Happy Easter everybody, but I have other things on my mind, and perhaps in some strange way we can find a connection between them. I was going to take the day off, but I'm getting so accustomed to posting on a daily basis that failing to do so would feel like not brushing my teeth, and what kind of freedom is that? Freedom for bacteria.
Speaking of freedom and truth decay, on the one hand man has the duty to philosophize, the unexamined life being not worth the trouble of living it. On the other, what even gives man -- a randomly evolved animal -- the right to philosophize?
To affirm that man has rights of any kind is already philosophy, since rights must either be grounded in principle or as arbitrary as the genetic shuffling that supposedly landed us here.
As we've said before, rights cannot be autonomous and freestanding but must be a consequence of duties; or at the very least, genuine rights and duties must co-arise. We don't give rights to animals with no ability to exercise them responsibly. We don't say the lion has an unalienable right to eat us, even if it is his genetic duty to do so.
If we say that animals have rights -- and they do -- what we really mean is that humans have a certain obligation to animals. Take man out of the equation and nature has no rights. There is no Ought in nature, only the ruthless Is, bloody in tooth and claw. Man qua man co-arises with the Ought, AKA ethics. No man, no Ought (or Ought Not).
Today, it turns out, is Transgender Day of Visibility, a new holy day. On this solemn occasion we ought -- it is our duty -- to
celebrate the lives and contributions of trans people, while also drawing attention to the poverty, discrimination, and violence the community faces.I already celebrate discrimination, but I draw the line at violence.
I see your point, Petey, in that to philosophize is to discriminate, precisely. This being the case, it seems that today is a celebration of the virtue of anti-philosophical indiscrimination, or rather -- since it emanates from the state -- a threat to be indiscriminate, or else.
To discriminate is to notice differences and behave accordingly -- for example, to avoid eye contact and run in the opposite direction. This is not the type of discrimination in which the state wishes us to engage. Rather, it wants us to indiscriminately celebrate those sad individuals who are unable to discriminate the sex to which they belong. That's a tall order, but orders are orders.
Supposing transgendered folks have rights, what are their corresponding duties? One might be the duty not to indoctrinate innocent children into their own sexual confusion, but that is an example of what we are supposed to celebrate.
For our ancient contemporaries, philosophy implies "moral conformity to wisdom: only he is wise, sophos, who lives wisely" (Schuon). Obviously this involves discrimination between wisdom and its unwise alternatives. Is it wise to indoctrinate children into any ideology? Here the exercise of rudimentary wisdom makes you a deplorable bigot.
Ironically, the discriminate "lover of wisdom" is revealed to be an indiscriminate hater. How did we get here?
the most “advanced” of the modernists seek to demolish the very principles of reasoning, but this is simply fantasy..., for man is condemned to reason as soon as he uses language, unless he wishes to demonstrate nothing at all. In any case, one cannot demonstrate the impossibility of demonstrating anything, if words are still to have any meaning (Schuon).
Condemned to reason. No wonder the modernists wish to be liberated from it!
The term “misosopher” or "enemy of wisdom” applies to "those thinkers who undermine the very foundations of truth and intelligence." It begins with "'criticism' and ends with subjectivisms, relativisms, existentialisms..., psychologisms and biologisms of every kind" (ibid.), each an indiscriminate and arbitrary subversion of the very possibility of philosophy.
In the opinion of all profane thinkers, philosophy means to think “freely,” as far as possible without presuppositions, which precisely is impossible..., since true freedom coincides with truth...
To say that freedom coincides with truth means that we are not only at liberty to know reality, but again, obligated to do so. Or at least try. Teleologically man is the truth-seeking animal, so failure to do so is intrinsically wrong, irrespective of the particular content.
They say wisdom begins with the fear of God, but this fear must be the consequence of a prior love. Now, one of God's names is Truth, which is the ground and possibility of philo-sophy, the love of wisdom.
Therefore, we can say that philosophy begins with the love of truth and a healthy fear of internalizing and propagating error, and of discriminating between the two: this is the philosophy of philosophy. Which is why
To philosophize and to "study philosophy" are two different things; one can possibly even hinder the other (Pieper).
