Or the sweet policy of Mao to force industrialization and thus force the peasants into industry and with no one left to plant and harvest 38 million peasants "disappeared".

 University professors in the USA can be extremely smart. Take for example Robert Paul Wolff. So what do you do when smart people argue for absurd nonsense? When it comes to Kant the guy is a genius. So one might be inclined to ask did he never hear about the Gulags? Or the sweet policy of Mao to force industrialization and thus force the peasants into industry and with no one left to plant and harvest 38 million peasants "disappeared". 

In the Vorkuta Gulag, a general came and asked over and over for at least 20 minutes the men to speak up if they have any complaints. And he promised no one would be punished. A professor of history stood up, and said "I know that for what I have to say ten years will be added to my sentence."     The general again promised for the umpteenth time that no one would be punished. The professor recounted the history of slavery, and finished by saying that what we are experiencing here, is the worst kind of slavery in the entire history of mankind.  He did not get the ten year sentence that he expected. He was shot immediately.

But this problem has bothered me for as long as I remember. I have always believed that smart in one field meant smart in another field.  However it is clear to me that Americans know this to be not true. No one [but me] ever thinks that Mozart could have been a mathematical genius. 

So back to Wolff being a Marxist. I would like to suggest that care for the weak and feeble is not a Marxist invention, but goes back to the Golden Rule. [This is something that Nietzsche saw clearly. He put the blame for morality and compassion squarely  on the shoulders of the Bible. And he was right!

But obviously the Nietzschean critique of the central problem of morality is true--most of what people claim to be their moral motives are all hypocrisy.  But contrary to Nietzsche, the fact that getting to be decent and really authentic caring person is hard, does not mean that it is impossible. [As noted  before me.] We know this already from Isaac Luria that most of this world is evil. [Foundation is equally good and evil. Creation is mostly good. Emanation is all good.] 

I think the best understanding of communism can be gained from the example of a village in South Vietnam after the Communists took over. They had been fishing, and thus making a small amount of a living. They could at least make ends meet. The Communists came with the (usual) promise of free stuff for everyone. Then came in and took away the fish. [I forget the name of the village that I am thinking of, but this was the general approach]

I can see that 20th century philosophy went from worse to worse. From where do you get that everything is a social construct? Foucoult. It is helpful to realize that he openly said that nature itself is a social construct. And his thought has been enormously successful for the Left. He could write three whole volumes concerning a philosophical understanding of sex and entirely leave out women.

I mean to say to the Left: why follow a madman?

But the problem is that it is not always easy to tell who really is mad--especially when they can talk in the sophisticated sounding talk of academics.

What are plain people like myself to do when their arguments are in areas where we have little understanding? How can we tell who really is a  tzadik and who is wicked? 

I am not sure how to answer this question since the sort of sense one needs to tell who is a righteous person whom it is fitting to take advice from and whom is wicked is not as easy as you could find in a Batman film. There is no ambiguity who is the tzadik and who is the joker.

But there is a suggestion from Michael Huemer: that reason is meant to tell us about universals. And morality is  a sort of example of universals that apply to human beings. That is a very old idea from Socrates that Reason can discern morality. Reason can also tell us whom to pay attention to and whom is the joker. 

To Saadia Gaon also we know natural law by reason. But to Maimonides reason can not know morality.[]You see this in his explanation of Abraham the patriarch who knew natural law but not by reason but by revelation.

[Of course  Kierkegaard help truth is known not by reason at all. The divide between reason and faith is not bridgeable. But I think faith and reason are mutually dependent. And faith is not by following anyone at all. And I have a certain degree of sympathy towards this idea. I see the religious world in fact is not at all religious. They believe in dead people, not God. And this fact is way beyond obvious.

I still wonder why the worship of dead corpses that the religious world is involved never seems to draw any questions. I had thought idolatry is wrong and even mentioned in the Ten Commandments. So why are the religious thought to be religious? they are heretics.

The Stogy German Professor [Marcuse] finds himself in Southern California and finds that the land of eternal sunshine and surfing and girls is all really Nazism

 The Frankfurt School is an important subject. The Stogy German Professor [Marcuse] finds himself in Southern California and finds that the land of eternal sunshine and surfing and girls is all really Nazism [just hidden and waiting to break out onto the surface.] [The One Dimensional Man of Marcuse became the main text of the student radicals.]The idea off the alienation by technology of Heidegger gets accepted by the "Greening of America" of the 1960's. The whole mixture of Freud and Marx as the liberators of Mankind becomes the norm.

The attempt to understand surfing and girls as proto Nazism had it effect as we see today with the consistent onslaught against all America values by the Left.

[The reason why these German professors were doing this is the same as "Antifa" working on getting away from Nazism. So their solution was to go to the Far Left and Show that America was too dangerously in the center. [In the 1920's there was no center.] 

[But I claim that the center is not the place of danger but rather the right place to be. But to the Left there is no center. if you are not a Freudian Marxist then you are a Nazi.]

The first blessing before the Shema in the morning in the sidur of the geonim

Blessings are a subject that is not well known. Many people think that the order of blessings established by the Kneset Hagedola [Men of the Great Assembly] means the actual language of the blessings. But the Gemara in Brachot makes it clear that that is not the case. What they established was whether whether you have a structure where there is a "Blessed art thou " in the beginning and end or only in the beginning. So for example the blessing after a meal of bread. What was established was that the first blessing starts with "Blessed are Thou" and ends after a middle area with another "Blessed art thou." 

This is obvious in many places in Brachot and Tosphot. But one example I thought to bring to show this point is in one of the earliest sidurim of the time of the Geonim where the first blessing before the Shema in the morning is the first short sentence. Then another short statement. And then the final, "Blessed art Thou who makes the lights".

So while it is true that this blessing and many others were expanded, still the actual obligation is very short and simple. [The knowledge of what is obligatory and what is optional would make the morning prayer shorter.] 

Words are radically subjective

 Words are radically subjective. There is not the slightest objective connection between the word "dog" and an actual dog. So when English American Philosophy took its linguistic turn it became completely irrelevant   meaningless and just shows the amazing stupidity that really smart people can get into.

z44 music file

 z44  D Majormidi  z44 nwc   r77 mp3   r77 midi  r77 nwc

The flat tire of philosophy

It seemed to me when I was in high school that philosophy in fact had fallen  after being preoccupied with words. I felt that if philosophy is worth anything it must be about "the big picture". So what is "Being" itself as Heidegger pointed out is a part of that question. But also the simple person (the Dasein) also seemed important. Where do we fit into Being?

Philosophy seemed to get no where near answering or even asking any of these questions. Physics is certainly asking about the very nature of reality, but to go into that seemed to me at the time to be too hard. [I was not familiar with the idea of Rav Nahman that just by saying the words of what you are learning the learning gets absorbed subconsciously. If I had known that, I probably would have gone into Physics or the Aerospace industry like my dad.]

So today I would like to say that the Kant Friesian School as developed by Kelley Ross  answers a lot of the issues I had back then. You do not want a philosophy that ignores the Inner World [who we are as people with love and imagination.] You also do not want a philosophy that gets the outer world wrong like the existentialists and post modernism. 

To me it seems the the Kant Fries School is the best. But it took time to develop the approach. I was not all with Kant of Fries or Nelson. Rather it took time to get to a place where you have a a coherent approach that also takes an eagle eye of reality.