lying versus bearing false witness

            Only in modern times has philosophy divorced itself effectively from theology, but the past relationship cannot be denied and on certain topics, philosophers confuse themselves when they forget their theological roots.  The matter of "lying" is one of them.   If the philosopher is of a school where a word or phrase can mean one thing and one thing only then he is ill equipped to consider the matter of "lying."  He is like the Pharisees and Sadducees whom Jesus cast into outer darkness where there will be moaning and gnashing of teeth.  He is like those about whom Augustine (I believe it was) said, "Legalism is at the root of all heresy." 

            The alternative to seeking "my definition over yours" or "this must mean one thing and one thing only" is to look at "God's thrust"; which is what (I suspect) most theologians have done over the years.  What was the original intention of the commandment "thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor" which has been translated to the confusion of almost everyone to "thou shalt not lie." 

            The bearing of false witness against one's neighbor involves testifying in order to harm him, or to gain some advantage over him.  Not harming one's neighbor is at the root, or thrust, of this injunction, and we find less to debate if we restrict our concern to the avoidance of harm rather than move it into a legalistic debate over the meaning of "lie."

            One finds this thrust I have referred to elsewhere in the Bible.  "Who is my neighbor?" a legalist demands of Jesus and he tells him the story of the Good Samaritan.  Legalists passed by on the other side of the street, but the Good Samaritan stopped to help the wounded man.  Jesus thereby moves the injunction beyond not doing harm to doing positive good.  We are to love our neighbor as ourselves.  So questions of whether we should admit to the Nazis that we are harboring Jews should be put in this latter light rather than in perversely remaining in the former, legalistic, darkness.  Treating our well-loved aunt kindly when she asks if her horrid dress suits her does not violate the injunction to do positive good -- though it may violate the legalist's desire to have a word mean one thing and one thing only.

Other Voices, Other Implications

 

            J. L. Speranza challenged my claim that I admire the French for admiring intellectuals but not necessarily the intellectuals they admire.   This person implied that it must be inconsistent of me to admire the French for admiring their intellectuals while at the same time not admiring the intellectuals they admire.  Speranza is  a subtle thinker; so I am not willing to dismiss his challenge without first examining it.  He has his own reasons for questioning my admiration, but since it is my admiration and not his that is in question, I intend to explore my own history, a tiny bit, with this in mind.

             While not directly implied, I assumed that National myths are important to a nation's well being.  The Japanese, for example, have the myth of the Samurai which is very like the American myth of the gunfighter or "cowboy" of the Old (American) West.  They were able to make use of this myth after World War II by applying the Samurai code to capitalistic competition.  They have become a modern economic success to at least some extent because of their Samurai myth.

            I've been especially interested in myths relating to a Nation's willingness to fight in its own defense.  The French used to be a great warrior nation, well able to defend itself.  They loved to fight so much that they readily encroached  on the territories of neighboring nations.  We tend to forget, in view of the France we know as the epitome of a victim nation, that one of the main reasons Germany sought the war of conquest that we call World War II, is because of their fear of a warlike France.  Not being admirers of French men of letters, they were not aware, or did not believe, that France was no longer a nation to be feared, that their warrior myth had been severely degraded if not utterly obliterated during the Banquet Years that Roger Shattuck wrote about, and further degraded during World War I; which Erich Maria Remarque wrote about  -- it is interesting that though German, the anti-war All Quiet on the Western Front had more of an effect on the French willingness to fight than it did on the German (in 1933 the Nazis burned it) -- and into then the embarrassing and extremely chaotic and largely pacifistic period the French endured ("embraced" might be a better word) prior to World War II. 

            Perhaps it is an American myth that the French are admirable for admiring their intellectuals.  I read some place, perhaps it was Mark Lilla, or someone else from New French Thought that Americans tend to buy books by French philosophers ten years or so after they have been superseded in France.  The French "philosophers" I have admired have been the ones (lower case) who have criticized the upper case philosophers such as Sartre and Derrida.  Or, perhaps, Marcel Gauchet has moved into the upper-case philosopher-category with his The Disenchantment of the World, a Political History of Religion.  But would that make him one of the "men of letters" the French admire?  He is part of the group (the Princeton Series on New French Thought has publicized) that rejects the wrong turn I mention above; so he might not be admired in the way that French icons like Sartre and Derrida were.

