Taste and aesthetics and literary criticism, and Niezsche being wrong

An interesting essay from Academia about Hume's "Nietzsche's Aesthetic Science and Hume's Standard of Taste."

I see some things that relate to biblical criticism, not just pre-modern, but modern, including the Jesus Seminar. Hume was halfway questioning what standard there was to judge the excellence of a poet such as Homer. Then, per the author of the piece, Nietzsche then asked what was the standard at his time, in trying to judge whether a fragment of Greek poetry was indeed Homeric or not, and whether there was any standard besides a subjective standard of taste.

And, in fact, he seems to actually support the idea that taste IS the ultimate standard.

To me, this sounds like some things that could relate to biblical criticism, and not just that of Nietzsche's time. I first thought of the Jesus Seminar and its criteria for voting sayings of Jesus as red, pink, gray or black.

Outside of this immediate thought, I am more generally reminded of the "criterion of dissimilarity" in biblical criticism. To me, it should be treated as a one-way valve. If an apparent saying of Jesus IS dissimilar to Judaism of the time, early Christianity or both, then it's likely authentic. But, as Jesus was a Jew, and the church developed from him (allowing for editorial work on the gospels), well, then there's going to be cases of similarity.

That said, Nietzsche was wrong on the bigger picture.

A philosopher trying to claim a science of aesthetics?

As a philologist as well as philosopher, he knew the Roman maxim: "De gustibus non disputandum."

Now, while we can tout some artists for understanding the science of human body proportion (Leonardo) or perspective, and many other things, there was plenty a Renaissance artist that understood both and still painted crap.

Within literary criticism, Hume does hit on one thing. A cross-cultural, anachronistic (in its technical sense) popularity for a poet or author, while not scientific, can surely be used as historic proof of greatness.

All hail the lowly aphorism

In one of his normal Friday reading roundups a few weeks ago, Massimo Pigliucci had a link to an Aeon piece about reading philosophy as aphoristic discourse first, systemic critiques second?

I agree with him on it being wrong. After all, even the pre-Socratics, quoted today for aphoristic insight like Heraclitus' "Nobody walks through the same river twice," were system-builders. Whether Socrates was himself or not is ultimately unknowable. But Plato was. Zeno was — the paradoxes, as a whole, were a system. The "other" Zeno was — rational detachment in light of the Logos is a system. Epicurus was. The Skeptics as a group were. Arguably, Diogenes was. Aristotle? One could make the argument that deductive reading was itself a system.

That said, we remember the pre-Socratics for aphoristic comment, as noted above. In modern times, Nietzsche, who arguably was NOT a system builder indeed, is certainly remembered as an aphorist.

However, on the flip side? None of the Empiricists are remembered that way. Nor  Comte, nor the logical positivists. Certainly not Kant.

But, per Massimo, it IS stimulating.

So, I offer a few of my own.

“Nobody reads the same philosophical system twice.” — The Socratic Gadfly, coming after Heraclitus, Plato and Whitehead.

“Nobody gets more than halfway through the same philosophical system once.” — The Socratic Gadfly, coming after Zeno of Elea.

“An aphorist is a deep thinker who knows the value of brevity and the price of wit.” — The SocraticGadfly, coming after Oscar Wilde.

Peter Singer disciple may be even more outrageous than the master

I missed this piece from Nautilus just over a year ago, but it's a look at Oxford philosophy prof Julian Savulescu, a disciple of Australian philosopher Peter Singer.

First, he shoots himself in the ethics foot in one area. Call it either the demarcation problem, per old philosophy friend Massimo Pigliucci, or else call it the sorites paradox.

Among things he says many people get wrong, ethically (and he seems to be talking about his fellow professionals in the field, not just outsiders) is something like blood doping for bicyclists. He says he is OK with low-level doping.

That leads to two immediate questions:
1. What is "low level" vs "high level" doping? That's more a demarcation problem than sorites issue, but could be a bit of both. In fact, I see them as interrelated. How many micro-moles of extra oxygen, if I'm oxygen-loading, to reverse the sorites paradox, can I add before I move from low-level to high-level?
2. Why NOT on high-level doping? (He never says why not, in the interview.)

His talk about eugenics is overall more ethically reasonable. That includes the part that classism issues will arise with it until we move to a post-capitalist world. (I agree, and use the word post-capitalist rather than anti-capitalist, in part because of any Marxist implications it has.)

