Serial Killers as “Criminals”

Posted on May 31, 2010 by shaunmiller

Here was an interesting question posted at Philosophy Forums:

If Alcoholism has been proven to be a mental and physical, diagnosable addiction, and society can come to terms with this and forgive those whom have been diagnosed for wrongdoings brought on by said disease, why are serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer punished by law and forced to suffer consequences? Just like it was proven that there are chemical, physical reactions in your brain that cause Alcoholism, leading to it being diagnosable, there are the same that cause some to become mentally ill enough to become serial killers. Alcoholics never “want” to drink, they “need” to. Like heroin to a junkie, it becomes sustenance. Serial killers don’t kill for fun, in fact motives are often hard to find in the murders they commit. And yet, they are punished for “unforgivable” and “heinous” crimes that they cannot control themselves to prevent. This is the reason serial killers often come off as normal and unassuming, as can be Alcoholics. However, society can come to terms with Alcoholism and even forgive them for their shortcomings. Why is this? Is this because serial killers’ diseases sustenance is illegal? Then why can illegal drug addicts avoid prison by committing to and undergoing treatment? Is it because society needs to draw the line somewhere? Is it because society is too ignorant, or ill prepared to accept this as a fact? Or is it because the acts they commit affect society far too harshly? I’d actually argue against the last in that Alcoholism has affected more people in my family, even ruining lives completely, more than a murder would have.

My answer is basically pragmatic: we can deal with alcoholics in society, but not serial killers.  Yes, alcoholics “need” alcohol, but after some training and strict discipline, they eventually won’t consume it.  The temptation to drink is still there, but it goes down somewhat.  For serial killers, it’s hard to say because we’ve never actually studied that or helped them to not want to be killers.

I also think it’s because alcoholics may want to drink, but they don’t desire that want.  In other words, the second-order desire is negative; they don’t want to want the drink.  Serial killers, however, may still want to want killing.  But do they?  I actually don’t know.  I’ve never studied this.

So two questions: serial killers enjoy killing.  But do they want to get rid of these wants?  If so, then I may have to revise my argument.  And two, what do you think of this proposed argument above?

Posted in Emotions, Ethics, Free Will | 6 Comments

Exercising the Will

Posted on May 24, 2010 by shaunmiller

In order to get strong, you must exercise.  Here are some examples:

If you want to be physically strong, you must do some sort of athletics such as lifting weights, running, etc.

If you want to be mentally strong, you must do some intellectual exercises such as reading, writing, getting involved in some stimulating conversations.

If you want to be spiritually strong, you must do some spiritual exercises such as getting involved in one’s religion, reading the scriptures, praying, etc.

If you want to be socially strong, you must do some social exercises such as being around friends, getting involved in your community, etc.

But now can one make the will strong?  Does it even make sense?

Let’s start with being physically strong.  Obviously, doing aerobic and/or anaerobic exercises are the way to do it.  It’s just that simple.  Of course to challenge yourself, you need to be with people are push you or challenge you to get better.

To be mentally strong, one needs some intellectual stimulation.  This, again, can be a group effort (like doing philosophy) or it can be individual (like homework), but the idea is that your mental abilities gets better over time.  If one doesn’t use those mental efforts, one loses mental strength in the same way one loses physical strength if one doesn’t exercise.

How about being spiritually strong?  I’m not religious but it seems obvious that one one must do the rituals and practices of one’s faith whether that means attending some sacred space, reading the sacred texts, praying/meditating, and other activities that helps you commune yourself to the Absolute.  This can be a group or individual enterprise as well.  The group helps the individual with their faith, but one can obviously practice his/her faith alone.  Can one become spiritually weak?  I think so.  If one doesn’t do these practices, one can lose one’s faith over time.  Thus, it’s analogous to losing physical or mental strength.

How about being socially strong?  It seems strange but one needs to interact with the community and establish relationships.  I’ve heard that the most terrible thing a prisoner has to go through is solitary confinement.  This is because we are social creatures and getting involved in the community helps us look at the world as social beings instead of individual monads.  It seems odd, but one can do this individually or as a group, I think.  A group can fight for a cause or for some injustice which helps give out the message to the rest of the community.  But one can also practice civil disobedience all by oneself and still give a message to the community.  It doesn’t have to be about injustice either.  One can make many friends.  But a group can also intermingle with another group.  Can one lose social strength?  Yes.  One can get away from society for so long that they become an ascetic and look at the world as something to despise.  It doesn’t have to be that extreme, but perhaps lazy people who don’t care much about the world can be socially weak.  In my class, only 20% of the people (on average) know where Iraq is on the map.  By tuning more into the world and realizing what their actions are doing to the community, they get a sense of responsibility and hopefully and understanding of interacting relationships in the world.

