I’ve seen prominent Jewish figures like Ben Shapiro condemn comparisons of Gaza to the Holocaust, on the grounds that the Holocaust was far worse; now, with Hoppe, I’ve seen the same position taken for the contrary reason.
Always funny to me that people have this idea of phenomenology as woozy French poetry when for its founder it was intended to be even more strictly empirical, rigorous, and ‘objective’ than the physical sciences.
I don’t think the project succeeded in providing a pre-theoretical account of the world any more than the physical sciences have succeeded, but we nonetheless treat the latter as having broken into an ‘objective world’ undistorted by subjective prejudice because it is useful to us.
The point of phenomenology in general is to illustrate that the ‘scientific’ approach is merely one theoretical approach to the world; science (with respect to the physical sciences) cannot acknowledge this fact about itself without wandering into the territory of philosophy and ceasing to be scientific.
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The anger and tone of voice that we find in Reformation battles were alien to the Middle Ages. As we have to admit, Reformation contests were like peasant brawls compared to the elegant fencing of the scholastics. As I said yesterday, one could then make very radical assertions unhindered without going over the line or really getting out of step.
Karl Barth
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Max Scheler notes, in religious life, that “believing is seeing.” This runs contrary to the empiricist’s maxim that “seeing is believing” and that all perception is the perception of sensible and material objects.
In fact, faith is its own kind of perception with its own domain of knowledge, a domain qualitatively distinct from the others (i.e. the rational, practical, and scientific) but no less real.
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Max Scheler describes a type of man he calls an “arriviste” - we would say striver - that I think is relevant here. He is kindred to the man of ressentiment in that he (unlike the noble sort of person) never experiences his own value or that of another without it being mediated by comparing them and only perceives the qualities in them that constitute possible differences, “more” or “less”, “higher” or “lower” than his own. He arrives at all value judgments by comparing himself to others and vice versa, and feels any respect in which he could be lesser as a threat to his self-value. The arriviste/striver is one who has this problem but is also energetic and relatively capable, and so he pursues power, property, honor, etc, but not because he enjoys or values these things intrinsically, but only because they are indifferent occasions for him to try and one-up others in an attempt to soothe his oppressive feeling of inferiority conditioned by the neurotic rat race comparison game he's running in his head.
In a truly homogenous country, this dialogue aiming to identify and wax loquacious about that which “we share in common” is never even had. It’s like debating the existence of gravity.
Here, Weinstein is effectively saying guns don’t kill people, people kill people.
Unfortunately, guns, as a fairly effective method of killing people, allow people who want to kill people to kill more people quickly. If there was an effective way to rid the country of all guns by banning them, it would be a good idea, but there isn’t (criminals will still have them), so it isn’t a good idea.
We can scrap the H-1B visa program, however, and we can ban migrants from India from the country. We can disarm employers who seek to injure the American worker by importing foreign labor on the cheap.
Vivek says America’s founding fathers sacrificed their honor before their lives. Little slips like this tell you a lot about a person. He’s always comparing himself to America’s founding fathers because that is how he would behave in their shoes (if he actually wore any).
America’s founding fathers risked their lives for their honor, not their honor for their lives. Their way of life is totally foreign to someone like Ramaswamy, who will do and say literally anything to get ahead.
There is something great and profound about Western man that should cause him to hesitate before mocking victims for their misfortune and recoil at those that would. This tendency is sometimes (errantly) given the title of “slave morality.”
It isn’t just about winning the elections are being seen in public as a “victor” who brings repute to one’s family instead of a “victim” who brings embarrassment, but winning in the right way. Status is not the most important thing; there is a moral world behind appearance, behind etiquette and naked ambition.
Western man feels as if he can lose before men and nonetheless win before God and that the approval of the latter is always worth more than that of the former.
This is something like grace and magnanimity, but it is not just the desire to distinguish oneself from the crude and insecure rival and plebeian that accounts for it. It is borne of a deep compassion and humanism, a private conscience, that European man already had, at least in part, before his conversion to Christianity. The Stoics believed in an “inner citadel” of the soul free from the court of public opinion. Socrates went to his grave and was executed by the Athenian state at the advice of his Daemonion.
There has always been an interiority to Occidental man that distinguishes him from Oriental man; it is the difference between shame and guilt that divides East from West.
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“Indeed, we have already become too weary to die; now we continue to wake and we live on—in burial chambers!”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The distinction between man and the animal for Nietzsche is that the animal, guileless and red in beak and claw, has yet to convince itself that it is not a creature of instinct. It is man who thinks himself a free actor who draws from the supra-sensuous reservoirs of good, evil, strength, and weakness, in realizing or failing to realize his instincts.
Put more precisely, man does not even perform his impulses, it is his impulses that, in conjunction with his capacities, perform him, and persuade him that they are not mere impulses at all, but decisions decided out of indifference which only later ossify into habit; habits which he is morally responsible for.