Philosophy takes effort too
A while back, Peter Norvig Peter Norvig mocked the trend in computer book publishing where publishers promised to teach you a particular programming language in a ridiculously short amount of time. I have two such books on my bookshelf, one promising to take only 24 hours to teach PHP 4, while another promising the same amount of time expenditure to teach HTML 4.
This kind of ridiculousness seems to have faded away in computing - or at least, I don’t notice them anymore. Perhaps I just consciously glaze over them in the search for the bulky O’Reilly, PragProg or Apress tomes aimed primarily at professionals. But I came across some recently in philosophy, in the form of the “in 90 Minutes” series by Paul Strathern. I consumed two recently: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein.
The Kierkegaard one was okay but the Wittgenstein one was awful. In the Kierkegaard book, more than a little bit of time was spent on the personal stuff: on Michael Pedersen, and on Regine Olson. The rest of the content felt very rushed as a result: a very quick tour of the aesthetic and ethical from Either/Or followed by a quick discussion of the religious stage from Fear and Trembling. Sickness Unto Death got an extremely brief treatment, as did the Johannes Climacus works Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. This despite the build-up of describing Kierkegaard’s rejection of Hegelianism (spoiler alert: if you want to know how and why Kierkegaard rejects Hegelianism, read the Johannes Climacus work). Similarly, mention was made of the Corsair affair and the biographical reasoning for Kierkegaard’s decision to pick a fight with The Corsair, but the text didn’t explain that this was the transition from the first authorship - criticism of Hegel and development of his existential psychology - to the second authorship where he became interested in “the public” and the press (prompted by the Corsair affair) which started with Two Ages: A Literary Review and continued with the various attacks on Christendom (there were other things in the second authorship - the highly interesting Book on Adler, obviously Sickness Unto Death and the theological treatises). Obviously, the short length of the book means some of it has to be cut. But you are getting Kierkegaard as just the author of Either-Or, not the whole picture. No “Absolute Paradox”, no objectivity/subjectivity discussion from Postscript, no Repetition, a very short teleological suspension of the ethical but no Knight of Faith/Knight of Infinite Resignation discussion to enlighten that. With Either/Or, the superb passages from “A” get no discussion: no ‘Crop Rotation’, no essays for the Symparanekromenoi - but, of course, the Diary of the Seducer does. Really, if you want to understand Kierkegaard in a short amount of time, it’s not like there aren’t at least two very short tomes on the topic - Julia Watkins’ Kierkegaard and Peter Vardy’s book in the Fount Christian Thinkers Series.
The book on Wittgenstein was not okay: the biographical material was presented well, and the author said that the Tractatus was a superb work of philosophy - and the Picture Theory of Meaning is reasonably well described. But the Philosophical Investigations was glossed over with no real presentation at all. Apparently, it’s not very interesting - a hodge-podge of boring nit-picking about language. What, then, makes it one of the most influential books of the latter half of the twentieth century for philosophers? Oh, boring little asides about language games, family resemblance, the private language argument, the application thereof to the mind and, err, duckrabbits. The Wittgenstein scholar Denis Paul has an article on Strathern’s misconceptions of the Investigations.
There is nothing wrong with short, introductory or summary texts. For Wittgenstein, Grayling has written a perfectly good introduction. Generally, I trust the Oxford Very Short Introductions to some degree, and I trust the Cambridge Companions a fair bit more. But if you really want to get into a particular philosopher, go online, find a reading list from a reputable university and see what they suggest. I frequently point people towards the London Philosophy Study Guide. There’s also Cambridge’s Undergraduate Course Details page from which you can click through to reading lists for a variety of topics, including Wittgenstein (in the Part II reading list). There are “in 90 Minutes” books on Plato, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Hegel, Descartes, Sartre, Kant, Marx, Hume, Spinoza, Foucault, Heidegger, Aquinas, Derrida, Russell, Rousseau, Augustine, Confucius, Machiavelli, John Dewey, Locke, Leibniz and Berkeley - and on literature too: Lawrence, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Joyce, Poe, Kafka, Beckett, Borges, Garcia Marquez, Nabokov, Virginia Woolf and Dostoevsky. All by the same author. If the two I have read are representative, the butter may be spread a little thin…
Lessons in respect from the Archbishop: attack secularists, then make up lame excuses for child rape
The Archbishop of Westminster stated, in an appeal for reasoned and respectful dialogue
that secularists just as dogmatic as the worst religious believer
. Start as you mean to go on, and all that. He then goes on to decry sound-bites
, which is pretty rich coming from one of the chief sources of idiotic sound-bites about “public life” and “the public square” - deliberately vague words used by the religious lobby to keep their feet under the table. Secularists like myself oppose religious privilege - unearned special rights given to people just because they are religious. Like, I don’t know, special programmes on the radio about religion that are listened to by a tiny fraction of the population (the Daily Telegraph poll from a few years ago showed that only 7.5% of people attend a weekly religious ceremony), schools run on sectarian lines, bishops qua bishops given the right to sit in the House of Lords, the constant demand that religious people be able to exempt themselves from rules the rest of us have to abide by - to turn their noses up at any particular law or term of their employment that offends their delicate sensibilities.