But what about the will?  When I’m talking about the will, I mean something like “I will to do x.”  It’s like I’m intending to do something.  For example, if I’m on a diet, I will myself not to eat some delicious snacks, or if I want to stop smoking, then I will myself not to smoke.  But can this will be strengthened?  The only person I know of that talks about strengthening the will is Aristotle.  He says that if one is tempted to do something vicious, it’s because one has a weak will.  So how does one strengthen the will?  Aristotle says through practice until it becomes ingrained into their character.  For me, this seems a bit odd.  If I want to strengthen my will, it seems strange that I have to tempt myself (let’s say, to eat some cake) so that I can strengthen the will.  Perhaps it could work, but let’s say that I want to will myself to keep on studying.  Does that mean I should study in at my friend’s BBQ so that I strengthen the will to resist the gathering and stick with my studies?  It could work, but again, it seems odd.

Can this be an individual effort or a group effort?  I guess it could be both.  Many people who exercises in groups are known to do better because they get motivation.  But does this extra motivation strengthen the will?  Is this new motivation a real ingrained passion in one’s character, or is this motivation superficial, meaning that you’re motivated because you don’t want to let the other person down?

Finally, can one become weak in their will?  If this analogy holds, it seems that we don’t do many exercises to strengthen the will (after all, what are the exercises to strengthen it).  Thus, our wills become weak over time.  But this seems absurd.  It’s not as if I stopped eating snacks, and then through loss of exercise, my will became so weak that I now have to eat snacks.  I still have the same will, I think.  I resist snacks or other things as I did when I was younger.

Could the will be innate?  Perhaps, but is physical, mental, spiritual, and social strength innate?  It can, but I believe you can get stronger or weaker with what you already have.  So yes, it’s is partially genetic, but there must be some exercises in order to strengthen what you already have.

So then, these are the questions:

  1. Can one strengthen the will?  If so, what sort of exercises can one do?
  2. Can the will become weak?  If so, is it because of lack of exercises?
  3. Can the will be a group and/or individual effort?
  4. Is the will simply innate, or can one train the will?
  5. Finally,  we know people who overdo their physical, mental, spiritual, and social exercises.  Is it possible to “overdo” the will?
Posted in Paper Topic, Will | 9 Comments

Book Review: The Rebel by Albert Camus, Part IV and V: Art and the Meridian

Posted on May 17, 2010 by shaunmiller

Since Part IV was really short, I decided to do Parts IV and V together on this blog.

Part IV: Rebellion and Art

“Art is the activity that exalts and denies simultaneously” (p. 253).  What does this mean?  The artist rejects what reality is, but demands for a certain unity about reality.  What have previous philosophers and thinkers said about art?  Art and beauty is a last priority, or it should be rejected from society.  There’s a notion of censorship always around art.  Thus, art is always revolutionary.  It transforms history into absolute beauty.  The artistic rebel makes aesthetic demands and forms the world into his plans.  Admittedly, this is the portion where I was lost because Camus is talking about aesthetics and beauty and this really isn’t my specialty in philosophy.  He talks about how the true artist is the rebel and how the rebel creates his own style.  But true creation leaves the categories of the master and the slave.  I would assume this would also leave the foundations of history like Hegel and Marx pointed out.  Again, Camus points out the that artist is the best example of the rebel, but his arguments is where I got lost.

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Part V: Thought at the Meridian

This last bit was the climax of the book.  It’s probably the best way to end this book.

The twentieth century is a century where man has shackled off religion, but he’s replaced those chains with something intolerable.  In this last century, mankind has gotten use to the tragedies of death, genocides and destruction.  Rebellion, therefore, has been seen as unworthiness.  However, giving up the rebel is leading to a conforming society: a society where justice prevails by having a police state.  The rebel is now seen as a tyrant, someone should we should see with repulsion instead is seeing that the rebel makes us realize that it could be us that is wrong.  The rebel creates the value whereas the rest of society is living off of the values from the previous rebel.  From the first move, the rebel cuts the world into two.  Why does he do it?  He does it in the name of mankind and he sacrifices this identity.  His existence was contained in this identity.

Rebellion doesn’t demand total freedom.  It actually puts total freedom on trial by showing that it has limits: the limit that we have the power to rebel.  The rebel exists because falsehood, injustice, and violence exist.  Because of this, rebels will always exist.  If the rebel is fighting for God or for history, he is surrendering his rebelliousness because it falls under the same patterns as before.  It is the same with freedom and justice.  Camus states (which has taken me a while to think about):

Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction: therefore it destroys freedom.  The revolution to achieve justice, through freedom, ends by aligning them against each other.

In other words, freedom needs contradiction.  But these contradictions are in the realm of absolutes.  Why?  And how?  Absolute freedom mocks at justice.  Indeed, absolute justice denies freedom.  The rebel fights for unity and order, but he must also remain aware that this unity and order is impossible. His revolt is without hope for resolution.  But it is through revolting where we see Camus give us his view of ethics. Remember, Camus can’t give us ethics with some standard because a standard is always giving us a purpose or a reason behind it all. So for Camus, there are no standards in ethics. But what you can do is revolt. It’s a negative form.  Explain the taste of salt, you can’t do it. But if you describe it in a negative way, it makes more sense.  This is Camus’ version of ethics: we do it negatively by rebelling. If we see something that’s unjust, we rebel and say that that’s oppressive. But to say it’s for humanity or for historical progression, that’s applying a standard, and the question faces us: why do it for humanity? Why do it for history? Doing it for those reasons is purely nihilistic.  In fact, doing it for history keeps power to the State.  And once it does that, it destroys the creative aspect of humanity.