His part about lifespan extension, though, is a fail, especially since he talked about moving to a post-capitalist world on eugenics. Our planet is getting closer and closer to a "carrying capacity" problem. When we hit 9 billion in another 30 years or whatever, and 1 billion more than today of that number trying to have a halfway "Western" lifestyle, including air conditioning that exacerbates climate change in a negative feedback loop, we'll be in trouble. Working to extend the average human lifespan to 120 or more will just put all those problems on steroids, and Savulescu misses that entirely. He does mention resource depletion later, as a separate ethical issue, but doesn't make a direct connection.

Regular readers of my philosophy-related writing know I'm not a system-builder. But, I do think you have to have a systemic consideration, and not just an ad hoc consideration, of empirical facts on, or likely to be on, the table.

Savulescu fails to do that. And, it's not necessarily him alone. Utilitarianism in general at least runs that risk.

No, chimps aren't religious

I've seen shorter versions of this claim made before by James Harrod, but with a longer paper on Academia, wanted to take a few minutes to refute it.

First, my rough-and-ready definition of religion is:

"A communal focus on engagement with believed metaphysical personages or entities involving communal rituals and actions to align the community with believed personages or entities."

I've rephrased that elsewhere as

Religion is about:

Metaphysical matters of ultimate concern, within a social group setting; and 

How one orients oneself within that group to a better relationship to these metaphysical matters of ultimate concern.

First, note that "metaphysical" shows we're clearly into philosophy. It means something that "transcendence" does not.

First of all, this definition is written to include something like Theravada Buddhism, by noting "entities," not just "personages." Theravada believes in an incarnation of a metaphysical life force, even if it doesn't believe in a personal soul, let alone a personal deity. And it believes that laws of karma govern that reincarnation. I have discussed in detail before the fact that Buddhism is a religion, and had a follow-up. I have also noted karma is as offensive as original sin, and maybe worse in Theravada with its rejection of an individual soul. I've also noted how reincarnation and karma has other problems, mainly based in a "progress" mindset that's as wrong there as in misframings of evolutionary theory. OK, so with all that about Buddhism, we move on.

Second, religion is communal, and part of that alignment includes addressing things like "sin." In many religions, the focus is first on sins against a god or gods, but still includes communal sins as well. And, even sins against a god are only visible within the light of a community.

Third, the "rituals and actions" notes that all religions have elements of orthopraxis. They all also have elements of orthodoxy. I've covered this recently.

Now, let's dig in.

Do chimpanzees have compassion? Yes. And even, perhaps, something like compassion for the memory of dead fellow chimps? Yes, I think. So do elephants, cetaceans and a few other non-human animals.

Do chimps have metaphysics? Highly, highly unlikely. In other words, chimps, IMO, don't believe in chimp souls, chimp karma, or a chimp god. Nor do gorillas, neither in the 1970s nor this past decade:



Sorry, James.

And, unlike Caesar/Andy Serkis, chimpanzees, and other primates don't have the speech to organize a community to focus on abstract ideas. And, contra Harrod, who is letting other scholars and thinkers be his mouthpiece, it's tempting to overread what communication chimps have. Well, tempting to him and them, but not to me.

Cetaceans might. But, if they do, they don't have hands with opposable thumbs and can't really engage in metaphysically related actions.

A rich emotion life and symbolic play also prove nothing about chimpanzees possibly conceiving metaphysical concepts. Nor does it at all address the difficulty of communicating such concepts without language. The fact that chimps have neural substrate systems similar to something like Broca's in humans only proves that evolutionary biology is real and is a conservative workman.

And, a first-order theory of mind? Given the complexity of judging human actions that might be called sins against a community, that's not enough. But, let’s get to Harrod’s nutgrafs — his transspecific definition of religion. Here goes:
• Reverence (showing devotion, intense love, deep respect), which may involve a hush;
• Careful observance, which may involve a calling-out announcement or remark;
• Experiencing or expressing emotion of dread (awe in its terror or astonishment aspect) before that which overwhelms the subject by its magnitude, grandeur, beneficence, or lethality; mysterium tremendum
• Experiencing or expressing emotion of wonder (awe in its fascination, curiosity, or desire-to-know-more aspect) with respect to a phenomenon (especially a movement) which is surprising, non-ordinary, extraordinary, special, or ‘miraculous’; mysterium fascinans
• Binding individuals together or back together in empathic intimacy or communion with respect to experiences of aliveness and animacy, including other living beings or things that appear to be alive, which may secondarily involve the witnessing of this by a collective social group.

