"One of the best contemporary writers on philosophy" National Review
"A terrific writer" Damian Thompson, Daily Telegraph
"Feser... has the rare and enviable gift of making philosophical argument compulsively readable" Sir Anthony Kenny, Times Literary Supplement
Selected for the First Things list of the 50 Best Blogs of 2010 (November 19, 2010)
Tuesday, September 26, 2023
Augustine on false community
In a
new article at Postliberal Order,
I discuss the perverse forms of human community identified and criticized by
Augustine in the Confessions, and how
what he has to say applies to our times.
I have always found it interesting - and perhaps former libertarians might have as well - how obsessed many moral nihilists are with collectivity and solidarity.
There are no doubt different ways of looking at the phenomenon: emotional/psychological, metaphysical, or even through a kind of evolutionary psychology lens. You know, in the latter case, " born that way"; a kind of reproductive strategy congenial to the "free rider" lineages.
But whatever the cause, it is the striking emotional neediness and the desire to diffuse and diminish responsibility of those ardent secularists who one tends to encounter, that leaves so strong an impression: A strongly negative one.
Freud famously remarked that religion, or religious belief, was the self consolation of life's losers. The collectivist impulses of the ardent a-theistic secularists often, not always, but often, seem to well fit the pattern of a religion too, especially considering the root sense of the term "religio".
Of course marking this observation does not require any unique deductive powers, as anyone who has trudged through the original and comically vaunting humanist manifesto will immediately recognize.
Atheist solidarity. Like naughty monkeys huddling in a storm. Or like the anti Jesus atheist "Elaine" of the old "Seinfeld" TV series, hilariously insisting despite her anti-theism, that her bedmate should care if she goes to Hell.
"how obsessed many moral nihilists are with collectivity and solidarity." Then what you call nihilism isn't, rather, it is a reorientation from the false promise of a source of objective morality to the true source of morality, our subjective moral intuitions, most especially, those moral intuitions that emphasize our altruistic, cooperative natures that bring us together collectively in solidarity with our fellow human beings.
Yet Feser has the gall to assert a binary choice between godliness and perversion.
@StardustyPhsyche do you find Feser to be worth reading (like does he challenge your beliefs at his best) or do you think he/ those like him miss the mark so much that you need to balance it out? A lot of your comments seem disdainful but you're also here a lot
Anon, "do you think he/ those like him miss the mark so much that you need to balance it out?" I am not very interested in asserting my personal motivations because they are unverifiable, as well as irrelevant to the OP.
But, since you ask, I am interested in the arguments and don't find preaching to the choir very interesting, or likely to lead to uncovering any errors I might be making, or to sharpen my expressive capabilities.
OP "true community is possible only as a byproduct of seeking something higher than it: communion with God." Thus, a choice is presented, continue with "perversion" or have an imagined communion with a figment of your imagination. I call that trading one perversion for another.
Other alternatives are plain, yet the author of the OP and DNW seem oblivious or utterly unaware of them.
In the case of DNW "how obsessed many moral nihilists are with collectivity and solidarity" is a plainly self-contradictory assertion.
A simple AI assisted google search yields: "A nihilist is someone who believes in nihilism, which literally means "nothingism". Nihilism is the belief that nothing has any meaning or purpose. Nihilists believe that life is meaningless and that there is no truth. They reject all moral, religious, political, and social institutions. Nihilists believe that everything in existence is unfounded and useless. They believe that there is no reason to uphold moral principles for themselves or others. They also believe that humans are animals and that we cannot know anything."
So, DNW claims that those who reject social institutions, don't see any reason to uphold any moral principles in anybody, reject political institutions...also are "obsessed" with "collectivity and community".
So here we have the OP, insisting that the way to end perversion is to turn to god, oblivious to the alternative of turning to each other.
And we also have DNW, insisting that those who seek each other seek nothingness.
So, Anon, perhaps you can point out the worth of the OP yourself?
Lol, I was just wondering. This particular issue isn't very interesting and I actually agree with you to some extent. "Nihilism" is often used a boogeyman/ insult more than anything else
Freud at his worst but elsewhere one of the greatest thinkers of modern times.Jung was a Nazi and pagan.I am baffled that people like Rohr so admire him
"In other words, what was attractive in the sin was a shared experience of evildoing, a perverse sense of community in doing what is destructive of community. "
Yeah, it's a way of scamming or defrauding others and then evading personal responsibility. A frisson of collective "will to power" excitement is there, too, no doubt.
The embrace of this diffusing tactic is one of the main traits we encounter in those people who we eventually, layers later, identify in the political realm as modern liberals, aka "progressives".