Again, what is a rebel? It’s “a man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.  He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion” (13).  What is he saying yes to?  He’s saying “no” of some intrusion in his life that he finds intolerable because he feels that “he has the right to. . .”  Rebellion must have that aspect.  He’s saying “yes” to a borderline and that one is affirming some borderline.  It’s just that the oppressor has stepped over it.  The rebel has a revulsion at infringements of his rights and a complete and spontaneous loyalty to certain aspects of himself.  When you rebel, a certain awareness comes out.  The rebel says “this is how things are.  Let’s change it so that that is how it should be.”

But here’s the thing with ethics: people who act on something do it because they know it’s the right thing to do. However, the rebel acts because he believes it’s the right thing to do, but he also recognizes that he might be wrong. The person with the moral standards are actually ruthless because they won’t even think about him/her being wrong. People with moral standards are actually more destructive because they’re dogmatic.  Man however cannot live without values. When you revolt, you’re revolting against exploitation, oppression, injustice and violence. But by that revolting, you’re asserting values on which you’re revolting. Thus, revolting has a moral basis.  With every rebellion, the rebel always thinks of an ideal beyond himself so that he can act.  The rebel identifies himself with others and thus he surpasses himself.  With this, the rebel tries to be someone other than who he is.  Resentment – it means to resent yourself because of what’s happening in society.  The rebel, on the other hand, refuses to allow anyone to define himself.  He fights for no one but himself, it’s part of his being.  He’ll even accept pain, as long as his integrity is intact.  The only hope for a society is an open future where revolting and moderation are constantly in tension.  To be totally free, you must give up the idea of purpose.  Thus, the ideas of freedom and justice find their limits in each other.  The revolutionaries don’t understand or don’t know about these limits.  The rebel does.   What limits are these?  The irrational limits the rational, which gives it its moderation.  This is our meaning.

Camus supports trade-unionism because it has improved the workers conditions.  By doing that, it has created limits and what should and should not happen.  The same could be said with other institutions.

Moderation is not the opposite of rebellion.  Rebellion in itself is moderation, and it demands, defends, and re-creates it throughout history and its eternal disturbances. . . Moderation, born of rebellion, can only live by rebellion.  It is a perpetual conflict, continually created and mastered by the intelligence.  It does not triumph either in the impossible or in the abyss.  It finds its equilibrium through them.  Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found.  We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages.  But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others. (p. 301)

We do it for the present, not for the future and certainly not for history.  Dedicating your life to history or to the future is back to the problem of nihilism.  Dedicate yourself to yourself!  “Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love” (p. 304).  It’s a love and exuberance of life.  “Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present” (p. 304).  It’s either love or nothing at all.  Dedicating your life to Man instead of a man is back to resentment instead of love.  This denies life.  This is the problem: no one loves life!  People have this assumption that to love life is to ignore the past and future.  But to love life is to make a better future.

We shall live and let live instead of bending the forces into a particular order.  Camus finishes the book with a nice flourish that gives a nice segue into his next book, The Myth of Sisyphus.  In ways, I thought The Rebel was the sequel.  This book is great for those who want to know more about Camus’ philosophy of rebellion and how to live life.  I consider The Myth of Sisyphus as a better outline and The Rebel as minor details of what the rebel does.  In short, read the The Myth of Sisyphus, and if you have a chance, read The Rebel.  I’ll finish by letting Camus having the last word:

They [the rebels] choose, and give us as an example the only original rule of life today: to learn to live and to die, and, in order to be a man, to refuse to be god.  At this meridian of thought, the rebel thus rejects divinity in order to share in the struggles and destiny of all men. (p. 306)

Posted in Book Review, Camus, Ethics, Existentialism, History, Values | 10 Comments

Book Review: The Rebel by Albert Camus, Part III: Historical Rebellion

Posted on May 11, 2010 by shaunmiller

Part III: Historical Rebellion

At this point, Camus wants to give a more detailed analysis of rebels in history.  At the same time, he also wants to show what the difference is between rebellions and revolutions.  I would suggest that if one is doing a simple philosophical review of Camus, they could probably skip this section.  It is pretty long.  However, he does state some interesting things pertaining to revolutions.  Most of this stuff was unfamiliar to me, but I tried my best to analyze what Camus was saying.