OK, first observation? He's clearly smoking some Rudolf Otto high-grade drugs. And the "mysterium tremendum" as a key to "religious experience" is by no means widely accepted. As the likes of Susan Blackmore note, psychadelic drugs or deep meditative experiences can induce this "mysterium" in the non-religious. Ditto for near-death experiences.

Harrod goes on to make clear that he is indeed adapting an Ottonian framework to animals.

He ignores entirely ideas of sin, guilt, and metaphysical entities.

As for his five actual points?
• I can love either a girlfriend or a bottle of whisky. I don't worship either one, even if I shout "oh my god" during sex.
• Careful observance? Chimps, like us, evolved to stay safe from snakes and predators, as well as to identify a variety of ripe foods. Careful observance is part of not being dead. It's also, in we humans, what's behind overuse of agency imputation and pattern detection in non-savannah civilized live.
• Mysterium tremendum? Since chimps don't have abstract language, no way I see for them to communicate that, let alone for us to see that they're trying to do so.
• Wonder? Many scientists still have great degrees of wonder for the facts of evolutionary biology, cosmology and many things in between, and they're not religious. Indeed, Aeon has a new piece about the role of awe in scientific work.
• Empathy for life? I have that, too, and again, I'm not religious.

What Harrod is missing is that, in reality, at some point in human CULTURAL evolution, some point AFTER the evolution of some degree of language in all likelihood, these five points were adapted for what developed into religion. Some of the adaptation, per my notes on point 2 above, may well have been non-conscious.

Should chimpanzees have an evolutionary twig that offshoots into a new species, that follows a similar bath, Harrod can contact me back in a couple of million years.

And with that, I've wasted enough time on him.

Museum of the Bible's Auguean stables:Have fun on cleanup, old classmate Jeff Kloha

I blogged a few months ago about the breaking of the Dead Sea Scrolls scandal at Hobby Lobby-owned Museum of the Bible, and how the man dealing with the fallout is old seminary classmate Jeff Kloha, who now prefers the full Jeffrey.

Update, July 27, 2021: The Gilgamesh Dream Tablet has Hobby Lobby back in the news. See my update at the bottom of the piece, including noting that Hobby Lobby is far from the only villain in the drama.)

Said blogging included disagreements between this now-secularist myself and the still-fundamentalist wing of Lutheranism Kloha about whether or not the DSS confirm a pristine transmission of the text of the Old Testament or Tanakh (they don't, Jeff) and whether or not they're "inarguably" the most important biblical discovery of the last century (they're arguably not, and if we focus on Christian development and diversity, Nag Hammadi is arguably MORE important).

But I digress.

NPR has a new piece about all the cleanup work that Kloha, the museum's chief curator, has on his hands.

He said it's looking at returning a bunch of items to Iraq, some of which likely came from its national musuem. That said, he doesn't know for sure:

"All we have is paperwork, and very vague paperwork," says Kloha, a former professor of the New Testament at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. "Obviously, there are multiple sources for items from Iraq over the past 30 years. So we have no way of knowing where these came from." 

Part one of the fun.

Part two? The Green family bought 5-10 percent fakes among the 8,000 items up for return. Schadenfreude is a bitch.

Part three? Items it has already promised to return are still in the U.S., because the Greens are too cheap to pay insurance. They're hoping to send them back on an Iraqi embassy plane.

Part four? Schadenfreude can spread wide, like diarrhea. Christie's sold a Gilgamesh to the Museum of the Bible, and didn't adequately check provenance. An Afghani Jewish prayer book was likely trafficked by the Taliban.

Kloha told NPR the "few bad apples" story.

"It seems to have been just one or two individuals who were acting as agents and purchasing things for what was, at that point, just the idea of a museum," he says. "It was a handful of advisers who would literally travel the world, make contacts, find things, and then bring them to the Greens for acquisition."

 Not quite, sir.

Part five? Schadenfreude sometimes degenerates into fuck-you privilege. Steve Green, Hobby Lobby patriarch, was flagged by Customs in 2010 for importing an ancient manuscript Bible without documentation. Read the story for details.

And, per this site, let us not forget the Green family's dirty hands on Dirk Obbink's apparent papyrus stealing.

I don't think Jeff is lying. But, it sounds like he needs to get more up to speed on the Green family.

