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A Commentary on the Passing Scene by Robert Paul Wolff rwolff@afroam.umass.edu
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https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/rwolff_umass_edu/EkxJV79tnlBDol82i7bXs7gBAUHadkylrmLgWbXv2nYq_A?e=UcbbW0
Coming Soon:
The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.
NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.
NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."
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About Me
- Robert Paul Wolff
- As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.
17 comments:
Matt Bruenig has a funny take on this, on his The Bruenigs podcast.
(Spoiler: it has nothing to do with Hunter's "expertise")
The Trump family and the Biden family have much in common.
Was it Tolstoy? "Every happy family is happy in the same way"?
Nothing to see here. Really. Thousands and thousands of companies around the world have thousands and thousands of members of their Board of Directors for prestige reasons, usually to convince others that they have access or endorsement that may or may not be real. It may be distasteful, but it's really no different than deciding to buy a corporate jet. It's corporate bling.
Unless you can point at some specific actions by the director or company that raise red flags, there's no point in worrying about this.
And (it goes without saying, doesn't it?) it is completely irrelevant to the impeachable actions of Drumpf.
Well, as Michael Kinsley once said, “The scandal isn't what's illegal, the scandal is what's legal.”
Well, we certainly can speculate as to what the gas company thought Hunter was doing - functioning as an open door to the VP. But now I'm curious. Have you changed your position that this ostensible example of corruption is not corruption but simply evidence of the routine machinations of capitalism - lest we see examples of corruption everywhere when we ought to be more a-tuned to the laws of motion of private ownership?
I would be willing to bet that there's not one member of the House or the Senate that isn't in some way legally or ethically compromised. As Dr. Johnson said, lo' those many years ago: "Politics are just a means of rising in the world".
If I were to learn that Senator Sanders or any member of his immediate family was mixed up in any kind of dirty business, I would be instantly converted to total misanthropy from the position of agnostic misanthropy I now occupy.
Please, join the fun. Misanthropy is where its at. You must read more Kierkegaard.
Schopenhauer, too. "If you feel irritated by the absurd remarks of two people whose conversation you happen to overhear, you should imagine that you are listening to a dialogue of two fools in a comedy."
Misanthropy is indeed fun - which is strange! From what I've seen, it can very naturally involve a sense of one's superiority to humankind, which is very ugly and distasteful - or which is, at best, involved in a sort of ironic tension with the *self-loathing* that a logically consistent misanthropy mandates.
Misanthropy and the pleasure of misanthropy are hard to make sense of. They also seems to coexist rather awkwardly with any politics concerned with the welfare of humankind. And it kind of saps the fun to cast these things in clearer and more consistent terms, e.g., "It's not that I loathe humankind while simultaneously believing that nothing matters more than to promote its freedom, happiness, and virtue; I just recognize that all human beings, myself included, are badly flawed, and I yearn rather hopelessly for us to be better."
I believe that it's possible to have a fairly negative opinion of human nature while promoting socialism and freedom. I don't have an especially elevated view of cows and chickens, but I'm against factory farming and in fact, I'm a vegetarian and could become a vegan some day.
Human beings, cows and chickens all deserve a better treatment than they currently receive.
By the way, even Schopenhauer believed in compassion towards those fellow human beings whom he loathed.
Schopenhauer, as I recall, kept a poodle as a pet. Enough said. If your'e going all in for nihilism and misanthropy, cats are where its at---just ask Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. On the other hand, the detached indifference of a cat is a marvel of philosophical equanimity.
Cats kill birds for fun. Doubtless with “philosophical equanimity.”
I fervently hope that President Warren will discourage her daughter from taking up such job offers.
More seriously there is a difference between either employing princelings in the vague hopes that it will do you good or consenting to such employment on the part of your princeling offspring and pressuring a foreign government to dig up dirt on a political opponent by threatening to withhold desperately needed aid that had already been voted by Congress.
