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‘I Am A Philosopher Not A Prophet’


Slavoj Zizek told The Guardian ‘I am a philosopher not a prophet.’

But Zizek also considers himself to be a Marxist and Marx, in his Theses on Fuerbach, wrote:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

Isn’t that also the goal of the prophet? So shouldn’t that also be the goal of a Marxist, even one who is also a philosopher?

And weren’t many of the most towering figures of philosophy also prophets who changed the world, rather than just critiquing it. I specifically wrote ‘towering’ instead of ‘great.’

I am thinking of Descartes who, more even than Netwon, set the table for a mechanistic view of the world.

Marx himself, of course.

Hegel, who built a structure to contain a scientific sounding determinism (and who set the table for Marx).

If one is truly Marxist (and I, for one, am not) and a philosopher (I am not that, either), shouldn’t thinkers like those above be what one strives for?

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More on ’36 Arguments for the Existence of God’


On my commute to work this morning, I began thinking about what it was that I found unsatisfying about 36 Arguments for the Existence of God.

It’s not a linear narrative, but a series of flashbacks. The longest series of flashbacks consists of episodes from the main character and his interactions with a Bellow-esque professor and intellectual (think Herzog or Ravelstein). A slightly shorter series of flashbacks return to when the main character met his current (live-in) girlfriend. The ‘present’ consists of the time when our hero’s successful book has garnered him an offer from Harvard, his girlfriend returning from a conference and then promptly leaving him, and a debate between our soon-to-be Harvard prof and a famous conservative commentator (who turns out to be little more than a straw man with an aggressive attitude).

Not earth shattered, but I don’t need that in a novel.

What bugs me is that the three parts don’t cohere, except insofar as the all involve the main character. The longest flashback, in particular, doesn’t seem to me to sufficiently inform the ‘present.’ The author seems to be setting up various characters (the Bellow-esque intellectual, the hero’s current girlfriend, his college girlfriend, and arguably the hero himself) to be archetypal, but the roles are too vague, the counterbalances don’t interact enough.

Besides showing off some decent writing, what was the point?

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Novels for Young People That You’re Not Supposed to Take Seriously When You Grow Up


A while back, I wrote about how Ayn Rand’s novels are really meant for alienated young people to read and then move on from once they’ve grown up.

Recently, I read this piece about a particular person’s commonsensical journey away from Rand.

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Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters


Way back in 1998, I was writing a thesis on a book by an obscure Southern apologist for slavery named Edmund Fitzhugh. His tract was published under the title of Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters.

I was researching why it was that Fitzhugh’s particular apologetics not only did not gain traction within supporters of slavery, but inspired intense criticism and were dismissed as quickly as they had appeared.

What did I see but this little gobbet from The Atlantic talking about that very book.

Ta-Nehisi Coates commented on what I (and indeed, anyone else who ever read the book) saw, and that was weird strain of proto-communism inherent in the book.

Oddly enough, for a slavery apologia, it rejected the most overtly racist aspects of other apologias (though any argument in favor of a system that kept Southern blacks in bondage is inevitably going to be racist). He did not see Africans as inferior or particularly suited for slavery (as many apologias argued). He argued for slavery in the abstract and even explicitly said that slavery would have been just as “good” had a different group been targeted for slavery. Which also goes to the core of his curious argument (and where the strain of proto-communism came from) – which was an economic argument (most apologists used, odd as it may seem today, moral and religious arguments, not economic ones).

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New Conan Movie Will Be Terrible


The new Conan is inevitably going to suck donkey balls. There’s no way around it.

The original short stories, written by suicidal masculinist Robert E. Howard, were masterpieces of high pulp. In theory, this new movie would hew much closer to Howard’s vision of the character – a wily, wary, and highly mercenary creation.

The 1982 movie freely abandoned most aspects of the story save a few names and the main character’s physique.

Nonetheless, its crazy right wing subtext; weird, pseudo-Nietzschean mythology (how many men my age first discovered that German grump from the quote opened Conan the Barbarian?); and utter self-seriousness was, in retrospect, the only way to capture the spirit of an outdated (especially in its racial and gender politics).

That an Austrian body builder with compensated for his almost complete verbal unintelligibility and the sort of bad acting normally associated with Keanu Reeves by means of Schwarzenegger’s incredibly improbably charisma.

Instead, we are likely to soon suffer through the bland antics of a beefed up pretty boy starring in a cut rate Kevin Sorbo knock off.

To brilliantly conclude, let ask you this one question:

What is best in life?

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On the Power of Ideas


But apart from this contemporary mood, the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

– John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

I rather hope this is true. Though Keynes notes the possibility of truly insidious ideas taking root (just look at the misguided, deeply discompassionate, and un-Christian values of the current leaders of the Republican Party), I do believe that ideas have value and can create positive change if disseminated.

