rightly be regarded as properties of things, but only as changes in the subject, changes which may, indeed, be different for different men. In such examples as these, that which originally is itself only appearance, for instance, a rose, is being treated by the empirical understanding as a thing in itself, which, nevertheless, in respect of its colour, can appear differently to every observer. The transcendental concept of appearances in space, on the other hand, is a critical reminder that nothing intuited in space is a thing in itself, that space is not a form inhering in things in themselves as their intrinsic property, that objects in themselves are quite unknown to us, and that what we call outer objects are nothing but mere representations of our sensibility, the form of which is space. The true correlate of sensibility, the thing in itself, is not known, and cannot be known, through these representations; and in experience no question is ever asked in regard to it.

[...]

[W]e deny to time all claim to absolute reality; that is to say, we deny that it belongs to things absolutely, as their condition or property, independently of any reference to the form of our sensible intuition; properties that belong to things in themselves can never be given to us through the senses. This, then, is what constitutes the transcendental ideality of time. What we mean by this phrase is that if we abstract from the subjective conditions of sensible intuition, time is nothing, and cannot be ascribed to objects in themselves (apart from their relation to our intuition) in the way either of subsistence or inherence.

I can’t take any such argument – that the universe is the product of our consciousness, that time and space are subjective in nature etc – at face value. Quantum mechanics, whatever it is supposed to mean, is increasingly becoming what can be termed as quantum mysticism. The existence of the universe is a fact. So is the existence of time and space.

Immanuel Kant vs. the Welfare State

Harold Jones argues, in this very interesting article, that Kantian ethics leads to a capitalistic polity and that it militates against the concept of the welfare state. He bases his argument on two formulations of Kant’s “Categorical Imperative” – “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law,” and “act so that you use humanity, as much in your own person as in the person of every other, always at the same time as end and never merely as means.” If you simply follow the “Categorical Imperative,” Jones’ argument is a good one. Further, this is not the first time I have heard such a defense – Kant as a defender of capitalism, or even Kant as a defender of negative liberty (I believe Nozick has used the “man should not be used as a means to an end” argument, and even Adlai Stevenson has talked about it). An excerpt-

Kant would say redistribution is immoral because the maxim upon which it is based cannot be universally applied without running into the law of non-contradiction. The welfare state is immoral also because it allows the recipient to make demands upon the taxpayer without providing the taxpayer an equivalent value in return. Redistribution is immoral, more generally, because it allows one person to treat another as no more than a means to the first person’s ends.

[...]

The immorality of redistribution lies in the elimination of this mutuality. The voter seeks to use the taxpayer as a means to the voter’s financial security without at the same time deliberately choosing to do something that will serve the taxpayer. The politician attempts to use both the taxpayer and the voter as a means to the politician’s goals of power and tenure. The fact that the voter, the taxpayer, and perhaps even the politician may be the same person does not raise the scheme to the level of morality. It indicates only, as Herbert Schlossberg has pointed out, that the person in question believes he can enrich himself by picking his own pocket.

Trade restrictions also fall short of the Kantian standard. In an attempt to use their limited resources as efficiently as possible, consumers purchase the products and services of foreign vendors. This interferes with domestic producers’ desire to maintain the high prices upon which their wage levels and profits depend. In limiting customers to the purchase of domestic products, producers are seeking to serve their own ends without at the same time serving the ends of their customers. Domestic producers are seeking to use domestic consumers simply as means to the producers’ ends.

—

But then Jones goes on to level an allegation against Ayn Rand-

Kant has a bad reputation among free-market libertarians primarily because he was maligned by Ayn Rand, who accused him of having “divorced reason from reality.” Her dislike for him may have come from the fact that she knew of him only by way of “his intellectual descendants,” who have indeed misrepresented him. This is especially true of his epistemology, but it applies also to his ethics. Most of those who have written about Kant, says Professor Roger Sullivan, have contented themselves with reporting on only a part of his work, rejecting everything that does not fit with the way in which they have made up their minds to interpret him.

Rand, furthermore, may be guilty of protesting too much. John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged drips with Kantian philosophy. The inscription above the door to the Galt’s Gulch powerhouse (“I will never live for the sake of another man or ask another man to live for mine”) seems to be no more than an abbreviated imitation of one of the ways in which Kant phrased his Categorical Imperative: “Act so that you use humanity, as much in your own person as in the person of very other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means”. If Rand was not imitating Kant, her tines are a testimony to the soundness of his reasoning.