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In history, the motive behind all revolutions is freedom.  If there was no freedom, justice would never come to fruition.  However, the difference between the rebel and the revolutionary is that the rebel always rebels for freedom.  The revolutionary can suspend freedom in order to demand justice.  However, revolutions are a logical consequence of metaphysical rebellions.  Through metaphysical rebellions, the death of God is real.  So what’s left?  History.  History will be the key to demand freedom.  This can only mean a change of government.  Any change in the policies of governments isn’t a revolution, it’s reform.  But then, what is the difference between a rebellion and a revolution?  Camus states: “Rebellion is, by nature, limited in scope.  It is no more than an incoherent pronouncement.  Revolution, on the contrary, originates in the realm of ideas” (p. 106).  The revolutionary puts ideas into history, while the rebel is an individual experience into ideas.  However, while revolutions shape actions to ideas to make the world fit into some theoretical framework, they kill men and principles in the process.  The rebel only kills men.  Revolutionary governments have obligations to be war governments.  Thus, a total revolution ends with a totalitarian government.  Here, mankind is back on the scene as the most important creature in the universe.  It’s the only way to save mankind.

“The majority of revolutions are shaped by, and derive their originality from, murder” (p. 108).  Slaves rebelled against their masters.  Gladiators fought as well.  This introduced the notion of “equal rights” into Roman thinking.  But in order for this revolution to work, in order for this idea to hold, it must replace and overthrow an older principle.  What older principles are there that need to be overthrown?

Kingships must be destroyed.  This is how the new social contract was born.  Rousseau brings up the idea that the people, not the king, can rule.  Before Rousseau, God created kings which, in turn, created people.  With the king gone, power isn’t brought about arbitrary.  Rather, it comes from the consent of the people.  Power now has a normative, rather than a descriptive, cause.  But with this, it makes God unneeded or even unnecessary.  The will of the people is being substituted for God Himself.  From here, God is killed by the 20th century.  This stems from thinkers like Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche.  The City of God will simply be the city of humanity.  With individual terrorism, as long as the steps are logical, anything is justified.  It was a rational self-interest that caught on in the Zeitgeist of the 1850s and 60s.  (Admittedly, this is where I got somewhat lost because Camus brings up a lot of historical information in which I haven’t had any background on, nor could I tell what information he was giving and how that connects with rebellions and revolutions.)

Because history is basically the story of revolutions, revolutions aren’t personal.  They are abstract and look far into the future.  Revolutionaries have no times for love, friends.  Indeed, violence is against everyone in service of an abstract idea.  These ideas become higher than humanity.  Indeed, revolutions suspend rights because revolutions is the supreme value.  There are only duties now.  However, because predicting history is hard to come about, rebellions have a problem about facing a probability instead of accuracy.  Nonetheless, the rebel is the creator of values.

Irrational Terror became the next stage in history thanks to Mussolini and Hitler.  They saw the irrational as the supreme good instead of reason.  They constructed the State on these terms: everything is meaningless and history is written through force.  It’s the ethics of the gang.  This stage died however.

There is another terror, however, that is quite rational.  Certain prophesies became an object of faith.  It was no longer a sense of predictions because predictions are short-lived, they can be controlled.  Prophecies, however, are long-term, fated to come about, and most importantly, they don’t need proof.  If predictions have failed, prophecies were the only hope.  These prophecies were the stages of how history functioned and it’s through Marx that he is the exemplar of this stage.  His prophecy is also revolutionary: capitalism is the last stage of economic productivity where the dialectic will be resolved to the point where there will be no more economy.  When that happens, the history that we know it will simply be pre-history.  All history, all reality is dialectic and economic.  History is now triumphant because it has replaced reason as the transcendent.  The only thing that is valuable is anything to supports the system, this particular future.  Any utopia is automatically authoritarian, coercive and a dystopia.

Why did Marxist prophecies fail?  It was because it wasn’t scientific.  If it was, they can only describe the past.  The future remains a probability.  Here is where I disagree with Camus.  Science does try to predict the future.  Indeed, that’s the point of science is to predict future outcomes.  Of course, it is in the realm of probability.  Nonetheless, there are probabilities where there’s a higher chance and a lower chance of something.  Perhaps the Marxists made a bad prediction, but they were trying their best to be scientific as they could.  However, Camus is right that Marx was trying to make prophecies, which exits the realm of science.  If it was truly to be scientific, it should have never made prophecies.  But with this, man becomes a mere character in history without any influence in this deterministic outcome.  Thus, Marxists had to invent their own science by replacing determinism with a sense of probability.  But with that, they had to deny any scientific progress since then.  They have to ignore any scientific progress in order for these Marxist principles to hold.

The Marxist dialectic, therefore, is nothing but nihilism in disguise.  It’s pure movement where it’s goal is to deny everything which is not itself.  But this goal is arbitrary and terrifying.  What is the point, then?  The point is to have complete dominance.  It is explicitly stated through the Marxist maxim: the dictatorship of the proletariat to suppress the bourgeois class and to bring about the socialization of the means of production.  After that, the State–and thus the dictatorship–will wither away.  Until we reach “to each according to his needs,” the State will continue.  But when will that be.  The answer has always been “no one knows.”  Thus, any Marxist prophecy takes away freedoms.  Indeed, there hasn’t been any promise that this dictatorship will end.