Who knows? Maybe even Shelley will be proved true and poets will become the world’s unacknowledged legislators alongside Keynes’ economists and political philosophers.

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The Primacy of the Author vs the Recipient


I was reading Alan Kirby’s article The Death of Postmodernism in that most accessible (to laypersons like myself) of philosophical journals, Philosophy Now.

The title is a misnomer – no doubt picked for a certain spectacle and shock value, rather than a true reflection of the content – as the article is more an effort to describe what has following/is following/will follow post-modernism than a post-mortem on the post-modern.

The distinction he makes strikes me. Even in post-modernism, when a book was printed, an artwork created, it existed irrespective of any consumer of that book or that artwork. But Kirby posits that the more purely electronic and ephemeral products of post-post-modernism only exist in the reception by a viewer. They have no existence beyond that (does an email, hanging in cyberspace, exist if the recipient never opens it?). As for ephemerality, versus the relative solidity of a printed book, well, let me just suggest you try to find your Facebook status updates from four years ago.

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Watching “Atlas Shrugged: Part I”


I dragged Mu with me to catch a Monday afternoon matinée of that Tea Party monstrosity: Atlas Shrugged, Part I.

And it was every bit as famously and hilariously bad as we had been led to believe.

It followed the events of the book (at least the first third of it, for this is a trilogy) with exacting, religious devotion (taking into account that the action was moved from the fifties to the year 2016 – not coincidentally, I imagine, coinciding with the end of Obama’s second term). This devotion extends so far as to turn Ayn Rand’s embarrassingly awful literary sex scenes into embarrassingly awful cinematic sex scenes. In fact, the sex is so awful to behold that you might almost suspect it of being self-conscious parody were the filmmakers not obviously being so painfully earnest.

I don’t (or shouldn’t) need to tell you about Atlas Shrugged‘s (the novel and the movie) painful didacticism and ridiculously constructed straw men nor how the first quality makes for a turgid novel and how the second makes for a poor excuse for “philosophy.”

What I do want to tell you is my dream, wherein Atlas Shrugged turns into a midnight movie cult classic, with people shouting something or doing shots whenever some painfully unrealistic villain appears or when the people on screen are pouring themselves a drink (the world of Atlas Shrugged: The Movie is filled with people who drink so much alcohol [mainly what is supposed to expensive looking scotch] that you’d think the ghost of Hunter Thompson had helped write the stage directions).

Some small part of this dream came true as one of our fellow moviegoers (there only five or six of us) was constantly laughing or exclaiming “Who is John Galt.” I can’t be sure whether he was a liberal parodying the ripe for parody dialogue or whether he was a true Tea Partier expressing his deep appreciation for all that grand, Randian genius on screen. Either way, he acted like a brilliantly senile Greek chorus to the proceedings. Mu was not amused, but I felt he added a real touch of meta to the experience.

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Apologies to Atheists


I titled an earlier post A Recovering Atheist’s Take on the Rob Bell “Controversy”. Now, I would like to apologize to atheists and agnostics for using the term “recovering.” I should have simply said “former.”

Recovering atheists implies that atheism is some adolescent stage that a healthy person should advance from.

That is simply not the case. I am not an atheist anymore, but I respect both atheism and agnosticism as valid, mature, and rational choices.

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Post Offices & Coffeehouses


Did you know that first post office in New York City was established inside of a coffeehouse in 1642? The first post office in South Carolina was also established inside of a coffeehouse.

This is all just a way to restart the discussion of the role the coffeehouse plays in society (and, to be fair, the very first post office in America was actually in a bar, back in 1639, but that information does nothing to help me progress my point). Is it a place for debate and discourse or a place where I pick up a cappuccino for no other reason than that the overpriced, piece of garbage machine I have at home couldn’t brew raw sewage, much less a decent espresso? (Here’s a tip: that $75-$200 machine you have at home is actually physically incapable of brewing a real cup of espresso; all it can do is brew a crappy, bitter cup of coffee which, granted, is all many people think an espresso is, but the truth is, you need an industrial machine that costs a couple thousand dollars if you want to make an actual, real, no kidding cup of espresso).

Coffeehouses, even within my memory, didn’t used to be limited to the partially soul-less spaces of Starbucks and Caribou Coffee. They used to be places to read, to perform, to speak with strangers and play chess. Maybe they weren’t like Cafe Central in Vienna, where Freud and Trotsky took their brew or Deux Magots in Paris where Sartre held court, but I remember they used to be something!

I almost wonder if free wireless is part of the problem. We (and yes, I do this, too) bring our laptops with us and work and write and surf the web instead of interacting and performing and talking anarchism and socialism with strangers.