I quite agree that Biden's allowing /ecouraging his son to pick up easy money because his Dad was Vice President is a good reason not to vote for him if a better alternative is available. But it's not an impeachable offence. That's the difference.
As an outside observer I really hope that Trump's anti-Biden intrigues will bring him down whilst doing enough collateral damage to Biden to ensure that he does not get the Democratic nomination. Trump's idiot sexism blinds him the fact that Warren is a far more dangerous opponent. Bernie too, but I think that the heart attack means that at his age he is out of the running.
Melville in "The Confidence Man: His Masquerade" has a nice bit on the "lone and lofty" folk (i.e. misanthropes) which seems apropos: "And what race may *you* belong to [if not the human race]? now don't you see, my dear fellow, in what inconsistencies one involves himself by affecting disesteem for men" (Chapter 24 A PHILANTHROPIST UNDERTAKES TO CONVERT A MISANTHROPE, BUT DOES NOT GET BEYOND CONFUTING HIM.). But my real contribution here is to draw attention to this timely work on confidence men (a.k.a. con-men), which shows that American manipulative techniques of today were around in Melville's time. So, in short, the work is apropos on two fronts: it deals with misanthropes (as Michael above projects himself to be), and it deals with con-men (which the current U.S. president clearly is).
I didn't mean to project myself as an unqualified misanthrope. It's more that I have a (healthy?) misanthropic streak that's strangely pleasurable to indulge at times.
I think I'm more-or-less with Wallerstein (and would like to read more about his "agnostic" misanthropy), including on the vegetarian part. In addition, I automatically feel a sense of good will toward most people I bump into; what activates my misanthropic streak is pretty much a combination of (a) my sensing, with varying degrees of vividness and clarity, the stupidity and selfishness that often inform our dealings with one another in various spheres, and (b) my noticing some ugly and vicious things about myself and projecting them onto others.
I think those things - especially (a) - are pretty commonplace (and seemingly amplified to 11 in the Trump era), and incline a person to smile when Schopenhauer* describes man as "a burlesque of what he should be."
I already noted some things that are strange about this, namely how "fun" it is. That might be because it's inherently fun and comical to see through a person's (or humanity's) pretentious disguises and realize how silly, sick, and ridiculous they are; it might also be because it's nearly impossible to do so without a self-congratulatory attitude. But the fun has a way of undermining itself, not only because self-congratulation is distasteful beyond a certain point, but also because misanthropy by definition (as you note with Melville) must apply to the misanthrope him- or herself - sort of the reverse of Nietzsche's remark: "He who despises himself still esteems himself as a despiser."
And aside from that, I think there's a lot of appeal and wisdom to the common-sense (or "healthy-minded," a la William James?) standpoint, from which people normally have many agreeable and admirable features, and despite falling short of their potential, are capable of many good and even great things.
*One more line from Schopenhauer(too fun to resist quoting): "How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do."
Michael,
The misanthropy is "agnostic" because I haven't fully assimilated it yet, because it's not my default mode yet. I still believe in some people, Bernie Sanders or for example, Nancy Fraser, whom I cite merely because I've been listening to some of her talks in YouTube in the last few weeks.
My default mode is still that "sense of good will towards people who I bump into" which you mention above, but almost always I quickly am turned off by their inability to treat others besides family members and members of their own in-group with consideration, concern and decency and by the fact that they've made no effort to liberate themselves from their capitalist and sexist conditioning, from the competitiveness that capitalism tries to instill in all of us, from the whatever the television or social media are telling us to believe in or be concerned about, that as Schopenhauer says, they do not philosophize about their lives in the least.
I'm not claiming that I'm the ubermensch or that I've successfully liberated myself from all the shit that society has inculcated me with, but at least I try. Some people have liberated themselves more completely than I have and I know several people like that, but most everyone makes no effort at all nor do they treat others decently, with respect and with consideration unless we're talking about their families or members of their own sub-group.
Since you cite Nietzsche above, I'll hazard the thought that the solution, if any, is Nietzsche's amor fati, to accept others as they are, with amor fati.
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