The rebel, however, can refuse to be reduced to the historic conditions.  If so, then the rebel reaffirm the existence of another kind of human nature, something which refuses to be objectified.  By reducing everyone to historic conditions, the individual is lost in this objective structure.

Thus, the revolution kills what is left of God and brings about historical nihilism.  To choose history is to choose nihilism.  But history offers no hope because you are either with history (by being objectified in historical conditions, and thus you’re part of the oppressive machinery) or you rebel (in which case, you’re insane.  Thus, you either have a police force or insanity.  There is no value in this structure.  So history cannot be the source of values.

Camus states it best:

Absolute revolution, in fact, supposes the absolute malleability of human nature and its possible reduction to the condition of a historical force.  But rebellion, in man, is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historical terms. . . But man, by rebelling, imposes in his turn a limit to history, and at this limit the promise of a value is born (p. 250).

Revolutions, in fact makes man subjugate to history.  The rebel, on the other hand, refused to be objectified.  If so, the rebel isn’t rebelling for the sake of history but to rebel against it.  The rebel wants unity; the revolutionary demands totality.  What can we learn from this?  Historical rebellion is a live and let live process in order to create value.  And the best person that can do this is the artist.  To finish of this part, it’s best to let Camus say it:

Rebellion, in fact, says–and will say more and more explicitly–that revolution must try to act, not in order to come into existence at some future date in the eyes of the world reduced to acquiescence, but in terms of the obscure existence that is already made manifest in the act of insurrection.  This rule is neither formal nor subject to history, it is what can be best described by examining it in its pure state–in artistic creation.  Before doing so, let us only note that to the “I rebel, therefore we exist” and the “We are alone” of metaphysical rebellion, rebellion at grips with history adds that instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are. (p. 252)

Posted in Book Review, Camus, Ethics, Existentialism, History, Marx, Values | 2 Comments

Book Review: The Rebel by Albert Camus, Part II: Metaphysical Rebellion

Posted on May 4, 2010 by shaunmiller

Part II: Metaphysical Rebellion

What is metaphysical rebellion?  Just like the slave rebels against the slave because the slave is rebelling against the constraints of the situation, the metaphysical rebel is doing the same thing.  He’s rebelling against the creation, the condition of which he finds himself.  The metaphysical rebel is always a blasphemer.  Just think of all previous rebels (e.g., the Founding Fathers rebelled against the conventional English society, Jesus rebelled against the Jewish/Roman society, Marx rebelled against the capitalist society).  But they blaspheme in the name of order.  By rebelling, you are going against the metaphysics of the culture.  In ancient Greece, they were fated to die.  Epicurus rebels and says “well then, let’s enjoy life.”  By blaspheming, you are trying to find a new god. https://i0.wp.com/www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/x1/x8488.jpg

In modern times, the best rebel is Sade.  After this, Camus talks about the rebels in art and poetry, but I’m not really familiar with it.  However, one thing that he brings up is the rebellion of Ivan in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.  Ivan rejects God on a moral plane.  He puts God on trial.  That’s true rebellion!  Later, Nietzsche rebels against the whole notion of Christianity.  Nietzsche takes a look at the meaningless world and he affirms it.  From Nietzsche, only man can find his own meaning by asserting (and affirming) the absurdities of the world.  To be truly free is to get rid of purpose, a telos.  However, a Nietzschean rebellion doesn’t go far enough:

Nietzschean asceticism, which begins with the recognition of fatality, ends in a deification of fate.

Nietzsche starts on the right path by replacing God with man.  But all he does is he just replaces God with Fate.  That’s what the Greeks did, but it’s not true rebellion; it’s simply nostalgia.  But for Nietzsche, he doesn’t reject evil.  He accepts is as part of the human circus.  It’s something to avoid, but also as a remedy.

For Marx, nature is to be subjugated in order to obey history; for Nietzsche, nature is to be obeyed in order to subjugate history.  It is the difference between the Christian and the Greek.

In art, the surrealist is the rebel by finding a solution to an endless anxiety.  (I’m not an artist so I’m not sure what Camus is saying.  What endless anxiety is the surrealist escaping from?)

The reactionaries made use of the tragedy of existence to reject revolution–in other words, to preserve a historical situation.  The Marxists made use of it to justify revolution–in other words, to create another historical situation.  Both make use of the human tragedy to further their pragmatic ends.

The enemy of surrealism is rationalism.  The rebel in art is getting away from Kant.

In history, there’s an insane drive to find order in history.  Schopenhauer is the rebel for Hegel.  This then leads to part three.