Anyway, according to their own worldview, all language, even their own social justice palaver, boils down to motivated rhetoric. So it is no wonder that these "congeries of appetites" which ( formerly "whom") we typically refer to as progressive persons, should concerning similar cases and circumstances nontheless slide nonchalantly between assertions of subjectivity and objectivity, radical relativism and truth, and radical nominalism and categorical imperatives. It just depends on what the momentary locus of these urges, happens to emit at that moment.
Rather simplifies things in one respect. We in principle recognize a mere bleat for what it is by simply locating the progressive within the very interpretive framework which it has itself constructed.
"So what if abortion ends life?"Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon Magazine
"All life is not equal. That's a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides ..."
"All [human] life", she says, "is not equal". Perhaps this principle applies even to self-identifying affinity populations among whom certain myopic, responsibility shrugging, or simply uncongenial, loci of appetite are discovered residing.
Potentially brutal. Yet it's all very, how do they say .... "liberating" and progressive.
Dr. Feser, I am only now reading your blog about Augustine. I can identify with how he struggled with sins of the flesh. For some of us, it is a lifetime struggle.
I wanted to take a few minutes tonight to check a short thread, and reread a few of my comments in order to review if I had been exercising enough - sufficient for combox contributions anyway - care in the formulation of my remarks.
This, because, even granting Peterson's conclusions regarding the low verbal intelligence of authoritarian progressives and their followers, several recent assertions made by the type and perfectly exemplifying Peterson's observations, surprised even me with their bizarre "obtuseness"; to try and put it charitably.
So, I looked and immediately noticed the phenomenon again in a response which I had previously ignored.
For example, I had stated above in this combox that, I have always found it interesting ... how obsessed many moral nihilists are with collectivity and solidarity. "
In LVI's ( as we shall label him to protect his anonymity and feelings) retort we see the following, " A simple AI assisted google search yields: "A nihilist is someone who believes in nihilism, which literally means "nothingism". Nihilism is the belief that nothing has any meaning or purpose. Nihilists believe that life is meaningless and that there is no truth. They reject all moral, religious, political, and social institutions. Nihilists believe that everything in existence is unfounded and useless. They believe that there is no reason to uphold moral principles for themselves or others. They also believe that humans are animals and that we cannot know anything." "
And then comes the interpretation, " So, DNW claims that those who reject social institutions, don't see any reason to uphold any moral principles in anybody, reject political institutions ..."
See what he has done here? If you are an ordinarily careful reader, know anything about moral philosophy, or are at all familiar with the topics covered by this blog over the years, it is obvious.
His "simple, AI assisted google search" has compensated for his deficient understanding not at all.
I had used the term "moral nihilism".
Either not knowing what it meant, or for some other reason, he selected a different term with a different definition upon which to launch his criticism.
"Moral nihilism" ... moral nihilism rejects the possibility of absolute moral or ethical values. Instead, good and evil are nebulous, and values addressing such are the product of nothing more than social and emotive pressures."https://iep.utm.edu/nihilism/
And that, is exactly the doctrine which the commenter has himself been advancing.
We are not talking 19th Century Russia, nor the post war German youth subjects of Helmut Thielicke's work.
The reference is to modern progressives, their metaphysics, moral ontologies, philosophical anthropologies, and the reflexive relation of the same to their own social behaviors, expectations, and subsequently undeserved status as moral peers and fellows.*
*Believing Catholics will of course persist in seeing them as like kinds deserving of human consideration - albeit as damaged and probably noxious like kinds.
Whereas I think that they not only deserve to be measured by the yardstick they employ, but that it is prudent and important and right to do so.
He showed that you contradicted yourself, therefore he showed that you exhibited faulty reasoning, if one values logic and considers self contradiction to be faulty reasoning.
You here yammer on with a diffuse and irrelevant set of assertions about generalized notions you attribute to "progressives".
You thus fail to even address, much less refute, the fact that you contradicted yourself.
Nihilists reject absolute morals. Absolute morals are logically impossible, as arguments of the form used in the Euthyphro dilemma conclusively prove.
All any of us have, all anybody ever has had, all any human ever can have, even in principle, is conventional morality, which is simply an agreed upon set of subjective moral intuitions.
"collectivity and solidarity." arise from subjective personal moral intuitions. There is no contradiction for those who express personal moral intuitions to express a personal moral intuition.
To assert that there is such a contradiction is false, and just another example of your faulty reasoning.
"Whereas I think that they not only deserve to be measured by the yardstick they employ," Fair enough. You seem to think you are using the yardstick of logic. Using that yardstick I have measured you as faulty.
You repeatedly contradict yourself, or assert a contradiction where there is no contradiction, or employ a variety of logical fallacies such as non-sequitur wherein you prattle on with irrelevant attacks .