            Perhaps the person who criticized the Americans for being taken in by French philosophers past their "use by" date was British.  A. J. Ayer, for example concluded about Being and Nothingness that "Existentialism, on this evidence, was principally an exercise in misusing the verb 'to be'."

            In looking through the list I quoted from Paris After the Liberation the only French man of letters I admire is Camus.  While I didn't admire his novels, I at least admired his The Myth of Sisyphus -- or at least I did when I first read it years ago.  Of course I can't say that I admire the American men of letters (being admired by the French) in the same paragraph: "such as Hemingway, Steinbeck, Damon Runyan, Thornton Wilder and Thomas Wolfe.  There was a time when I tried to make my mind accept the idea that Thomas Wolfe was the "great American novelist," but I failed.  His novels were great long disjointed things. 

            Gauchet and Renaut chide the French for being enamored of German "men of letters" -- implying that the French copies were inferior to the German originals. 

            Perhaps more than praising the French for admiring their "men of letters" I was criticizing my own countrymen for admiring "rock stars."  Though Walter Russell Mead is concerned about Foreign Policy in his Special Providence, his classification of Americans goes beyond foreign affairs:  There are the Jacksonians (the fighters), the Hamiltonians (the capitalists), the Jeffersonians (the legalists) and the Wilsonians (the political evangelists).  The Jacksonian, Mead tells us in an interesting oversimplification, joins the National Rifle Association (NRA); while the Jeffersonian joins the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).   None of Mead's classifications include "men of letters." 

            Someone might say that America has first to produce quality "men of letters" then there will follow Americans willing to admire them.  But that is not what the French did and so doesn't comprise a valid parallel.  While the American "men of letters" in the list that Shattuck provides were second rate; so were the French men of letters.  They seem first rate because of the adulation they received from French citizens.  But, someone may quickly challenge me by asking, who is?  And I don't have a good answer.  Neither do Luc Ferry, Alain Renaut, Philippe Raynaud, Pierre Manent, Blandine Kriegel, Stephane Rials, Bernard Manin, Anne Godignon, Jean-Louis Thiriet, and Gilles Lipovetsky, who without clear direction hanker after the good old days before the men of the Banquet Years and their successors degraded French Thought.

Men of Letters in Paris, after the liberation

            From pages 172-3 of Paris, After the Liberation, 1944-1949, by Beevor and Cooper:

            "Students seemed to live off nervous energy and ideas.  The greatest hunger was for reading material, yet there was so little time and so much to read -- Aragon, Camus, Sartre and Beauvoir, as well as Apollinaire, Lautreamont, Gide, and now all the American novels which proliferated in translation, such as Hemingway, Steinbeck, Damon Runyan, Thornton Wilder and Thomas Wolfe.  Everything formerly banned must be seen -- whether the plays of Garcia Lorca or the films of Bunuel.  Philosophy student or not, you needed to be able to discuss Hegel's master-slave paradigm, the collected works of Karl Marx, and existentialism's less than apostolic succession from Soren Kierkegaard and the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, via Martin Heidegger, then Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

            "Emannuel Le Roy Ladurie's professor of philosophy, Beaufret, had an immense prestige among students: he had actually met Heidegger. . . ."

            "Antoine de Saint-Exupery had written of 1940 in Pilote de guerre, 'La defaite divise.'  The Liberation managed at first to unite the majority of the country under the banner of progressisme, as the opinion polls demonstrated in the massive support for the nationalization of banks and heavy industry.  Simone de Beauvoir wrote of 'Paris in the year zero'.  And indeed for Communists and their fellow-travelers there was a sense of marching with history.  Another sign of the times, as Galtier-Boissiere pointed out, was Vogue -- of all magazines -- publishing a poem of Eluard and a portrait of Marcel Cachin, the veteran Communist.