Posted in Book Review, Camus, Ethics, Existentialism, History, Values | 2 Comments

Book Review: The Rebel by Albert Camus, Part I: The Rebel

Posted on April 28, 2010 by shaunmiller

This really isn’t a book review per se, but since this is a challenging book, this review is more for myself.  It’s a restatement of Camus’ arguments and my own two cents.  So this will be a combination of a summary of Camus’ book and my response to it.  I also understand this is a long post.  You’ll have to bear with me.  It’s a very complex essay and so I want to write down as much as I can on Camus’ thoughts as well as my own thoughts on this as well.  At the same time, I was thinking of doing the whole book but that would be too big of a post.  Thus, I’m just going to post it part by part and see if that makes things simpler.

Part I: The Rebel

What does it mean to rebel?  To live means that our existence takes on a positive value.  Rebellion means that we value something in human society.  Thus, the rebel is always ethical.  But the downside is that these values are “given.”  This book is about politics and ethics.  One must be familiar with Camus philosophy to understand this book.https://i0.wp.com/www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/x1/x8488.jpg It’s a metaphysical revolt.  This isn’t a revolution.  Revolutions are planned out.  The rebel has no plan.  He just acts.

The essay feels like it’s a sequel to his The Myth of Sisyphus.  In there, he talks briefly about rebellion.  Since the rebel acts, what is he acting toward?  Imagine if there was no meaning or purpose.  What then?  Suicide?  Murder?  Nihilism?  Camus advocates rebellion.  Why is that?  It’s because the universe and life itself is absurd.  Can we prove it?  No.  But I can still act on it and show why that’s the “right” belief.  How do I do that?  By rebellion.  All beliefs are like that.  All beliefs and ideas start of as rebellions and they strive and push to become known.  But there’s no reason behind it.  There’s no calculated rationale.  It’s a blind push.  Thus, the rebel can only find reasons within himself, not from without.  It’s the feeling that “I’m right” and establishes a borderline where crossing this borderline is a “no.”  To remain silent is amounting to wanting it.  Notice it’s not tolerating it, but literally wanting it.  Camus states: “With rebellion, awareness is born” (p. 15).  And with this rebellion, he’ll take on this value (even though it’s from within) and live for it.  Perhaps even die for it.  With rebellion, it’s a shift from descriptive to normative; before there’s ethics, there’s rebellion.  Before there’s politics, there’s rebellion.  Before there’s value, there’s rebellion.  The rebel finds something to value in order for that thing to be valuable.  From this, before there’s metaphysics, there’s rebellion.  Is it possible to find values in a meaningless world?  That’s what the rebel wants to find out.  That’s why in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus starts with the essay that there’s only one true philosophical problem, and that is suicide.  With these values, the rebel takes on these values so deep and ingrained that he believes that these values are now more important than his own individuality.  Thus, he’ll fight for these values because he considers these values more important than himself.  Ahh, but there’s one thing you must accept: there’s no human nature.  If there was a human nature, you couldn’t rebel.  As Camus puts it: “Analysis of rebellion leads at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature does exist, as the Greeks believed.  Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving?” (p. 16)

We come together through rebellion.  Camus states: “In order to exist, man must rebel” and “I rebel–therefore we exist” (p. 22).  This isn’t resentment.  Resentment is slow.  Rebellions are quick and surprising.  The resenter resents himself.  The rebel imposes his ideas onto others.  With this, rebellions far surpass resentments.  The rebel makes people aware of their freedom.  Sartre was wrong.  Being aware of your freedom doesn’t make you free; the rebel makes you aware that you’re free.

Posted in Book Review, Camus, Ethics, Existentialism, History, Values | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments

Marx’s Critique of the Liberal Notion of Freedom

Posted on April 21, 2010 by shaunmiller

https://i0.wp.com/www.donalforeman.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Marx.jpgI just finished Peter Singer’s Book on Marx.  I thought it was well-written and Singer does an excellent job of explaining Marx’s position and his overall philosophy.  In the end, Singer gives an evaluation of Marx and explains Marx’s critique of the liberal notion of freedom.  It’s something I’ve never really thought about, but it something that Singer says that whether you agree with him or not, it’s still a major contribution to political philosophy and it’s something that every political thinker needs to face.  So what’s the critique?  I’ll summarize Singer:

  1. Let’s start with the liberal notion of freedom.  According to this idea of freedom, I’m free if I don’t have any interference from other people.
    1. Now, I do have limits to this freedom.  The government can interfere if I infringe on my neighbor’s freedom, for example.  In that sense, my freedom can be restricted.
  2. With this, freedom is at it’s maximum where each individual can do what s/he pleases as long as there’s no interference onto others.
  3. Ok, so this seems like it fits into capitalism.  Let’s say that an employer offers a job with a wage of $10/hr. for forty hrs. a week.  Under the liberal notion of freedom, anyone can choose, without interference from others, to accept or reject this offer.
    1. If you accept this offer, then the employer will use your labor to make a widget and he offers these widgets for sale at a certain price, and again anyone can freely choose whether or not to buy them at this price.
    2. And anyone who can do better is free to set up their own business to make a better or cheaper widget.
    3. So, no one is forced to work for or buy from this business or any individual.