===

Update, July 27, 2021: With the DOJ getting a court ruling today that Hobby Lobby must forfeit the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, sounds like Jeff Kloha has more Cleanup on Aisle 6 to do. Details? The tablet was shipped to the US in 2003 by Jordanian Antiquities Authority, without proper paperwork but with the claim it was found in miscellaneous rubble in 1981. In reality, like much other stuff the Green family got its mitts on, it was apparently looted from Iraq. There is no honor among thieves, and we'll see how much remorse there is.

Now, some of this is not new, and some of this on the political side is a #BlueAnon dogpile on the Green family. Hobby Lobby surrendered it a nearly a year ago, after federal authorities ruled to that end. Let's ALSO note that Hobby Lobby supports its return to Iraq. The actual court ruling is more icing on the cake than anything, though it gives the feds leverage if there's anything Hobby Lobby tries to keep its hands on.

In fact, it's arguable that Christie's (yes, THAT Christie's) is at least as big a villain as Hobby Lobby.

Christie's, the international auction house from which Hobby Lobby bought the item, previously told CNN that "any suggestion that Christie's had knowledge of the original fraud or illegal importation is unsubstantiated."

Christie's can use the weasel word "unsubstantiated" all it wants. And, yes, "weasel word" it is.

Re Hobby Lobby, Christie's and looted Iraq, there may be plenty of people who aren't hard-right conservative Christians who willingly bought larger or smaller sums of ill-gotten booty pilfered from Iraq, and some of it may have sifted through Christie's hands.

Related to that? I want to hear NOTHING from American do-gooders claiming we should hold on to it because ISIS will just destroy it. First, that would be yet another form of thievery. Second, that's why much of the rest of the world hates American do-gooders. Third, destruction of antiquities has been happening since the rise of civilization. Fourth, Christians have done this in hte past. The Iconoclastic Controversy. Worshipers, led by ex-priest pastors such as Karlstadt, shattering stained glass in the early Reformation. Some "Mark of the Beast" types (generally ignorant) destroying things related to that alleged mark today.

So, the idea, from one apparent BlueAnon do-gooder on Twitter, that it would have been better had it been stolen on the QT, is laughable.

No, really! The "HL" in his Tweet, part of a thread from a now-muted person, goes exactly down that rabbit hole. 

C. Is the same point I'm making. For one, DOJ wouldnt know about it if HL didnt declare it. It could've easily ended up in the hands of a private collector that kept it secret.

— Edward Davis (@Mag_neto_) July 28, 2021

Besides, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? That's true on everything from antiquities to importing exotic plants and animals to a new country or continent. I tweeted back to the guy exactly on that line:

So, now you're advocating that thievery is fine as long as it's on the QT? Gee, that's what organized crime says. Keep extending the rope to further hang yourself.

— Crushes Xi Jinping Thought Kool-Aid peddlers 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) July 28, 2021

Twitter's non-literalists claimed that the words above were inciting self-harm and locked my account until I deleted that. I of course did a screenshot.

And yes, IMO, that's what it boils down to. I thought of Juvenal's maxim shortly after that. And, see what I said above about Christie's. They may have sold Iraq antiquities to other buyers who made exactly that argument. Or, Christie's senior staff, with their attempt at plausible deniability, may have internally made that argument themselves, that selling these items got them out of Iraq.

No, per the Wiki link, the phrase doesn't come from Plato's "Republic," though the idea behind it is raised indirectly. Plato's answer on how to guard them? The heart of the fascism behind the "Republic" — mind control through the Platonic Noble Lie. No thanks, as I've said about St. Anthony of Fauci, on masks and herd immunity. I don't even consider his "gain of function" a Platonic noble lie. More like a Jesuitical one, or just a plain old grubby one.

As for the value of Gilgamesh? It's at least partly behind the tales of Moses' birth and similar birth stories around the ancient Near East, as well as some documents from Qumran (which tie back to Hobby Lobby's larceniousness as well as to why Kloha was hired) and to the Iliad and Odyssey. Arguably, it's connected indirectly to just about any later epic tale in the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean.

 

Update, Nov. 26, 2024: I don't know whether he left on his own, or got kicked to the curb, but Kloha is no longer at the Museum of the Bible, per his LinkedIn. In a post, he says it was his decision, but, nonetheless, that could be a decision that was constrained or nudged in some way. Per this post from his new freelance life? It's interesting. Maybe he's less argumentative than in the past. That said, does his enlightenment about political discourse also apply to political discourse?