            "The death of the great poet Paul Valery at the age of seventy-four seemed to underline the end of an era.  Valery, who had delivered the address of welcome to Petain when he was elected to the academie Francaise, died on 20 July 1945 -- three days before the Marshal's trial.  He was given a state funeral: the coffin was carried through the streets of Paris, accompanied by a detachment of the Garde Republicaine marching to muffled drums.  The coffin was placed just below the Trocadero on a golden catafalque, lit by torches.  Duff Cooper, who thoroughly approved of the French Republic's respect for men of letters, reflected ruefully on the difference in his own country.  'We have only to imagine how would be greeted the suggestion that the Brigade of Guards would march past the coffin of T. S. Eliot.'"

            COMMENT:  As critical as I often am of the French, I do admire that about them, that they have respect for men of letters.  At the same time it is difficult to sift through what was going on at the time and judge, even from this later perspective, what was good and what was bad about what they thought and desired.  Elsewhere I criticized Apollinaire, and would to some extent anyone who admired his anarchistic attack against "the establishment."   

            I was amused that the Communists sought to describe themselves as Progressives after the Liberation.  American Leftists of the present time prefer being called "Progressives" to Leftists.  But what is it they fancy they are progressing toward?  The ones I've questioned don't seem to know.  Beevor and Cooper mention nationalized banks and heavy industry.  European nations did have a fondness for that sort of "progress" for a while, but inasmuch as Nationalized anything can't compete very well in a free market, I suspect very little of that sort of "progress" remains anyplace in the West.  So what did the French calls this "progress" when it fell short of expectations?  It can take a long time before a bit of progress of that sort actually fails, and very easy, I suspect, to conceal the fact that one supported failed ideas -- especially when one lives in a nation willing to rescue such failures from a natural death.  We in America still subsidize our Postal Service for example.   Then of course there was that nation, most admired by the French after the liberation, the Soviet Union; which subsidized everything and took a very long time to fail.  Modern Progressives don't like to read about their Progressive predecessors.  It is very human of them to skip over all the failures and concentrate upon warm, comforting, hope.

            I was inclined to sympathize with Duff Cooper until I sought to draw up a list of American "men of letters" I thought would deserve the American equivalent of the Brigade of Guards marching past.  I had to give it up.  We are too diverse, too spread out in cities that are not-Paris, too disparaging of that sort of attention -- at least for men of letters.  And there would, of course, be the inescapable comparison with rock stars, singers, actors, and sports figures.  And while large numbers, whom some might be tempted to refer to as subnormal, aren't interested in a Brigade of Guards, they do howl in anguish when one of their rock stars dies, often though it might be of a drug overdose.

           

             

Chomsky joins a hypocritical attack on Obama

            I was prepared to leave Chomsky alone for awhile, but he intruded himself upon my attention by supporting the full-page "World Can't Wait" ad which appeared on page 17 of the 5-27-10 issue of The New York Review of Books.   Those who don't get the NYROB can see this ad in fine print at http://www.worldcantwait.net/index.php/features-mainmenu-220/the-war-of-terror/6280-crimes-are-crimes-no-matter-who-does-them .   The impetus for the ad seems to be disappointment that Obama has turned out to be a normal American President and not a radical anarchist.  I see that William Ayers, a member of the Weather Underground and one of Obama's original sponsors also signed the ad.  He is probably part of the "World" that "Can't Wait" for Obama to turn into the anti-American radical that it hoped he would become.

            While I can't tell whether Chomsky was involved in the creation of "World Can't Wait," I do want to consider the ad as something he signed up to.  It is consistent with other things he has advanced. The full title reads "Crimes are Crimes no matter who does them."  This title deserves closer attention in light of Chomsky's anarchistic philosophy.  If we pass over the truistic nature of this cliché, an act is not a "crime" unless it has been established as such in some system of laws sanctioned by some established government supported by a more or less quiescent society.  Chomsky wants to tear down our Liberal-Democratic government and society; so he is at the very least hypocritical if he is using existing American laws to further this end. 

            But are there such laws?  He and the leaders of World Can't Wait fail to distinguish between a normal American citizen and an American president.  The President has the power to declare war -- something Chomsky considers a crime -- while the ordinary citizen does not. 