There is no contradiction for a moral nihilist to express subjective moral intuitions regarding "collectivity and solidarity."
I have always found it interesting - and perhaps former libertarians might have as well - how obsessed many moral nihilists are with collectivity and solidarity.
ReplyDeleteThere are no doubt different ways of looking at the phenomenon: emotional/psychological, metaphysical, or even through a kind of evolutionary psychology lens. You know, in the latter case, " born that way"; a kind of reproductive strategy congenial to the "free rider" lineages.
But whatever the cause, it is the striking emotional neediness and the desire to diffuse and diminish responsibility of those ardent secularists who one tends to encounter, that leaves so strong an impression: A strongly negative one.
Freud famously remarked that religion, or religious belief, was the self consolation of life's losers. The collectivist impulses of the ardent a-theistic secularists often, not always, but often, seem to well fit the pattern of a religion too, especially considering the root sense of the term "religio".
Of course marking this observation does not require any unique deductive powers, as anyone who has trudged through the original and comically vaunting humanist manifesto will immediately recognize.
Atheist solidarity. Like naughty monkeys huddling in a storm. Or like the anti Jesus atheist "Elaine" of the old "Seinfeld" TV series, hilariously insisting despite her anti-theism, that her bedmate should care if she goes to Hell.
"Together, wherever, we go ..."
"how obsessed many moral nihilists are with collectivity and solidarity."
DeleteThen what you call nihilism isn't, rather, it is a reorientation from the false promise of a source of objective morality to the true source of morality, our subjective moral intuitions, most especially, those moral intuitions that emphasize our altruistic, cooperative natures that bring us together collectively in solidarity with our fellow human beings.
Yet Feser has the gall to assert a binary choice between godliness and perversion.
@StardustyPhsyche do you find Feser to be worth reading (like does he challenge your beliefs at his best) or do you think he/ those like him miss the mark so much that you need to balance it out? A lot of your comments seem disdainful but you're also here a lot
DeleteAnon,
Delete"do you think he/ those like him miss the mark so much that you need to balance it out?"
I am not very interested in asserting my personal motivations because they are unverifiable, as well as irrelevant to the OP.
But, since you ask, I am interested in the arguments and don't find preaching to the choir very interesting, or likely to lead to uncovering any errors I might be making, or to sharpen my expressive capabilities.
OP
"true community is possible only as a byproduct of seeking something higher than it: communion with God."
Thus, a choice is presented, continue with "perversion" or have an imagined communion with a figment of your imagination. I call that trading one perversion for another.
Other alternatives are plain, yet the author of the OP and DNW seem oblivious or utterly unaware of them.
In the case of DNW "how obsessed many moral nihilists are with collectivity and solidarity" is a plainly self-contradictory assertion.
A simple AI assisted google search yields:
"A nihilist is someone who believes in nihilism, which literally means "nothingism".
Nihilism is the belief that nothing has any meaning or purpose.
Nihilists believe that life is meaningless and that there is no truth.
They reject all moral, religious, political, and social institutions.
Nihilists believe that everything in existence is unfounded and useless. They believe that there is no reason to uphold moral principles for themselves or others. They also believe that humans are animals and that we cannot know anything."
So, DNW claims that those who reject social institutions, don't see any reason to uphold any moral principles in anybody, reject political institutions...also are "obsessed" with "collectivity and community".
So here we have the OP, insisting that the way to end perversion is to turn to god, oblivious to the alternative of turning to each other.
And we also have DNW, insisting that those who seek each other seek nothingness.
So, Anon, perhaps you can point out the worth of the OP yourself?
Lol, I was just wondering. This particular issue isn't very interesting and I actually agree with you to some extent. "Nihilism" is often used a boogeyman/ insult more than anything else
DeleteFreud at his worst but elsewhere one of the greatest thinkers of modern times.Jung was a Nazi and pagan.I am baffled that people like Rohr so admire him
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteWhy is the new translation of Augustine's Confessions "excellent"?
ReplyDelete"In other words, what was attractive in the sin was a shared experience of evildoing, a perverse sense of community in doing what is destructive of community. "
ReplyDeleteYeah, it's a way of scamming or defrauding others and then evading personal responsibility. A frisson of collective "will to power" excitement is there, too, no doubt.
The embrace of this diffusing tactic is one of the main traits we encounter in those people who we eventually, layers later, identify in the political realm as modern liberals, aka "progressives".
Anyway, according to their own worldview, all language, even their own social justice palaver, boils down to motivated rhetoric. So it is no wonder that these "congeries of appetites" which ( formerly "whom") we typically refer to as progressive persons, should concerning similar cases and circumstances nontheless slide nonchalantly between assertions of subjectivity and objectivity, radical relativism and truth, and radical nominalism and categorical imperatives. It just depends on what the momentary locus of these urges, happens to emit at that moment.
