Tag: Nihilism

And When He Got to Moving

Posted on by Jerry Cayford

by Jerry Cayford

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

“If I Had My Way” is one of the great protest songs (aka “Samson and Delilah”). The biblical story of Samson expresses the theme that a primitive and chaotic force beneath protest can escape all restraint. Samson is a destroyer: “He lifted up that jawbone and he swung it over his head / And when he got to moving ten thousand was dead.” No specification of who exactly died is necessary, for it doesn’t much matter with Samson.

We might think the story is a warning, but what makes “If I Had My Way” so electrifying is the chorus celebrating Samson’s destructive spirit:

If I had my way
If I had my way in this wicked world
If I had my way I would tear this building down

The listener singing along revels vicariously in a rage so deep it has become nihilism: things are so bad I no longer care and just want to tear it all down. The revolutionary intent is clear in the anecdote about Samson in which he kills a lion with his bare hands: “And the bees made honey in the lion’s head.” The symbolism is obvious: lions always represent rulers; the bees are workers; and honey is the sweet life. Samson is the working class’s spirit of vengeance against a condescending and abusive ruling class. It is a spirit that has started to move again in our own wicked world.

I

Let us start with the song of an angry strongman. In the second section, we’ll consider how the nihilistic spirit of Samson has been awakened by a political betrayal of democratic promises. In the final section, we’ll look at philosophical ideas about what we imagine should keep that spirit from waking. First, though, the song.

Most people know “If I Had My Way” either from Peter, Paul and Mary’s 1962 version (from which I quote) or The Grateful Dead’s 1977 “Samson and Delilah.” But the song is a traditional African-American spiritual dating back at least to the early 20th century (three versions recorded in 1927), and maybe all the way to slavery. (The folk music magazine Sing Out! explores the song’s history in a four-part 2019 article: 1, 2, 3, 4.) Rev. Gary Davis brought it into the folk revival of the civil rights era in 1960, and then Peter, Paul and Mary brought it to mainstream audiences on their first album, which was so popular that royalties from it kept Rev. Davis (given copyright credit) financially secure for life (Sing Out!). I take Peter, Paul and Mary’s as the definitive version, in part because it is substantially rearranged to make the protest elements explicit. Read more »

Monday, July 22, 2019

Among the Godly

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

Several co-workers, all of whom have Ph.D.s. An old friend who’s a physicist. Scads of family members of both blue and white collar variety. Numerous neighbors. And of course the well dressed, kindly old women who occasionally show up at my door uninvited, pamphlets in hand.

One can point to general trends about the powerless, the vulnerable, and the less-educated as likelier to believe in God than those full of book learnin’ or living the good life. But But when the vast, vast majority believe, the believers represent a thorough cross-section of society. And so my daily existence, and that of many if not most atheists, involves sharing interactions and ideas with all sorts of people, wealthy and poor, old and young, male and female, well educated and not, who embrace magical thinking to one degree or another. Who believe either quite vividly or a bit vaguely in a supreme, celestial being or force with at least some degree of sentience and even an agenda. A god who sees and hears us. And perhaps a soul or spirit within in us that lives on after our bodies have given out, some ethereal expression of immortality, some mechanism of continuity after this go-around is done, some medium of transcendence into a heavenly (or hellish) destiny, or perhaps into another corpus, whether animal or human yet unborn, and from there a fresh start.

We, the atheists, the ones who, if you are anything like me, cannot believe even if we desperately want to because we find it patently unbelievable, are a small minority around the world. Here in the Untied States we number a scant 3%.  All around us, a great majority run the gamut: agnostics (only 4%) who may one day end up like us; a growing number of people who just don’t think about it all that much until they end up in some proverbial foxhole; conscious believers, such as my friend the physicist, who might be like us in countless other ways; hardier believers hungrily gulping up the magic; and ever up the scale eventually peaking with a small number of badly broken and certifiably insane people who think they themselves are this or that saint or such and such deity. Read more »

Monday, March 3, 2014

Transcendental Arguments and Their Discontents

Posted on by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

KantConsider the nihilist who provides us with an argument with the conclusion that nothing exists, or that there are no norms for reason. Take the relativist who contends that all facts are relative to some perspective. Note the skeptic who consistently criticizes not only our claims to knowledge, but our very standards. Call such views Transcendental Pessimism. An appealing and longstanding reply to Transcendental Pessimism is that it is self-defeating in some way. The nihilist nevertheless avows a fact and relies on norms of rationality to run the argument for his own conclusion. The relativist isn't just saying that it's all relative to her perspective, but that it's all relative full stop. The skeptic's conclusion that we have no knowledge or have no reliable means to assess knowledge purports to be a knowledge-like commitment held on purportedly good epistemic grounds. The critical line is this: Transcendental Pessimist views cannot be consistently thought. Such views, to make sense at all, must presuppose precisely what they deny.

So far, this self-defeat maneuver against nihilists, relativists, and skeptics is but an inarticulate hunch. Transcendental arguments are attempts at making that hunch explicit, not only about how the negative views are self-defeating, but also regarding the positive views worth preserving. That is, we deploy transcendental argumentation not only as a critical line against Transcendental Pessimism, but we also (and perhaps thereby) establish some positive conclusion. Call this objective Transcendental Optimism.

Immanuel Kant is widely acknowledged to be the first to overtly use the argument type. The primary example of Kantian transcendental argument comes in the Second Analogy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The rough form of argument runs as follows: One can judge a series of representations is evidence of a series of events only if one holds that the series is asymmetric (it must happen in that order, not in a reverse or other order). One can believe that the representations are asymmetric only if one holds that the events represented are similarly asymmetric. If a series of states is asymmetric, the earlier states are causes of the later states. Therefore: One can take a series of representations as evidence only if one takes them as evidence of a causal order. Experience can be a source of information only if there is a causal order.

Read more »