            And since the World Can't Wait ad centers on some of the events carried out in the course of president-initiated wars, let's look at them: 

            Chomsky and WCA object to the assassination of a terrorist whom the president deems a threat to national security.  Has Chomsky ever objected to any terrorist killing people in any Liberal Democracies.  If so, I missed it.  It typically isn't until the democracies, in this case the American one, respond or attempt to respond to terrorist activity that Chomsky becomes outraged. 

            Chomsky objects to U.S. troops firing on unarmed civilians.   Firing on unarmed civilians is not sanctioned by the US. government or the military, but collateral damage does occur.  This is one of Chomsky's favorite targets.  If Chomsky could show that the U.S targets unarmed civilians he might have a point.  But please note that's what the terrorists do.  So why does Chomsky go after American troops who kill civilians accidentally rather than the terrorists who do it on purpose?   As I have argued elsewhere, the reason Chomsky does this is that he is anti-American even more than he is anti-Liberal-Democracy, and he isn't above abandoning what logic he practices elsewhere to hypocritically attack the Americans who do kill civilians accidentally while giving a free pass to Islamist radicals who do it on purpose.

            The final paragraph in the "Crimes are Crimes" ad reads "Unsurprisingly the Obama administration has refused to prosecute any members of the Bush regime who are responsible for war crimes, including some who admitted to waterboarding and other forms of torture, thereby making their actions acceptable for him or any future president."   What is his definition of "war crimes" I would like to ask Chomsky?    "War Crimes" seems a pejorative swear-term rather than a legitimate classification of crimes.  Which court defined these "Crimes"?  Which Judicial System is responsible for prosecuting them?   Which government is responsible for punishing them?   It isn't a war crime or any other sort of crime for a President of the United States to do what he deems necessary to protect American citizens. 

            There seems to be the assumption that the American president needs to be utterly submissive to the American judiciary.  That is not an accurate understanding to the American governmental system which has three powers (the executive, legislative, and judicial) which were designed to balance one another.   The President (the head of the executive branch of the American government) has extensive powers, and while the legislative and judicial branches of government challenge those powers regularly, they do not have the power to declare them crimes.  I mention that  in passing, for neither the Legislative nor the Judicial branches of the U.S. government have declared Obama's actions crimes -- as Chomsky and "World Can't Wait" have done in their illogical, inconsistent and hypocritical way.

           

French resistance

 

            The OED has for "Liberate" "To set free, set at liberty; to free, release from (something)." 

            The French "resistance" didn't seriously threaten the German forces in France until after D Day.  Frenchmen sitting on the fence, not willing to turn upon the Germans until and unless it became clear that they were losing, began to hop off on the side of the allies.  It was clear that Germany had failed to defeat the Russians and would ultimately lose their war after the defeat at Stalingrad (Feb 1943), but what did that mean for France?  The French weren't certain, but after the successful landing on French soil on June 1944, there seemed little doubt.

            However, were the Allies interested in liberating France or in defeating Germany.  Stalin kept urging the Americans to start a second front.  What occurred in North Africa and in Italy wasn't all that impressive to Stalin, but finally a second front, serious enough to impress Stalin, was established in June of 1944.  When we think of Stalin's demands, the concerns of the Vichy French; who were not demanding a second front or even requesting liberation diminishes in importance. 

            One can always find a representative of just about any position.  The French Resistance wanted "liberation," but not the larger number of French people who got along well with the Germans during the Vichy period.  So how much credit do the allies deserve for liberating Vichy Frenchmen who didn't want to be liberated?  Not much, I suppose, but after D Day, the number of dedicated Vichy dropped dramatically and the number who belonged to the Resistance grew in inverse proportion.  That was rather ignoble of the Vichy French we might think -- better to stand before a firing squad or the guillotine with defiant words on one's lips than slink off to the Resistance and hope that one's new allegiance cancels out, in everyone's mind, one's craven behavior during the time of the Germans.  And, interestingly, Beevor and Cooper in Paris, after the Liberation, 1944-1949, tell us that during  the epuration sauvage many late night assassinations were of collaborators, but others were by collaborators killing off those who could testify against them. 