That's for sure: many if not most philosophies undermine the very possibility of philosophy as such, including a "philosophy of transgenderism."
I understand the philosophical quest as an existential experience centered in the core of the human mind, a spontaneous, urgent, inescapable stirring of a person's innermost life (ibid.).
What is the corresponding object of this search? It is the totality of things both vertical and horizontal, not excluding the nature of the strange being who philosophizes. What kind of being is this?
Today's other celebration -- Easter -- furnishes a clue, which comes down to the eternal conformity of Son to Father. The Son is even the wisdom of the Father, or so we have heard from the wise.
Maybe we should call it a National Day of Unsurpassable Irony.
To be continued...
4 comments:
President Biden issued a stern condemnation of Jesus Christ after learning that the Savior of mankind had the audacity to rise from the dead on Biden's "Trans Day Of Visibility".... According to sources, Jesus Christ's resurrection bringing the hope of salvation and eternal life to mankind has, in fact, distracted from people looking at guys wearing skirts.
To discriminate is to notice differences and behave accordingly -- for example, to avoid eye contact and run in the opposite direction.
Now let's be fair - they do want people to have such a reaction, but only in response to white Christian Nationalists who might want to wish someone a happy Easter.
Good evening Dr. Godwin, Julie, and unseen readers all.
All new employees at our firm are given training in investigations. Some of the first tenets taught are to interview eyewitnesses, and to ask open-ended questions. Also, to avoid asking leading questions. The idea is to get the interviewee talking freely.
Also we teach that God is real, an eyewitness to virtually everything, and will readily respond to open-ended questions.
From this post the Good Dr. provided the information we want to find out: "Supposing transgendered folks have rights, what are their corresponding duties?"
The question posed to God was, "What boots it trannies?" And the flood-gates did indeed swing open.
Cut to a scene from the movie "Little Big Man," starring Dustin Hoffman. Great flick. Here is the Cheyenne war camp. Here is the war chief. Here are the warriors. Here is the...berdache? Who is this clown riding his horse backward dressed as a woman? We learn he is "contrary." Not only does he walk and ride his horse backwards, he is in all respects a woman. He is popular in the camp, apparently the Cheyenne are fond of the berdache and are amused by his antics.
Cut to scene in the African Veldt. Here comes a herd of elephants, let by a huge male with enormous tusks. A voice over intones "This male African elephant behaves in all respects like a female, leading the herd after the female matriarch was killed. How this particular elephant chose to behave this way is a mystery."
We grokked. Trannies were not a woke thang. They were apparently a natural phenomenon which had become enmeshed in our second American civil war, serving as a moral token Negro; filling the role the slave did in the first. The oppressed integer. But what of their duties?
My comment, part the second:
A well-lit, huge room had a conveyor belt running down the center, and upon the belt white-coated technicians working what looked like huge escargots, snails without shells. As these trundled past we could see the workers squirting them with chemicals, hooking up little hoses and poking them with inscrutable devices.
A supervisor introduces herself as Amygdala, and the items on the conveyor belt are human brain components being assembled. We have been shrunk down in scale so we could watch. These components, we were told, were being readied for installation in human feti. Boys and girls get different variants of these intricate brain parts, and the variants were, in front of our eyes, being customized as to gender orientation. Careful craftsman was needed, as an error could produce a sexual mismatch, which was not, Darwinianly speaking, a good idea.
Amygdala suddenly halted the line. She whipped a work order off of her clipboard and shouted to the crew: "One of ten-thousand!" A specialized work detail stepped up and began to tinker with one of the assemblies. Amygdala cheerfully stated, "We are crafting a component which will produce a trannie and we do it every one in ten-thousand units. This will go into a human being and they will have a trannie mind."
Amygdala looked familiar. I said "Have I seen you before?" She stated "You have. When I was known as Mary of Magda."
I gasped. The apostle of the apostles. Here in this vision with me. I asked "what boots it with the trannies?"
She stated, "check the pheromones produced by each trannie, and you will have your answer."
And that was all we got. We are starting a program to carefully analyze all chemicals emitted by trannies to seek an insight into what was said here.
Sure its weird. You think we don't know that? It is what it is. We have learned not to doubt.
Until next time, if there is one, Trench.
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