“Maligned” is too harsh a phrase here. And he doesn’t give Rand enough credit, nor does he understand how important “reason” was for her. For example, Rand has, at the very least, read (the editor of Marginalia should be flogged if he spelled the philosopher’s name as “Immanual”) German philosopher and professor of philosophy Friedrich Paulsen’s book Immanuel Kant – His Life and Doctrine which is an extensive treatment of Kantian metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. Further, this was what she thought of herself-

I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason.

And here comes Kant saying that there are two worlds – the noumenal and the phenomenal, and that reason is powerless to deal with the noumenal world (in Paulsen’s words) “on account of the nature of human cognition, which presupposes perception.” The evisceration was to be expected, and well-deserved. That Jones is using only one part of Kantian ethics, is a different matter altogether. The problem is not Kantian politics – liberal in nature, but his repressive ethics that worships duty and divorces virtue and happiness. When you make an impossibility an ethical ideal, the kind of politics that it leads to is immaterial.

—

What Kant did with (to, rather) philosophy is no mystery. Will Durant writes in his The Story of Philosophy about The Critique of Pure Reason-

Here was a tremendous book, eight hundred pages long; weighted beyond bearing, almost, with ponderous terminology; proposing to solve all the problems of metaphysics, and incidentally to save the absoluteness of science and the essential truth of religion. What had the book really done? It had destroyed the naive world of science, and limited it, if not in degree, certainly in scope,—and to a world confessedly of mere surface and appearance, beyond which it could issue only in farcical “antinomies”; so science was “saved”! The most eloquent and incisive portions of the book had argued that the objects of faith—a free and immortal soul, a benevolent creator—could never be proved by reason; so religion was “saved”! No wonder the priests of Germany protested madly against this salvation and revenged themselves by calling their dogs Immanuel Kant.

And no wonder that Heine compared the little professor of Konigsberg with the terrible Robespierre; the latter had merely killed a king, and a few thousand Frenchmen—which a German might forgive; but Kant, said Heine, had killed God.

You cannot read anyone out of context – if that is done, a dictator can be shown to be a saint on the strength of a couple of sentences, and vice versa. While talking about Kant, or any other philosopher, you have to consider their whole philosophy. And if that is done with Kant, I don’t think he is a defender of capitalism or liberalism. One thing he did do – he unleashed a pack of mad dogs on the world – “his intellectual descendants” – which included Hegel, Marx, and the pragmatists James and Dewey. Marx alone has the blood of tens of millions on his hands thanks to Lenin, and Stalin, and Mao. The others have the genocide of Nazi Germany, and the involuntary servitude of most of humanity to their credit.

A philosophical “Axis of Evil”

This is a continuation (1, 2) of the bashing of anti-reason philosophers and philosophies. Rand didn’t respect too many philosophers. The only two she had any real respect for, it differed in degree, were Aristotle and John Locke, and this was because these two were the pro-reason philosophical force behind the formation of her beloved United States. And she shreds all other philosophers, one by one, in her book “For the New Intellectual” – some because of their views on metaphysics and epistemology, others because of those on ethics and politics. (You wouldn’t enjoy it if you were her target. She had a gift for vitriolic polemic.)

Among the three she singled out for attack are Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel and Karl Marx. She actually called Kant a “head-shrinker”.

Kant-

The man who formalized this state [of battle between Witch Doctors and Attila-ists] and closed the door of philosophy to reason, was Immanuel Kant.

Kant gave metaphysical expression to the psycho-epistemology of Attila and the Witch Doctor and to their primordial existential relationship, shutting out of his universe the existence and psycho-epistemology of the Producer. He surrendered philosophy to Attila—and insured its future delivery back into the power of the Witch Doctor. He turned the world over to Attila, but reserved to the Witch Doctor the realm of morality. Kant’s expressly stated purpose was to save the morality of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice. He knew that it could not survive without a mystic base—and what it had to be saved from was reason.

Attila’s share of Kant’s universe includes this earth, physical reality, man’s senses, perceptions, reason and science, all of it labeled the “phenomenal” world. The Witch Doctor’s share is another, “higher,” reality, labeled the “noumenal” world, and a special manifestation, labeled the “categorical imperative,” which dictates to man the rules of morality and which makes itself known by means of a feeling, as a special sense of duty.