            "On his return from prison camp, Baron Elie de Rothschild remarked to the old family butler, Felix, that the house must have been very quiet under General Hanesse's occupation.

            "' on the contrary, Monsieur Elie.  There were receptions every evening.'

            "'but . . . who came?'

            'The same people, Monsieur Elie.  The same as before the war.'"  [Beevor & Cooper, pp 133-4]

            One may be inclined to think that Britain and the US were France's "natural allies," but only if one forgets the French period of anarchy and the subsequent Surrealism, Dada, etc.   Britain and the U.S. seemed to much like "the establishment," too much like what the French intellectuals were reacting against.  Sartre believed he could know nothing beyond himself, at least not for sure, but on the assumption that others were like him, it would be a good thing, he thought, for everyone to band together in the Communist Party.  Others, perhaps, had their own reasons, but Communism became very popular in France in the post-war period.  The Russians, at least, had never "occupied" France as the allies had.

            Francis Fukuyama argued that the end of history had occurred, and influenced by the Russian (Communist) but French citizen Kojeve argued that it was Hegel who was right about that end and not Marx.  The "end" was Liberal Democracy (aka Capitalism) and not Communism.  France today seems as Liberal-Democratic as the rest of Europe and the West, but they "resisted" all the way.  And perhaps "resistance" is a logical outgrowth if their earlier "anarchy."  Anarchy after all "resists" organized forms of government, and while France hasn't quite done that, they have give the appearance of resisting still, as though they have made of the term "resist" an intransitive verb.

 

On the dangers of liberating the French

            One of the quirks of history that has puzzled many, over the years, has been the fact that though France was liberated by British-American forces, the predominate attitude in France has been one of antagonism against America and Americans (and to a lesser extent the British).  Shouldn't France feel more grateful to America, and if not, why not?

            Many who pursue this issue start with Roosevelt's contempt for De Gaulle.  As soon as it became clear that Germany had defeated France, De Gaulle fled to Britain with little more than what he was wearing.  Yet in a very short period of time he declared himself to be the head of Free France.  Roosevelt wasn't impressed.  The real leader of France, in his opinion was Petain.  Roosevelt would rather do business with the real power in France, as much as existed during the Vichy period, than with the wishful thinking of Charles De Gaulle.  And De Gaulle resented Roosevelt deeply. 

            But it would be better to start at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.  Not to see the seeds of the difference of opinion about liberation, but to understand why France needed to be Liberated.  Late in the 19th century France went through a period where Anarchy was extremely popular.  While the political anarchists were eventually subdued by the French authorities, the artists picked up the threads of anarchy and wove new types of art, music and literature.  They opposed the more orderly forms that existed in the past and sought an individualistic display of willfulness where everything was permitted, especially if it opposed the "powers that be." 

            Thus, at a very critical time in French history, when France desperately needed its young men to be willing to defend France, the young men remembered the rallying cry of the anarchists: "death to France.  The young men who needed to fight for France against Hitler's Germany were disgusted with the "powers that be," with "the state" and with mankind in general.  Across the border in Germany, meanwhile, the young men were singing Deutschland uber alles.

            But so what?  Your aunt Sophie shouldn't have turned to chocolate after Uncle Fred died and ballooned up to 300 pounds either.  She had her heart attack.  No big surprise there.  And though her heart stopped; she was brought back to life by the paramedics.  Let's give your aunt the latest medical care even though she probably wouldn't have suffered the heart attack if she had maintained a decent weight and exercised instead of eating chocolate.   In hearing no more than this about your Aunt, I would expect her to be grateful to the paramedics for having saved her life. 