Arise, O Lord, against this Luther

This is another in a serious of posts examining facts, legends and more related to Martin Luther and early Lutheranism on the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation.

So, Luther had forced Johann Eck to admit that popes could err, and that good works could only "act" after faith — a sola fide faith — had enlightened and sanctified a person.

So, we got?

A committee.

Why not.

The papal curia was, and still is, a bureaucracy like any secular state.

So a committee of about 40 sat down to fine-tooth comb Luther's writings. Among the group was not only Eck but Cardinal Cajetan, rebuffed by Luther the year before Eck was refuted.

The committee eventually led to Pope Leo X "calling bull" on Luther, with the papal bull Exsurge Domine, translated at the start of the header.

Cajetan wanted to take a nuanced approach of ranges of possible church discipline to different writings and comments of Luther's while Eck, more openly humiliated, wanted to bulldoze over him.

Result? Eck won.

The committee, similar to how Hus was treated a century earlier, just drew up a laundry list of what was wrong without saying why it was biblically wrong or how wrong it was.

Just as Rome and Constantinople were asunder long before their mutual anathemas of 1054 (he Slavic missionary competition in the 700s shows that, and the crowning of Charlemagne as emperor [NOT "western emperor"] in 800 in the secular side backs that up), so were Luther and Rome officially asunder when the bull was received by him, months before his excommunication and two years before the imperial pressure cooker of the Diet of Worms.

For Luther, the lack of imperial action — related to imperial succession issues — only emboldened him.

Richard John Neuhaus: A Lutheran con, like Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod on abortion

Richard John Neuhaus was a rising theologian within the late 1960s and early 1970s Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, at a time when the denomination was "schizophrenic" by its own standards.

In 1969, the body elected J.A.O. Preus, perceived as a conservative, as its new president, and him defeating an incumbent perceived as a bit more moderate. But, at the same time, it entered full "altar and pulpit" fellowship with the moderate-conservative, but not full conservative, American Lutheran Church. That was modified four years later into "fellowship under protest" even as the LCMS worried about "liberalism" in theology taking over its main seminary in St. Louis. That ended with the "Seminex" walkout, which failed to oust Preus from the presidency. (Bringing things to a full boil in the 1973-74 academic year, AFTER Preus had been re-elected to a second term and the "fellowship under protest" had been adopted, was the height of bad politics.  And, yes, churches are all about politics.)

Neuhaus supported Seminex, but at the same time, moved more conservative politically because of Roe v. Wade.

I came across this via the "Slacktivist" blog on Patheos. The writer, a liberal evangelical, was refuting David French in his claim that before the 1980s, the rising Religious Right didn't care about abortion. And, contra mythos of my LCMS days, teh Google to its own website tells me Lutherans for Life wasn't officially founded until 1979, and only claims some activity starting 1976. (That said, contra pro-life Catholic mythos, it's arguable that pre-Roe, abortion wasn't big on the Catholic radar screen either, contra Humanae Vitae.)

Anyway, Neuhaus was a sort of a neocon. He was also a paleocon, even more at times, per his affiliation with the Rockford Institute.

And, per Slacktivist, he is kind of full of it on other things.

If one truly does believe in historical-critical methodology, first, then "Jesus is Lord," with which he starts his blast, is always subject to human trimming.

Second, Christianity is compatible with non-democratic governments, human rights abuses, slavery and more. For the first, read Romans 13. For the second? More Romans 13 isn't bad. Nor is 2 Corinthians 11:24-25. For the third? Galatians 3:28. For all of the above? Any good Lutheran (or Catholic, for other reasons, perhaps) theologian would know of this book called "The City of God."

Third, any good non-Catholic would look at least a bit askance at going too far down the road of natural law for human rights. A good secularist would look hugely askance.

Fourth, despite his dipping one foot into theological liberalism or what passed for that at the LCMS of his salad days, it's laughable to be like National Affairs and paint him as a liberal. What he really was, was a neocon. (That's probably part of why Rockford booted him.) First Things magazine itself, in its encomium obituary, tells the truth.

I will say that, when he came by Concordia Publishing House in the early 1990s, he was well received among staff, even by the ordained minister who oversaw copyediting there and was more theologically conservative.

He struck me as a bit erudite and urbane. In hindsight, that probably comes from him being born in Canada.