Its ok, the bit on rationalism I dont agree with though. He asks what is love and nobility to be described in rational terms. Of course its possible to describe such emotions and abstract things rationally.

I can’t help but wonder what kind of reception Stephen expects when he posts at traditionalist conservative websites using the e-mail address:

stephen@allofyourgodsaredead.com

which is sort of like someone posting at, say, a pro-democracy website with the e-mail address:

jack@dictatorshipoftheproletariat.com

or posting at a Jewish website with the e-mail address:

frank@gaschambersarezionistmyth.com.

I have nothing against Stephen, I’m just telling him that his e-mail address is the electronic equivalent of walking around with a t-shirt that says “F—- you and everything you hold most dear.” If that’s what he wants to do, well, it’s a free country. But as President Bush said about the protests against the Dixie Chicks, freedom is a two way street; so Stephen should be aware of the reaction that at least some people are going to have to him.

Stephen writes:
“Of course its possible to describe such emotions and abstract things rationally.”

This is only true in the same sense that modern philosophers like Daniel Dennett “describe” (implied to be a *sufficient* description) consciousness rationally without any transcendent implications. The trick is to not take it (consciousness, honor, or whatever) seriously: to treat it as an “epiphenomenon” or use some other anti-realist label and then declare that it has been described rationally, when the reality is that it has been discursively reduced to something it is not.

Thanks for the disclaimer lawrence, cant change that email address though, I use it to provoke people just, and also because I just think its personally amusing, not the same though as wearing an offensive t-shirt in public, maybe move similar to wearing an offensive t-shirt under a jumper. you you have to make a conscious decision to look at my address to see it. It only should annoy anyone anyway who is nosey enough to hover their mouse over my name to gather some info, not the same as posting under the name for instance “Stephen-the-wife-beater” or something similarly grotesque.

But anyway ah, when I look at Matts comment , I basically dont know what the concrete meaning of his statements are, It seems obviously I am incapable at this time of understanding this trancendence thing. If I say for instance that Love is just a biological expression of desire and a desire to protect the desirable. Yes I am leaving out the possibility of other possible meanings that could be appended to this meaning. But saying there is a transcendent meaning that is incomphrehensible anyway just short circuits my brain.

Stephen writes:
“…saying there is a transcendent meaning that is incomphrehensible anyway just short circuits my brain.”

Consciousness, love, and honor are not any more incomprehensible than anything else. We experience them vividly all the time and we discuss them reasonably. Materialism claims that bouncing molecules sufficiently explain them; they don’t. Rationalism’s claim is (like all self-contradictory claims) more squirrely, but it seems to amount to an assertion that there is nothing mysterious about these things to reason and that therefore the claims people make about mystery and transcendence are irrational.

If Stephen prefers an epistemic approach he can try this on for size: knowledge and mystery are presumed to be a clear dichotomy, but in actual fact they are not. That is, people presume that there is a bunch of stuff we know, and then distinct from that is a bunch of stuff that is unknown or mysterious. If our minds tried to actually work that way they would short-circuit though. Everything known is also mysterious, because we can always ask more legitimate questions about it. Everything mysterious is known enough to identify (this is even true of “the set of all completely unknown things” if such a construct is built in such a way as to be non-self-contradictory).

So the only rational conclusion is that right reason is not bounded in the way that rationalists suppose it to be, but rather is coextensive with the mysterious (or the transcendent, that which transcends us and the things we can comprehensively grasp). This is true all the way down to basic arithmetic and Godel’s Theorem. Mysteriously we seem to know things, but that knowledge is always mysterious and (provably) cannot be made complete. Reason itself clearly demonstrates the existence of mystery and its coextension with knowledge, that is, that there is always necessarily more “there” there that transcends ourselves and what we know. It is fundamentally irrational to deny transcendence (which is what we ought to expect, since after all the truth is the truth, mysteriously enough).