            Many Frenchmen would have objected right after the liberation  to my analogy.  They would have said that they weren't dying under Philippe Petain and his Vichy government.  They were getting along just fine.  However, the other Frenchmen went on a rampage of slaughter -- killing or degrading the collaborators.  These latter would surely appreciate being liberated.  But no, or if they did, it didn't last long.  They didn't feel like the defeated.  And the liberators had the maddening habit of thinking that 1) they had liberated France and 2) France should be grateful to them.  France!  Imperial France!  France of Louis XIV and Napoleon!  No, it was impossible.  America should consider it an honor, perhaps nothing more than partial repayment for past occurrences when France helped America.  The American attitude was not to be borne.

            The American attitude, meanwhile was not steeped in history.  The young boys wearing the American uniforms knew that they had been called upon to liberate the French.  They had done it and now, the strange French, many of them, resented them.  It was beyond understanding.

            Earlier, in Britain, the British engaged in a bit of resentment as well.  They too were in trouble.  They toyed with pacifism.  It was popular to think that wars were caused by misunderstandings.  Since it was inconceivable that Britain would go to war over a misunderstanding, they need not build a war machine to match the German one -- except for their navy, but that was needed to protect their empire.  The British were initially happy to receive the influx of American soldiers with all their weapons, but before too long their opinions changed.  They complained that the American soldiers were "over paid, over sexed, and over here."   But, were the American soldiers blameworthy for behaving in that manner?  Or did they behave approximately as we would expect any liberating force to behave?

            One might wonder to what extent the French were responsible for their own ancestors who degraded French morale to the point that the Germans were able to defeat them so readily.  Later at the Nuremburg trials, the judges decided it was not a legitimate defense to claim, "I was just following orders."  But isn't that very like what the French were doing -- following "instructions" when they accepted the teachings of their ancestors and turned against "the status quo," "the powers that be," "the supposed need to defend one's country"?   If we sent German's to prison for "following orders," why can't we get the French to take responsibility for "following the instructions of their teachers"?

            Hovering back behind this look at the liberation of the French in 1944 is the subsequent liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban and Iraq from the regime of Saddam Hussein.  Are the Afghan and Iraqi people going to behave any differently than the French?  And have the Americans learned anything from the earlier resentment against them?  It is too soon to tell.

           

             

The Kirsch Review of Faye's book on Heidegger

            A reader sent me the following review of The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 by Adam Kirsch: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/books/review/Kirsch-t.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fbooks%2Freview%2Findex.jsonp

            I was not impressed with Faye -- even less so than Adam Kirsch.  Kirsch writes, "In these classes, Faye proves beyond doubt, we do witness “the introduction of Nazism into philosophy,” the outright transformation of Heidegger’s thought into a tool of Nazi indoctrination. The more familiar a reader is with Heideg­ger’s work, the more shocking it will be to see him employ his key terms — being, existence, decision — as euphemisms for nationalism and Führer-worship. Thus we find him, in the winter of 1933-34, declaring that “the question of the awareness of the will of the community is a problem that is posed in all democracies, but one that of course can become fruitful only when the will of the Führer and the will of the people are identified in their essence.” At the same time, Heidegger tells his students — “many of whom,” Faye points out, “were to become combatants at the beginning of the following decade on the Eastern front” — that “to a Semitic nomad,” the “nature of our German space” is inherently foreign."

            Which sounds telling except that his use of words from his philosophy in support of what he was teaching his students about National Socialism would be a natural thing to do if he thought National Socialism was heading in the direction of his philosophy.  Even if he didn't, why would Heidegger use a completely new vocabulary, when he had his own ready to hand -- I doubt that he was concerned about the future Faye suggesting that his philosophy was Nazi philosophy?  It is a very weak argument to suggest that because one uses the same words in two different contexts that the contexts must be connected.  Faye of course goes further and suggests that the contexts are the same.  I did not finish Faye's book because I had no confidence that he understood what comprised a logical argument.  This review by Adam Kirsch has done nothing to change my mind. 

            Kirsch also reveiwed Daniel Maier-Katkin's Stranger from Abroad, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness.  I don't think Heidegger's reputation is in jeopardy as a result of Faye's bizarre allegations.  Kirsch, and perhaps Maier-Katkin assert that Arendt's reputation is tied to Faye being wrong.  Not to worry.  Faye's unsupported allegations are based upon wishful thinking and not sound evidence.