Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art.

August 25, 2010 at 10:54 A.M. A single quotation mark was removed since my previous review. I have corrected that inserted "error." I cannot say how many other writings have been altered or damaged.

June 2, 2010 at 9:08 P.M. This title has been altered in my list at my blog so that it appears out of scale with all other titles. This alteration of this copyright protected page by hackers using NJ government computers cannot be repaired. I will do my best to cope with such harassments. I cannot say what further harm or alterations have been done to my writings today.

April 20, 2009 at 1:23 P.M. I have just corrected "errors" that do not appear in earlier versions of my essay "Nihilists in Disneyworld." Attacks on several essays have resulted in corrections of "errors" that had previously been corrected, numerous times. I will run scans throughout the day.

July 15, 2008 at 6:38 P.M. Please see "New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court" and "Bob Menendez Has Not Been Indicted -- Yet!"

Computer attacks this morning have made writing difficult. I will try again. This essay has been corrected in the same ways at least twenty times.

April 22, 2008 at 1:09 P.M. Once more with feeling.

June 25, 2008 at 10:24 A.M. More "errors" inserted and corrected. Please keep your eyes on this essay for alterations of the text. As I post this essay, italics and bold script are still not available. MSN (I am told) has "closed."

I. Introduction.

My subject is a single important essay by Arthur Schopenhauer entitled, "The Metaphysics of Fine Art" in T. Baily Saunders, trans. & ed., "Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer" (New York: A.L. Burt, 1901), at page 279. I shall refer to key sections in the volumes of "The World as Will and Representation," also to Bryan Magee's biography and exposition of Schopenhauer's system only in passing, that is, in order to clarify the arguments set forth in this specific essay, which is about the right length for an Internet commentary. My reading of Rudiger Safranski's scholarly and elegant "Schopenhauer and The Wild Years of Philosophy" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987) came too late to improve this essay. Schopenhauer states the fundamental issue in the philosophy of art in these terms:

"How is it possible to take pleasure in something [art] that does not come into any relation with the will?" (p. 279.)

In more contemporary language, this is a way of asking why we derive pleasure from or find meaning in art, although art may have nothing to do with our material or selfish interests? Why is a Rembrandt self-portrait worth millions even if we get nothing "practical" out of it? Why is it appropriate to pay a great actor large sums of money, aside from economic considerations, for what he or she is able to give us? Yes, there are non-economic reasons for a society to value great art. Why is art so valuable, and not just economically, even though art may have nothing to do with our specific daily projects and concerns? The art object does not really "do" anything nor does it have any impact (for most of us) on our ways of earning a living so as to get the material things that we want in life, and yet art matters a great deal to most of us. There is a mystery in the realization that beautiful things are desired in our lives for themselves, despite their lack of material utility. At best, art is purely existential. Art simply "is."

Schopenhauer's answer to this question is that aesthetic pleasure is only possible because there is no relation with the will and its concerns in the contemplation or experience of art, that is, in "the aesthetic experience." We experience art -- unless we are professionally concerned with art -- in a manner that is disengaged from the world. Think of going to a movie and being lost in the story on screen for two hours or disappearing into a great novel. Schopenhauer says:

" ... by the beautiful we mean the essential and original forms of animate and inanimate nature -- in Platonic language, the Ideas; and they can be apprehended only by their essential correlate, a knowing subject free from will; in other words, a pure intelligence without purpose or ends in view. Hence in the act of aesthetic perception the will has absolutely no place in consciousness. But it is the will alone which is the fount of all our sorrows and sufferings, and if it thus vanishes from consciousness, the whole possibility of suffering is taken away." (p. 280.)

What does Schopenhauer mean by this? To answer this question will require some appreciation of Schopenhauer's metaphysics, which builds on Immanuel Kant's Critical philosophy and aesthetics, on Kant's celebrated separation of the sublime from the beautiful, along with the Platonism which inspired it. Today there are also objections of a political or Marxist sort to be examined concerning this highly aristocratic conception of aesthetic delight. I will first offer some biographical information; then I will discuss Kantian metaphysics and epistemology in a very brief way; next I summarize Kantian aesthetics as the foundations for Schopenhauer's view of art; I conclude with some applications of Schopenhauer's ideas to a single aesthetic experience in my life.

