Philosophy on YouTube, And In Print!

 Philosopher Slavoj Žižek on the re-election of Donald Trump & his fears for Western values.

I read two of Žižek's books while in prison. I may not agree with some of his thinking, but he will sharpen your own ideas.

What Are Slavoj Žižek’s Most Intriguing Ideas?

Slavoj Zizek — Is Jordan Peterson the real Postmodernist?

As for the print stuff, I learned some history from Morten Høi Jensen's  Operation Nietzsche: ‘How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold’; a review from Commonweal.

And here’s where the story gets really interesting. Sensing an opportunity, two Italian philologists, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, plotted what they privately referred to as “Operation Nietzsche”: they would undertake a definitive complete edition of Nietzsche’s published and unpublished writings based on the manuscripts in the GDR. The two men made for unlikely candidates for such a daunting task. Colli was an adjunct professor in his mid-forties who taught ancient philosophy at the University of Pisa. Montinari, a former high-school student of Colli’s, was a disillusioned member of the Italian Communist Party “incapable of practical work,” as he put it himself. And yet these loveably eccentric dilettantes emerge in the pages of Felsch’s book as genuine heroes of intellectual history: two men who hoped that the patient, determined study and transcription of Nietzsche’s manuscripts and papers would not merely absolve him of his National Socialist associations, but allow him to speak for himself for the first time. As Colli later put it: “In truth, Nietzsche must not be interpreted in any way. We must simply lend him our ears.”

I dislike thinking of Ayn Rand as a philosopher. She is as much a philosopher as the writer of "Self-Help for Dummies". Since Amelia Pollard's Ayn Rand, Live from Los Angeles : From a movie set extra to a famous Red Scare crusader in Los Angeles (LARB) serves my biases, I will include it here.

In a letter to a close friend, she wrote: “Let a real, loud, concerted protest be made just once — and Hollywood will be safe for conservatives for a long, long time.” Much like the construction of her ideal man, Howard Roark, in The Fountainhead, Rand was determined to rebuild an ideal Hollywood teeming with self-interest. Rand spread her philosophy in lectures and interviews across the country. Altruism is “the destroyer,” she wrote in her debut as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, a position she held for only one year in 1962. Although Rand wasn’t a fan of the John Birch Society’s cult-like tendencies, they shared common goals. Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial win in 1967 signaled that conservatism was there to stay.

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For something a little different to end upon, Dr. Aristotle Papanikolaou's Ethics as Art: A Reflection on “For the Life of the World”

Orthodox theology teaches us that we are called to be theotic beings in the world. This possibility of theosis, means that since God is love, to become godlike, to become perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect (Mt. 5:48), is to love as God loves, to love God with all our heart, mind, and soul, and love our neighbor as ourself, including stranger and enemy. To love as God loves, however, requires training. One cannot simply make love happen instantaneously, as the great saints of our Tradition knew well. St. Maximus the Confessor in his Chapters on Love writes, that “the one who sees a trace of hatred in his own heart through any fault at all toward any man whoever he may be makes himself completely foreign to the love for God, because love for God in no way admits of hatred for man” (1.15). St. Maximus writes these things because he knows there are those Christians who do feel fear, anger, and hatred in one’s heart. The Chapters on Love can be read as a training manual to love, to transform one’s being into a theotic being, one that loves God as God loves in the world.

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For the Life of the World points to this possibility, to this transformation that our Lord and Savior makes possible with his Incarnation, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension. Specifically, it points to this possibility of transformation in this world, in the world in which we currently live, a world that is facing unprecedented challenges. It is also a world that is the most pluralistic in human history, not simply as a result migration patterns, but also because of the collapse of space that occurs through the internet. The Social Ethos document is not a legalistic manual; it does not offer an “ethics” for this world; it does not offer solutions to very specific problems. It does offer, however, an alternative way for understanding what it means to be human, an understanding that is revealed to us in the Incarnation.  It is a vision that is not dualistic;  it does not frame the world in terms of either this or that, in terms of absolute good vs. absolute evil. It is a vision that seeks the good in the other even if that other does not embrace our faith;  it is a vision that confidently witnesses to the world how we may move beyond our sinfulness so that we may reflect iconically the beautiful images of God that we are; it is a vision that proclaims that even if the Kingdom is not of this world, we can be with each other in such a way as to iconically reflect the Kingdom in this world. In the end, it is a document of hope that it is possible to love as God loves in this world, and that even though love is hard work, love is possible, even love of stranger and enemy. And, for Christians, love is a learning always driven by the hope that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).

Them and us: How good are we at getting on with one another? (Times Literary Supplement) reviews THE INVENTION OF GOOD AND EVIL; A world history of morality by Hanno Sauer. I do like someone making the point about talk overtaking action.

What do we do instead? We feel we must try something. (It’s a sign that we are truly moral beings.) We seek to achieve social justice, thinks Sauer, “through a renewed emphasis on collective identity by paying particular, and sometimes exclusive attention to a person’s group identity, such as their ethnicity or sexual orientation”. Identity politics and culture wars, in other words. The Academy bears much of the blame for this strategy. Academics, frustrated at being unable to effect real social change, and desperate not to be diagnosed as impotent or redundant, change instead the ways we talk about one another and pretend that that does real work. The ways are those of well-meaning wokery – ways not necessarily bad in themselves, but that labour under the sinister delusion that mere talking can change the world. When talk doesn’t make much difference, but there is no other strategy, the talk gets louder and shriller and turns into a scream, eliciting and boosting a counter-scream from ideological opponents. The strategy of talking instead of doing meaningful work to reduce inequalities is, says the author, “currently threatening to implode under our noses”.

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He can’t quite bring himself to say it, but by “reasonable people” he actually means “good people”. Most of the book, despite its title and subtitle, isn’t about morality at all, but about historical, sociological and psychological explanations for behaviour. That’s not surprising. Many of Sauer’s academic peers would regard a belief in good or evil as a disqualification for writing a book about either. Yet right at the end, when he gives his grounds for hope in the “potential for reconciliation”, Sauer relies, finally and inevitably, on a true notion of the good. We may be people who hate one another, but we are (as the imago dei suggests), basically good people who hate one another. We even appeal to broadly similar notions of the good to justify our hatred of the other.

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