This is another one of those things the modern mind doesn’t like to digest even though it is manifestly the case. Part of the problem is that the notion of a completely separate faith and reason has dominated thought for the last few centuries, the former referring to some ungrounded belief and the latter to grounded certainties. But in fact there is no such thing as a categorically ungrounded belief (all actual beliefs have some ground to them even if they are in error) nor of an apodictic certainty (any proposition at all can be approached with skepticism, even Descartes Cogito). Religious faith is not an ungrounded belief, it is a personal trust in God Who Reveals, whom one believes to exist on reasonable grounds. Faith doesn’t form a neat dichotomy with reason.

To whom it may concern,
The subtitle of the main page of this forum says “The passing scene and what it’s about viewed from the antimodern politically incorrect right”. While I understand that conversation here should not be strictly limited to entirely practical concerns, this thread’s digression into abstract philosophy detached from all practical application is one of many such digressions.
I have watched this site silently from the sidelines for quite a while, and have (disappointedly) come to realize that while this site claims to be concerned mostly with the “passing scene” it is really more of an intellectual playground for anyone who happens to be right of Stalin.
Many of you here, who give yourselves the appropriate title of “paleo”-conservatives are exactly that; stuck with a prehistoric fossil of a political ideology that is long dead and can no longer survive in the environment of reality. Simply put, many of you suffer from the same “denial of reality”, as Mr. Auster so succintly put it, that the liberals and leftists do, and you do as much, if not more, of a disservice to the West as they. If you want to be practical and helpful, you must be realistic and grounded.
The past is gone and irretrievable (no, segregation is no longer an option), and the future has not yet been handed over to the relativists. The main problem with conservatives is a tendency to become stale and hypersensitive to all change, but it is the mission of the West, spelled out in the Constitution of the USA in particular, to continue improving until we can no longer be improved upon (which will never happen, of course). Once again, if you want to be practical and helpful, you must be realistic and grounded, and maybe even-*gasp*-progressive.

Daugherty:

May I politely remind you that assertion is not the same thing as argument; nor tiresome brazenness the same as creative boldness. I think I can speak for most of the contributors here at VFR when I say that few things are so eminently “practical and helpful” as trying to think clearly about the ideas and motivations which animate human beings. What is decidedly IMPRACTICAL is to insist on the foolishness of philosophical clarity at precisely the moment when clarity and sanity has fled.

On a specific matter, one does wonder what could possibly be meant by speaking of a category of people who “happen to be right of Stalin.” We might similarly begin by talking about the intellectual society enjoyed by those who happen to read words printed on a page.

” What is decidedly IMPRACTICAL is to insist on the foolishness of philosophical clarity at precisely the moment when clarity and sanity has fled.”

That’s exactly what I’m saying. There is no way to understand humanity with philosophical clarity, but rather a blend of philosophy and free will. A mix of THINKING and BEING. I think the being is underestimated around here.

You understood my joke, but not the sarcasm. Try again.

Daugherty writes:
“…this thread’s digression into abstract philosophy detached from all practical application …”

There are a number of reasons why neocons like Daugherty have surrendered themselves to liberal modernism. For a natural conservative, a man of good will, one of those reasons for surrender is a lack of intellectual defenses against liberalism. So one of the tasks at hand here on the extreme right (indeed to the right of Stalin) is providing such defenses. Daugherty’s contemptuous counsel that we just surrender instead isn’t helpful, and in any case not everyone has the option of willfully ceasing all thought.

It occurs to me on a re-read that it isn’t thinking in general that Daugherty denounces, but only clear thinking specifically. He then provides us with an example of virtuous unclear thinking that we can juxtapose to the vice of clarity, to wit:

Mr. Cella wrote:
”What is decidedly IMPRACTICAL is to insist on the foolishness of philosophical clarity at precisely the moment when clarity and sanity has fled.”

Daugherty replied:
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. There is no way to understand humanity with philosophical clarity, …”

Mr. Cella rightly denounces Daugherty’s denunciation of philosophical clarity; Daugherty asserts that he agrees and then rephrases the assertion as its opposite. It isn’t unexpected for those incapable of achieving even basic conversational clarity to denounce moral and intellectual clarity, I suppose.

(Hint to Daugherty: Mr. Cella’s phrase “insist on the foolishness of philosophical clarity” doesn’t mean “insist on that foolish thing, philosophical clarity” it means “insist that the virtue of philosophical clarity is foolish”. I hope that clears things up).