Before turning to my discussion of Shopenhauer's essay, it is necessary to deal with the charges brought against him by contemporary feminists and others who have placed Shopenhauer's writings on a list of works deemed "inappropriate" in our enlightened age. My daughter recently came home from her high school history class excoriating Christopher Columbus for "genocide." Despite the nice statue in "Columbus" circle, it seems that admiration for this European explorer -- something that I was taught in school -- is a sign of immorality, until it is pointed out that immorality is only relative, of course. The "School of Resentment" (a term coined by Harold Bloom) regards the European arrival in what became the Americas or the "New World," as a great and unmitigated evil -- except that there is no such thing as evil, naturally, unless we are referring to the actions of White European Males (WEM).

Whatever else she is learning in school, my daughter is absorbing and reacting to this "ideology of resentment." These judgments are taught as historical truths, apparently, placed beyond dispute, by the very people who define themselves as epistemological skeptics and ethical relativists concerning the existence of any truth at all. I continue to find this puzzling. This is the sort ideology of "political correctness" that I find not just puzzling, in fact, but also less than appealing. Not because it is wrong, necessarily, but because it is one-sided and simplistic, excluding alternative perspectives. It suggests the opposite of an intelligent and qualified historian's perspective on the actions of a complex historical figure, one who lived in the fifteenth century, and who is unlikely to be found sharing the values of chi-chi New Yorkers of the twenty-first century. Burning magazines in school because they contain "sexist or exploitative" images of women, for example, is not the best way to teach students the meaning of the First Amendment.

The difficult historical question avoided by a trendy dismissiveness of all "White European Males" is whether this "European Whiteness" makes Columbus a "bad person," whatever this may mean, and (if so) on what basis this judgment is made today, usually by self-professed ethical relativists and so-called opponents of RACISM. Shopenhauer's views of women are worse than unacceptable by our standards today. They are idiotic and offensive at any time. This is not another example of knee-jerk political correctness, but the only possible conclusion of an opponent of militant political correctness. The charges against Schopenhauer are admitted, in other words, but they are deemed irrelevant to what is most interesting about his work for us.

Charged with sexism, Schopenhauer "demurs" -- like New Jersey Chief Justice Stuart Rabner -- and responds that he rejects the values underlying the charge as inappropriate to his century and irrelevant to his understanding of life. I concur in part, even as I dissent in part. Naturally, since Schopenhauer is dead, we will have to "demur" on his behalf.

It may be that what most concerns us about a historical figure -- such as Columbus -- is not whether his values and attitudes to the peoples of the new world that he found in the course of his adventures are "enlightened" by contemporary standards, but whether he played a significant role in altering the historical course of several civilizations. Schopenhauer is worthy of study for his influence on subsequent thinkers, this is entirely apart from the merits of his system. To expect the past to satisfy our standards of value is to ensure disappointment, for it is to fail to see the past at all. First, understand the men and women who lived in a different time and their concerns; second, make your judgments; finally, assess those judgments in historical and cultural terms.

Will posterity conclude that our so-called "political correctness" is also short-sighted and naive? I am sure of it. For the historian, there is the immense condescension of posterity to worry about. Historians should be wary of fashionable conclusions about the past or reductivist views of great historical figures at any time. They should be wary about trendy political opinions. In fact, historians more than most of us should be hesitant about claiming to have understood the past.

Much like Nietzsche -- who was profoundly influenced by Shopenhauer -- Arthur Schopenhauer is an unapologetic misogynist and elitist. I disagree with and reject many of his political opinions and everything that he wrote about women. Please bear this point in mind so that I will not find it necessary to respond to charges of misogyny merely for studying Schopenhauer's writings and learning from them. As ridiculous as such accusations may be, they are increasingly common in our politically charged academic and intellectual environment.

I do not wish to absolve Schopenhauer of post-mortem responsibility for those hateful "sexist" views; nor does the admiration that I feel for some of his writings -- an admiration that is shared by many distinguished scholars and artists, some of whom happen to be women and feminists -- excuse those discredited views. Schopenhauer's idiocy on the subject of women (and I will provide a sample below) does not diminish the validity of his insights concerning knowledge and art, ontology and metaphysics. Schopenhauer may be the foremost Kantian in German idealist philosophy and also a perceptive critic of Kant.

For a brilliant and trenchant criticism as well as exposition of Kant's system by Schopenhauer, see Volume I, "The World as Will and Representation," pp. 415-501. (E.F.J. Payne, trans.) For a comparison that would have horrified Schopenhauer, see Hegel's "Absolute Spirit: Art, Revealed Religion, Philosophy," (1817, 1827, 1830) in Peter C. Hodgson, ed., "G.W.F. Hegel: Theologian of the Spirit" (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), pp. 137-155; then G.W. F. Hegel, "The Idea of Artistic Beauty or the Ideal" and "The Symbolic Art Form," in Henry Paolucci, trans. & ed., "Hegel on the Arts" (Celaware: Bagehot Council, 1979), pp. 1-23.