If the Archbishop does want to have a reasoned dialogue - hell, I’m all for that - perhaps he could start by listening to what secularists are actually campaigning for rather than the straw man he has built up. We campaign against religious privilege. That is, certain rights religious people and groups get just because they are religious. Let’s take the bishops in the House of Lords. The apology given for these is that they bring a “spiritual and moral perspective” to the business of the House of Lords. The justification is always consequentialist in nature. But the objection isn’t about whether or not the bishops have a positive or negative role. It’s not about the bishops themselves - many of whom are probably nice liberal Anglicans who ceteris paribus would be perfectly good people to have in the legislature. Whatever someone like Rowan Williams believes about religion, I’d rather have him writing laws than Nadine “Mad Nad” Dorries MP. But we’re talking about principles and process not consequences. The fact is that the Lords Spiritual are there only because they are bishops. The justification works just as well for many other groups. Why not have the directors of Oxfam sit in the House of Lords? Or representatives of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster? The reason is simple: religious privilege. The only people who defend religious privilege are those who benefit from it. The excuses given should sound self-serving and hollow, because they are self-serving hollow.
Secularists qua secularism don’t oppose religion having a role in public life
or the public square or whatever. You already have a role. People can choose to attend church and believe in religion. Religious people can vote. Religious groups can make their viewpoints heard like anyone else. And people can be free to disagree with them. Churches can provide charitable services. They can respond to public inquiries. They can publish their ideas in the press. But what is intolerable is for churches and religious groups to seek special favour from the State. That is what secularists oppose. Now, many secularists are also atheists, and many atheists hold stronger personal beliefs about religion - some even think that all religion is harmful and humanity would be better off without it. I agree to a limited extent with this view - I agree with the conclusion that if religion were to suddenly stop tomorrow, there would be a net gain, although I don’t think that something being religious automatically makes it tainted as some of my more radical atheist brothers and sisters seem to. There’s a really goofy argument put forward in this vein though: just because I think the world would be better without religion, I automatically believe that a world where religion never existed would be great. Various people feel the need to assert the idea that this is a secularist belief. It’s not. It’s a totally potty belief that relies on one enormous counterfactual that we could never really unpick (it’s also a complete failure of the principle of charity, but that’s unfortunately common). Saying that the world would be better if religion were to end doesn’t mean that if that unrealistic dream were realised, religion wouldn’t be part of history. I’m glad that the Roman civilisation no longer exists - there are far fewer incidents of people being forced to take part in mortal, gladitorial combat or being fed to lions. Saying that doesn’t mean I would enjoy the counterfactual of all of the good things about Roman civilisation disappearing. We can’t erase history, good or bad.
Nichols also stated that he wants believers and non-believers to work together for the greater good. We do. We do this already by having a secular political system - where religious differences are put to one side to try and build a better society. It’s why we atheists, Catholics, Buddhists and anyone else who cares about some particular issue can work together.
Nichols then goes on to make some really lame excuses for the Catholic Church’s covering up of child abuse in Ireland. On the “secularists are just as bad!” theme, I have a challenge for the religious: show me an equivalent. Go on. Dig up some Humanist equivalent of Crimen solicitationis. Show me all those child abuse victims that have been secretly paid off by the National Secular Society. Is the International Humanist and Ethical Union shielding child molesters? I mean, you can’t be moral without religion, right? Dig out those secularist paedophiles and child rapists. Go on. I’ll wait.
One day religious leaders will actually be sincere in their desire for “dialogue” by not misrepresenting their opponents. Or at least, I have a possibly naive wish that they might.