Now comes Marx.  He has a huge objection to this.  To explain this, I’ll switch to a more current example:

Suppose that we all live in the suburbs and in order to come to work or go to school in the city, we either have to drive here or take the bus.  I, personally, don’t want to wait for a bus, so I’ll take my car.  Most of you, I would assume, don’t want to wait for a bus so you’ll drive too.  In fact, thousands of other people will probably be thinking the same thing.  Now because of that, the roads are much more clogged with cars.  And because of that, it takes each of us an hour to travel 10 miles.  Ok, now in the liberal notion of freedom, we have all chosen freely.  No one deliberately interfered with our choices.  However, notice that the outcome is something that none of us want.  If we all went by bus, the roads would be empty and we could cover this distance in 15 minutes.  Even if there was the inconvenience of a bus stop, we’d all want that.  Now we are free to alter our choice of transportation, but what can we do?  A lot of cars also slows the bus down, so why should any individual choose differently?  Thus, there’s a paradox in the liberal notion of freedom: we have each chosen in our own interests, but the result is in no one’s interest.  It’s individual rationality, but collective irrationality. So what’s the solution?  We should all come together and make a collective decision.  Individually, we can’t bring about a situation that we desire.  Together, we can achieve what we want.  Marx saw capitalism forming a collective irrationality.  We assume that that we can choose what we want and where to work under capitalism.  But we don’t even have control over our own lives.  This isn’t because people choose badly.  It’s because all of these individual choices results in a society where no one has chosen that result.  So where the liberal conception of freedom says that we are free because we are not subject to deliberate interference by other humans, Marx says that we aren’t free because we don’t even control our own society.  Remember, economic conditions not only determines our wages, but it also determines our politics, religion, and our ideas (the substructure forms and creates the superstructure).

Any sort of rationally organized industrialization should make us enjoy an abundance of material goods with a minimum effort.  Under capitalism, however, these advances actually reduces the value of the commodity produced, which means that the worker must work just as long for the same wage.  With this, if there is no overall planning or direction in the economy, it leads to a crisis of over- or underproduction which is itself a crisis which signifies an irrational system.  Recessions happen through this “free” economy where neither the workers nor the capitalists want.  Economic value now has a life of its own.  Money takes on a life of its own it has more value than the worker does.  Yet these economic relations are our own unwitting creations.  Now they’re not deliberately chosen but nevertheless the outcome of our own individual choices and thus potentially subject to our will.  So we’re not truly free until, instead of letting our creations control us, we collectively take control of them.  Thus, a free market is actually a contradiction in terms for Marx.  A free market means that the market, the economy controls you.   Rather, we should control the market.  We should control our economy.  And this means we need a planned economy.   Any unplanned economy makes human beings subservient to the economy.  A planned economy, however, is reasserting a human sovereignty and it’s an essential step towards true human freedom.

It’s an interesting argument.  I know that when you hear the word “Marx” there’s an automatic reaction.  But just for a brief second, pretend that it’s someone else making this argument.  It seems to hold.  What do you think?

Posted in Capitalism, Economics, Marx, Paper Topic, Peter Singer | 7 Comments

Book Review: Cultivating Humanity by Martha C. Nussbaum

Posted on April 12, 2010 by shaunmiller

Throughout the midst of the culture wars, Martha Nussbaum gives a definitive account of reforming our liberal education from a classical point of view.  She boldly, yet cautiously defends the liberal education that is desperately needed in higher education.  What is the problem?

The typical replies against this liberal education is that:

  • this tears apart tradition.  The students will gain new ideas that has no anchor to their upbringing.
  • this constant questioning of their beliefs and ideas just makes students confused.
  • this make students the (false) assumption that they are being indoctrinated with multiculturalism and getting away from their roots.

Nussbaum gives a careful introduction into what a true education is by using the classics to help her case.https://i0.wp.com/covers.openlibrary.org/b/olid/OL1012540M-M.jpg

She starts with Socrates and his method.  I have mentioned the benefits of the method in a previous post but to repeat, “the unexamined life is not worth living.”  By examining our lives, we truly understand why we have the beliefs that we do.  If not, we may be repeating the same mistakes that has happened in the past.  Thus, if our beliefs were bad, we can correct them.  If our beliefs were good, then we at least know that they were good and we can justify them.  What’s wrong with that?  We often see any form of questioning our beliefs as a bad thing.  It’s not!  Doubt is helpful because it admits honesty into who we are.  It provides a clearing into knowledge instead of dogma.  And it cultivates wisdom instead of remaining in ignorance.  Clarity through learning is the key, not following the crowd.  This can only be done by questioning.

