On Burying our Nuclear Waste in the West

"It has happened over and over again that promised land or holy land by one reckoning is wasteland by another, and we assert the sovereign privilege of destroying what we would go to any lengths to defend." Marilynne Robinson, "Wilderness"

Critique of Utilitarianism

"Let Benthamism reign, if men have no aspirations…" John Henry Newman, A Grammar of Assent, p. 88.

Lives of Significance

"Significance can, of course, be a misleading description of the lives that got my attention. Significance suggests importance. It suggests lives that make a difference and that demand acknowledgment. But the lives of significance that I began to notice were not significant in any of those ways. Rather, they were lives of quiet serenity, capable of attending with love to the everyday without the need to be recognized as "making a difference." Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah's Child

A Different Kind of Logic Course

I'll be teaching Logic next semester. I've taught the standard courses before. They are often more like math classes than philosophy classes. I want to teach not just mathematical logic, but the philosophy of logic, from Parmenides to the present. Topics: Mythos and Logos; Greek philosophy through Aristotle; Stoicism?; Descartes and Leibniz; Kant and Hegel; Frege, Husserl, Russell, and Dewey; propositional logic; Boole, Cantor, Godel. Any suggestions?

Tangled lines

Over the last several years, I have operatively adopted an historicist account of human nature (ala Hegel, Gadamer, Sartre, Ortega). For many (Sartre and Ortega included, I think) that account is opposed to view of natural law in which the goals and basic structures of human nature are given not by human decisions or by human history but by something more grand in which humans participate. I think Hegel and Gadamer would have a more nuanced position here than Sartre or Ortega allow – that is, while remaining basically historicist, they can incorporate an account of “nature” into that account rather than leaving it as a contradictory opposite.

So, now I’m rethinking my thoughts from the standpoint of primitivism, which completely reconfigures the relation between nature and history On the primitivist account, human nature is a product of millions of years of evolution (so evolution provides a broadly historicist framework, but not in the sense of history used by the thinkers above). “History” (in the narrow sense of the word used by historicists) began only about 10,000 BC, and that is not enough time for any real biological change in humans. So we are all basically what we were in the Paleolithic age; our bodies, our minds -- our nature – is best suited to the environment and life “we” had then. So, the primitivist essentially makes a natural law case for human ethics.

Questions: In what senses is the primitivist case different from a natural law account of human nature? What are the advantages of an historicist account of human nature that we would lose and need to rethink if the primitivist case seems convincing? Has anyone written a critical review comparing the theoretical frameworks of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Dependent Rational Animals with the more historicist framework assumed in most of his other writings?

The Hunter-Gatherer of History and the Indian of Faith

I attended an N.T. Wright conference this weekend. I've been reading the works of Calvin Luther Martin, a historian of White-Indian relations. It strikes me that there are closely parallel issues in Life of Jesus studies and histories of Indians: 1) Most generally: History comes to the subject matter with a philosophy of history and a set of methods that constitute its epistemology. However, in spite of its self-assurances, there are signs that the real subject matter escapes. This failure eventually rebounds onto the practice of history itself as inadequate to the subject matter. More specifically: 2) Both Jesus and the American Indian seem to operate within a radically different experience of time than that assumed by an Enlightened philosophy of history. 3) Both Jesus and the American Indian operate out of motives that remain opaque to the assumptions of rational, economic behavior. And 4) the sources by which we know these things are themselves puzzling and must be reinterpreted out of their own world and into our if we hope to make any headway.

Bambi 2: Message

These changes made possible or necessary by the change in medium already have the ability to transform the story. Disney studios also made other alterations that make Satlen’s Bambi and Disney’s Bambi into different, even competing, stories.

Salten’s story, written in the aftermath of the Great War, takes death as its central theme. Nature is “red in tooth and claw.” Predators kill and eat, prey are killed and eaten. The animals, the plants, and even the leaves of trees anxiously anticipate their own deaths, and they talk about their impending demise. While humans, called “Him,” seem to be either a god or devil, He too dies, as Bambi sees at the end. Bambi voices the theological moral of the story: “There is Another who is over us all, over us and over Him [Man].” Man and the Forest are reconciled within the circle of life and death beneath the care of One who is above it.

Disney’s Bambi, produced during the preparations for and beginning of the Second World War, presents Nature as a calm and peaceful harmony (except for the scene in the winter where Bambi’s mother feeds him bark off of the trees.) All of the animals are friends; the crotchety owl looks down from his perch with grandfatherly affection on the gathering of rabbits and mice. As the story editor Perce Pearce says in a planning meeting: “There’s nobody swooping down and eating someone else….” In the realm of nature, there is no death, only birth and life. Disney isolates and focuses Death onto one character, Man. Pearce, again: “their one common enemy is Man. That’s the conflict there—and keep it simple.” Simple, indeed. Death disappears from Nature. What had been a death scene in Salten, the two falling leaves, becomes the beautiful passing of autumn into winter. All dialogue about anxiety in the face of death disappears, and in its place … music. And Man is always the devil, never a god. In contrast with Salten, Disney offers no resolution of the conflict between Man and Nature, Death and Life. “It is about surviving in the forest.” This is part of the reason Roger Ebert describes Disney’s Bambi as “a parable of … nihilism, and despair”; it paints reality as a “world of death and violence.”

My five-year-old reaction was appropriate after all.