Author: Huenemann

Richard Velkey reviews Robin Douglass’s Rousseau and Hobbes: Nature, Free Will, and the Passions. Excerpt:

The critical response to Hobbes has been inadequate, Rousseau argues, due to its failure to grasp the historical contingency of the misery-causing passions and to see that original human nature is free of them. Yet Rousseau makes this move by an appeal to Hobbes in which he takes further Hobbes’s view of the human as originally governed by passion (self-preservation and amour-propre) and as unaware of the “metaphysical” principles of right ascribed to natural reason by natural law theorists (68). Hobbes was radical but insufficiently so: “Hobbes very clearly saw the defect of all modern definitions of natural right: but the conclusions he draws from his own definition show that he understands it in a sense that is no less false.” Hobbes should have seen that his insight into the human as passion-governed leads in another direction: “Above all, let us not conclude with Hobbes that because he has no idea of goodness man is naturally wicked, that he is vicious because he does not know virtue”. Hobbes’s error is shared by all fundamental political thinkers prior to Rousseau: “The philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have all felt the necessity of going back as far as the state of nature, but none of them has reached it.”  Hobbes like all the others attributed to original humanity passions that could arise only in society. Thus Rousseau would unmask the failure of the whole tradition, Hobbesian as well as anti-Hobbesian, with the help of Hobbes. This is one of several paradoxical inversions performed by Rousseau.

“Thou hast existed as a part. Thou shalt disappear in that which produced thee.”

wow its kind of like you’re going to die without ever having been a real person at all
so it’s kind of like you were never really alive

“Take away thy opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint. “I have been harmed.” Take away the complaint, “I have been harmed,” and the harm itself is taken away.”

hi did you know that if you stopped complaining you wouldn’t have anything to complain about, you should try it

“Hast thou reason? I have. -Why then dost not thou use it?”

ok your brain is not there for like, decoration babe, it’s not just there to weigh your head down

Read more here!

Great essay here on the man who is said to be single-handedly responsible for the decline of “Søren” as a first name. Excerpt:

If Kierkegaard is your benchmark, then you judge any philosophy not just on the basis of how cogent its arguments are, but on whether it speaks to the fundamental needs of human beings trying to make sense of the world. Philosophy prides itself on challenging all assumptions but, oddly enough, in the 20th century it forgot to question why it asked the questions it did. Problems were simply inherited from previous generations and treated as puzzles to be solved. Kierkegaard is inoculation against such empty scholasticism. As he put it in his journal in 1835:
“What would be the use of discovering so-called objective truth, of working through all the systems of philosophy and of being able, if required, to review them all and show up the inconsistencies within each system … what good would it do me if truth stood before me, cold and naked, not caring whether I recognised her or not, and producing in me a shudder of fear rather than a trusting devotion?”

Here you go!

Interesting essay by Joseph Epstein in The Weekly Standard. Excerpt:

The answer for Oakeshott, as he set out most emphatically in “On Being Conservative,” is to cultivate

a propensity to use and to enjoy what is present rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be. .  .  . To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.

For Oakeshott, conservatism was a disposition rather than a doctrine. From this disposition certain political positions followed, views of change and innovation key among them:

Whenever stability is more profitable than improvement, whenever certainty is more valuable than speculation, whenever familiarity is more desirable than perfection, whenever agreed error is superior to controversial truth, whenever the disease is more sufferable than the cure, whenever the satisfaction of expectations is more important than the “justice” of the expectations themselves, whenever a rule of some sort is better than the risk of having no rule at all, a disposition to be conservative is more appropriate than any other; and on any reading of human conduct these cover a not negligible range of circumstances.