The “phenomenal” world, said Kant, is not real: reality, as perceived by man’s mind, is a distortion. The distorting mechanism is man’s conceptual faculty: man’s basic concepts (such as time, space, existence) are not derived from experience or reality, but come from an automatic system of filters in his consciousness (labeled “categories” and “forms of perception”) which impose their own design on his perception of the external world and make him incapable of perceiving it in any manner other than the one in which he does perceive it. This proves, said Kant, that man’s concepts are only a delusion, but a collective delusion which no one has the power to escape. Thus reason and science are “limited,” said Kant; they are valid only so long as they deal with this world, with a permanent, pre-determined collective delusion (and thus the criterion of reason’s validity was switched from the objective to the collective), but they are impotent to deal with the fundamental, metaphysical issues of existence, which belong to the “noumenal” world. The “noumenal” world is unknowable; it is the world of “real” reality, “superior” truth and “things in themselves” or “things as they are”—which means: things as they are not perceived by man.

Even apart from the fact that Kant’s theory of the “categories” as the source of man’s concepts was a preposterous invention, his argument amounted to a negation, not only of man’s consciousness, but of any consciousness, of consciousness as such. His argument, in essence, ran as follows: man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind, because he has eyes—deaf, because he has ears—deluded, because he has a mind—and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them.

As to Kant’s version of morality, it was appropriate to the kind of zombies that would inhabit that kind of universe: it consisted of total, abject selflessness. An action is moral, said Kant, only if one has no desire to perform it, but performs it out of a sense of duty and derives no benefit from it of any sort, neither material nor spiritual; a benefit destroys the moral value of an action. (Thus, if one has no desire to be evil, one cannot be good; if one has, one can.)

Those who accept any part of Kant’s philosophy—metaphysical, epistemological or moral—deserve it.

Hegel-

While scientists were performing astounding feats of disciplined reason, breaking down the barriers of the “unknowable” in every field of knowledge, charting the course of light rays in space or the course of blood in the capillaries of man’s body—what philosophy was offering them, as interpretation of and guidance for their achievements, was the plain Witch-doctory of Hegel, who proclaimed that matter does not exist at all, that everything is Idea (not somebody’s idea, just Idea), and that this Idea operates by the dialectical process of a new “super-logic” which proves that contradictions are the law of reality, that A is non-A, and that omniscience about the physical universe (including electricity, gravitation, the solar system, etc.) is to be derived not from the observation of facts but from the contemplation of that Idea’s triple somersaults inside his, Hegel’s, mind. This was offered as a philosophy of reason.

Marx-

While businessmen were rising to spectacular achievements of creative ability and self-confidently ambitious courage, challenging the primordial dogma of man’s poverty and misery on earth, breaking open the trade routes of the world, releasing mankind’s productive energy and placing in its service the liberating power of machines (against the scornful resistance of loafing, ex-feudal aristocrats and the destructive violence of those who were to profit most: the workers)—what philosophy was offering, as an evaluation of their achievements and as guidance for the rest of society, was the pure Attila-ism of Marx, who proclaimed that the mind does not exist, that everything is matter, that matter develops itself by the dialectical process of its own “super-logic” of contradictions, and what is true today, will not be true tomorrow, that the material tools of production determine men’s “ideological superstructure” (which means: machines create men’s thinking, not the other way around), that muscular labor is the source of wealth, that physical force is the only practical means of existence, and that the seizure of the omnipotent machines will transfer omnipotence to the rule of brute violence. Never had Attila’s psycho-epistemology been transcribed so accurately. This was offered as a philosophy of history and of political economy.

These three, along with Plato, the original idealist, totalitarian and communist – their “ideas” – are responsible for every major genocide carried out on the basis of an “ideology” in the 20th century. Ideas have consequences.

The destroyer of the mind

I think its time ET renamed its “Cosmic Uplink” column “Thoughts for the crapper.” I haven’t read today’s paper yet, but the column it carried the day before was outrageous to say the least. And this is not the first time Mr. Prime Crane Sri Always Joyous has written such “spiritual” stuff. He writes-

Four hundred years ago Rene Descartes, the French philosopher declared, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ He was right, and at the same time, he was wrong. This declaration has formed the basis of modern thinking. Billions of people in this world have followed Descartes for generations believing that unless each one outthinks the other they cannot succeed in this world.

He was right in that the human system does not know how to live without its mind, without thinking. As a result human beings have become slaves to their minds. They live in bondage. He was wrong in that it is possible to live without the mind!