Rather simplifies things in one respect. We in principle recognize a mere bleat for what it is by simply locating the progressive within the very interpretive framework which it has itself constructed.
"So what if abortion ends life?"Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon Magazine
"All life is not equal. That's a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides ..."
"All [human] life", she says, "is not equal". Perhaps this principle applies even to self-identifying affinity populations among whom certain myopic, responsibility shrugging, or simply uncongenial, loci of appetite are discovered residing.
Potentially brutal. Yet it's all very, how do they say .... "liberating" and progressive.
Dr. Feser, I am only now reading your blog about
ReplyDeleteAugustine. I can identify with how he struggled with sins of the flesh. For some of us, it is a lifetime struggle.
I wanted to take a few minutes tonight to check a short thread, and reread a few of my comments in order to review if I had been exercising enough - sufficient for combox contributions anyway - care in the formulation of my remarks.
ReplyDeleteThis, because, even granting Peterson's conclusions regarding the low verbal intelligence of authoritarian progressives and their followers, several recent assertions made by the type and perfectly exemplifying Peterson's observations, surprised even me with their bizarre "obtuseness"; to try and put it charitably.
So, I looked and immediately noticed the phenomenon again in a response which I had previously ignored.
For example, I had stated above in this combox that, I have always found it interesting ... how obsessed many moral nihilists are with collectivity and solidarity. "
In LVI's ( as we shall label him to protect his anonymity and feelings) retort we see the following,
" A simple AI assisted google search yields:
"A nihilist is someone who believes in nihilism, which literally means "nothingism".
Nihilism is the belief that nothing has any meaning or purpose.
Nihilists believe that life is meaningless and that there is no truth.
They reject all moral, religious, political, and social institutions.
Nihilists believe that everything in existence is unfounded and useless. They believe that there is no reason to uphold moral principles for themselves or others. They also believe that humans are animals and that we cannot know anything." "
And then comes the interpretation,
" So, DNW claims that those who reject social institutions, don't see any reason to uphold any moral principles in anybody, reject political institutions ..."
See what he has done here? If you are an ordinarily careful reader, know anything about moral philosophy, or are at all familiar with the topics covered by this blog over the years, it is obvious.
His "simple, AI assisted google search" has compensated for his deficient understanding not at all.
I had used the term "moral nihilism".
Either not knowing what it meant, or for some other reason, he selected a different term with a different definition upon which to launch his criticism.
"Moral nihilism"
... moral nihilism rejects the possibility of absolute moral or ethical values. Instead, good and evil are nebulous, and values addressing such are the product of nothing more than social and emotive pressures."https://iep.utm.edu/nihilism/
And that, is exactly the doctrine which the commenter has himself been advancing.
We are not talking 19th Century Russia, nor the post war German youth subjects of Helmut Thielicke's work.
The reference is to modern progressives, their metaphysics, moral ontologies, philosophical anthropologies, and the reflexive relation of the same to their own social behaviors, expectations, and subsequently undeserved status as moral peers and fellows.*
*Believing Catholics will of course persist in seeing them as like kinds deserving of human consideration - albeit as damaged and probably noxious like kinds.
Whereas I think that they not only deserve to be measured by the yardstick they employ, but that it is prudent and important and right to do so.
"See what he has done here?"
ReplyDeleteYes, pretty obvious.
He showed that you contradicted yourself, therefore he showed that you exhibited faulty reasoning, if one values logic and considers self contradiction to be faulty reasoning.
You here yammer on with a diffuse and irrelevant set of assertions about generalized notions you attribute to "progressives".
You thus fail to even address, much less refute, the fact that you contradicted yourself.
Nihilists reject absolute morals. Absolute morals are logically impossible, as arguments of the form used in the Euthyphro dilemma conclusively prove.
All any of us have, all anybody ever has had, all any human ever can have, even in principle, is conventional morality, which is simply an agreed upon set of subjective moral intuitions.
"collectivity and solidarity." arise from subjective personal moral intuitions. There is no contradiction for those who express personal moral intuitions to express a personal moral intuition.
To assert that there is such a contradiction is false, and just another example of your faulty reasoning.
"Whereas I think that they not only deserve to be measured by the yardstick they employ,"
Fair enough. You seem to think you are using the yardstick of logic. Using that yardstick I have measured you as faulty.
You repeatedly contradict yourself, or assert a contradiction where there is no contradiction, or employ a variety of logical fallacies such as non-sequitur wherein you prattle on with irrelevant attacks .
There is no contradiction for a moral nihilist to express subjective moral intuitions regarding "collectivity and solidarity."
It’s a lovely article. Thanks.
ReplyDelete