Nussbaum next uses Diogenes and the Stoics by stating that we aren’t simply local citizens.  We’re all in this together (especially as the world is becoming more globalized).  We must transcend our “local origins and group memberships” and instead become “a citizen of the world.”  By ignoring other cultures, we will be lost not only on the competitive ground (which I’ve given a Zakarian twist to it), but we also lose our wisdom and our insight into these other ideas that we would lose if we never studied them.  Just by simply following what our culture says is again following the crowd.  It’s a simple authoritarian society instead of a democratic one.  It sets us up to double check to see why our actions are truly good actions or merely conventional.  Indeed, learning about other cultures is an essential part of life.

Next, she uses Hume and Adam Smith to give an account about how Narrative accounts can produce sympathy within us.  Knowledge is important, but morality also includes feelings.  Indeed, Smith points out that we lose wisdom without cultivating our moral sympathies.  This requires imagination, namely imagining what it would be like to be the other person.  Compassion tears down the walls of signifying the other as “other.”  The other is now part of “us.”  It makes us realize why people are feeling the way they are.  We see and understand why they are angry when an injustice happens even though that action didn’t happen directly to us.  Literature is the best way to cultivate empathy and sympathy.  With this, this helps us become a citizen of the world, a cosmopolitan rather than just identity politics.

After justifying why this reform education is necessary, she delves deeper into the applications of multiculturalism: Cultural Studies, African-American Studies, Women Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, and how religion applies to all of this.

I won’t go into the details here, but she basically states that those subjects should be taught in higher education they are necessarily to cultivate a democratic citizen.  She does, however, critique certain philosophers like Foucault and Derrida saying that their studies have gotten off track in terms of what it means to cultivate our humanity.  She specifies Allan Bloom and George Will specifically stating that they have misconstrued what a liberal education is all about.

Her ideas are practical, refreshing, and bold.  To give a specific account, part of my job is to make the students question their religion.  Of course, many people will see this as bad because it makes people to lose a connection to their community, to who they are, and perhaps society will be fragmented.  I disagree.  Questioning is helpful.  It forces people to now investigate instead of dogmatically living out their lives.  People who never question their beliefs will continually follow the crowd instead of doing it because they know it’s right.  It looks threatening on the surface, but if one digs deeper, one can see that it’s beneficial.  As Plato said, leaving the cave is painful.  Gaining wisdom is painful, but you’ll be better for it in the long run.  If you care about how education should be taught and one who delves into the culture wars, you should check this book out.

Posted in Book Review, Culture, Education, Respect, Stoicism, Teaching | 4 Comments

What War with Iran Means

Posted on April 3, 2010 by shaunmiller

by Pat Buchanan.  (Thanks to Prof. Hand for providing this link.)

What an impressive article!  The comments at the end are enlightening as well.  Basically, Buchanan states that a war with Iran would be completely disastrous and it would just make the situation worse than it is now.  We should keep investigating to really make sure that they are on the “verge” of making a bomb, and not get into the scare tactics that the media, Congress or the Neocons are trying to pull us into:

If Iran is on the “verge” of a bomb, as Schumer claims, the entire U.S. intelligence community should be decapitated for incompetence.

It’s a great article that everyone should read.

Posted in Government, War | 3 Comments

Book Review: This Land is Their Land by Barbara Ehrenreich

Posted on March 30, 2010 by shaunmiller

I just read This Land is Your Their Land by Barbara Ehrenreich.  I was somewhat looking forward to it because I read another book of her’s, Nickel and Dimed.  I liked that book so I expected to like this one as well.  Well, this book wasn’t what I was expecting.  In Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich actively lives out a life of three jobs to see if these types of people can actually survive.  These three jobs were waitress, maid, and Wal-Mart clothes attendant.  In the end, you can probably tell that she struggled just by making ends meet.  I expected her new book would have the same flavor, the same struggles, and the personal aspect to her previous.  It wasn’t that at all.

https://i0.wp.com/www.metroactive.com/metro/08.20.08/gifs/BOOK_Ehrenreich.jpg The book has no personal aspirations nor detailing moments of personal struggles.  That’s what made her last book great.  Instead, we get a hodge-podge of articles that feels like they are from an op-ed piece in the newspaper.  Indeed, in her acknowledgments page, she states that a few of them were op-ed pieces.  They are extremely easy reads.  All of them range from 2-3 pages.

Ehrenreich writes with sarcasm about the unfair treatment of people in America with various topics.  These topics are: the inequality of wealth which leads to class struggles, illegal immigration, the lowering middle class, workers’ rights, health care, sexual issues, and religion.

While she makes perhaps a few good points, I would’ve loved to see arguments for her views.  Most of the stuff was sarcastic wit on why the status quo doesn’t work.  She certainly has a biting humor.  Perhaps under different circumstances, I would’ve been in the mood for this.  However, since I was expecting something with an argumentative bite, I was let down.

If, however, you feel like you want to read about certain injustices and why the status quo isn’t working out (with a bent to the left), this book might be for you.  However, they are op-ed pieces and so there is no strong argumentative stability.  Check it out for a quick read if you want to read about these issues.  I’d give it 2 stars out of 5.

Posted in Book Review, Culture, Health, Religion, Sexuality, Socialism | 1 Comment