First, a statement cannot be right and wrong at the same time – “you” can “interpret” it in two (or gazillion) different ways. When Descartes said “cogito, ergo sum” – this is one of the most famous statements in the history of philosophy – he meant that the only way he “knew” that he “existed” was because he “thought.” From the Wikipedia: “The simple meaning of the phrase is that if one is skeptical of existence, that is in and of itself proof that he does exist.” But Doubting Descartes, as always, doubts too much (and he says there is vacuum in Blaise Pascal’s head). His statement takes a swipe at metaphysics and epistemology in one go. I don’t have the reference at hand, but I think (I may be wrong here) he said that that piece of knowledge is the only thing that he is sure of – that he exists and he thinks. Rand said it best – “I am, therefore I think.” If you don’t exist, you cannot think – existence before consciousness.

The more outrageous claim of Prime Crane is “it is possible to live without the mind!” Are you kidding me? For such people, philosophy is a joke. Will you undergo a heart operation by a surgeon who thinks that “it is possible to live without the mind?” Or sign a contract with an architect/ engineer who says that he can build a skyscraper without using his mind? Or marry off your daughter to someone who believes that? Or write in an application for some job-

Sir,
[...]
Mr. Crane states that it is possible to live without the mind. I believe him. It then stands to reason (its just a meaningless idiom; reason, of course, is irrelevant) that it is possible to work without the mind. So I didn’t find it necessary to gain the necessary knowledge and qualifications. I believe that the “higher consciousness” will take care of it, automatically…

Philosophy is not something that you think about in the toilet, or something that you write about because you have nothing else to do, or talk about to impress friends and girl friends. You can do all that, but that is not its “primary purpose.” Philosophy is a guide to life. It is not a joke.

Then comes more traditional stuff – idealism Vedanta style-

Many centuries before Descartes, a Vedic sage declared that man does not begin to exist till he stops thinking. Adi Shankara, the boy sage from ancient India, at the age of eight, faced his future master across the waters of the holy Tungabhadra river. The master asked him, ‘Who are you?’ In response Adi Shankara said, ‘I am not the mind, I am not the intellect, I am not the ego and I am not the senses. I am beyond all that. I am pure consciousness.’

“I am pure consciousness.” What does that mean? Take a shot. Does this “pure consciousness” need to eat, drink, pee, take a dump, sleep, earn, read? Or can it survive without all this?

Then comes his moral relativism, that practiced by, as Blanshard referred to them, emotivists-

Nothing is inherently good or bad except what we judge them to be…Drop your judgement about yourself, about people around you and about situations.

Hitler killed 6 million jews – there is nothing “inherently good or bad” in that act? Nathuram Godse murdered Gandhi. Isn’t it bad? What about murderers, rapists etc etc etc. They are not “inherently good or bad?” We should stop judging them, stop punishing them and let them kill, rape and pillage?

This is what happens when philosophy and spirituality is considered to be something that is “special,” some skill that is to be practiced by “enlightened” people, “intellectuals” and other jerks. The mind – intellect – is the “only” barrier against nonsense. And the only way people can purvey absolute crap – “profound” knowledge – is by destroying the mind. No wonder philosophers and gurus keep saying the mind doesn’t exist, and neither do you, and that you need to aim for a “higher consciousness”. The fact that they have an audience – people gape, in awe, at such “profundity” – speaks volumes about the intellectual caliber of the general populace.

—

There is a companion piece, a bigger one, by spiritual “guru” Deepak Chopra that is just as inane-

The economic meltdown being global is pointing out to one essential fact that there is no regional or national solution to any problem. These problems include extreme poverty, economic disparities, social injustice in all its forms, war, terrorism and climate chaos.

All these problems are the result of a collective consciousness that is based on the idea of the separate self. Now we are being forced to realise that we are not only one economy and one eco-system, we are one humanity. To create the new paradigm we do not need to resuscitate a dying patient, we need to let the patient die and reincarnate ourselves as a new humanity.

He then goes on to provide a plan to hand over the civilized world to barbarians – through disarmament. He also wants to “initiate a global voluntary programme of personal transformation, relationship building, creative problem-solving and service.” If people are so interested in all that crap, they will do it themselves. Its only necessary to “initiate” it if they don’t want to do it “voluntarily.”

Beyond such mind-numbing spirituality lies evil, far worse than the evil that Hannah Arendt termed ‘banal’. That is why I think Rand called Immanuel Kant – some one the world recognizes as the most important philosopher since Aristotle, a man who didn’t “hurt” a single soul – “the most evil man in mankind’s history.” It was his philosophy which laid the groundwork for Nazi Germany, for Soviet Russia, for Communist China, a philosophy that left the mind defenseless against the machinations of “leaders” and “statesman” – he denied reason. “The man who . . . closed the door of philosophy to reason, was Immanuel Kant . . . .”