"Hence it will be found that the fundamental fault of the female character," Schopenhauer writes, "is that it has no sense of justice. This is mainly due to the fact, already mentioned, that women are defective in the powers of reasoning and deliberation; but it is also traceable to the position which nature has assigned to them as the weaker sex." (Schopenhauer, supra, pp. 437-438.)

This is probably the nicest thing that Schopenhauer has to say about women and an impressive display of his own "sense of justice." The foregoing sentence is an example of irony. Schopenhauer's view of men is not much better. Schopenhauer is the great misanthrope and pessimist in the history of Western thought, mean-spirited, sometimes petty and dogmatic, but also one of the most intelligent critics and interpreters of Kant's system, as I say, a highly learned and superb writer, with a sharp mind and keen imagination, anticipating Freud and Nietzsche, influencing everyone from Thomas Hardy to Dylan Thomas and Thomas Mann. Schopenhauer's mastery of English philosophy, including Hume and Berkeley, as well as his admiration for British government and law are crucial in understanding this "Romantic pessimist."

One of Schopenhauer's biographers comments on the philosopher's practice of dining at the same pub every evening where he consumed an identical meal of steak, potatoes and beer. This was only after placing a gold coin next to his plate. Inevitably, Shopenhauer would pick up the gold coin and put it back in his pocket at the end of the meal. When he was asked why he did this, he explained that each day he hoped to hear a single interesting statement from one of the patrons of this establishment. If Schopenhauer ever did overhear a profound or clever remark, then he would leave the gold coin to commemorate the occasion. Despite his many years of daily anticipation, Schopenhauer always left the restaurant with his gold coin still in his pocket. Most people, according to Schopenhauer, "are blockheads."

What follows is what Schopenhauer would probably describe as one "blockhead's" comments on his work.

II. Biography.

Schopenhauer was born in Danzig on February 22, 1788. His father was a great merchant, who was sympathetic to the philosophies of liberty (for the affluent middle class, that is) of the Enlightenment. He was well-read, cultivated, concerned about his son's education. The family moved to Hamburg when Arthur -- who was named for the mythical English king -- was five years-old, after Danzig became part of Poland in 1793.

Schopenhauer's father committed suicide. This was not discussed in accordance with the hypocrisies and conventions of their prudish pre-Victorian society, and the family promptly liquidated his assets and left for foreign parts. Arthur lived and studied in France and also in England. He travelled widely on the European continent during his early years. He was affected by seeing the horrors of the Napoleonic wars, its victims and legacy of suffering. His mother was an eccentric, writing Romantic novels, creating a salon, meeting the likes of Goethe and other intellectuals of the era, creating a number of Hamlet-like issues for the bright young man and philosopher-to-be, who quickly figured out that business and law were not for him.

One commentator says that "though he soon abandoned the mercantile career into which his father had pushed him, it left its mark on Schopenhauer in a certain bluntness of manner, a realistic turn of mind, a knowledge of the world and of men." Like Byron, Schopenhauer and his "mom" had "issues," as they say in California. Professional jealousy may have played a part in their mutual antagonism. There was not enough room for two geniuses (or is it "geniusi"?) in one family. Schopenhauer made it very clear that he was the genius -- and he was right. Schopenhauer did make one lasting and important friendship through his mother, Goethe. During the final twenty-four years of her life, Schopenhauer did not speak to his mother. Neither of them seems to have regretted this state of affairs.

Schopenhauer's doctoral dissertation appeared in 1813, "On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason." His quarrels with Hegel and lack of subtlety or diplomacy made a university career impossible. His view of women left him with no significant relationship, unmarried and without children. His masterpiece "The World as Will and Representation" (1844) was mostly ignored. Schopenhauer published the work at his own expense and had to buy back 99% of the copies. World fame and recognition arrived only at the end of his life, when Schopenhauer delighted in it. A volume of essays "Parerga und Paralipomina" ("byproducts and leavings" or "comments and omissions") was published in 1851.

Both Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche were influenced by Schopenhauer, spending many evenings during the years of their friendship discussing the "old man's" works. Schopenhauer was the first of the great philosophers to make substantial use of the Upanishads and Buddhist philosophy in his system. Schopenhauer died in 1860. He once pushed his housekeeper down the stairs of his building and had to pay damages to compensate for her injuries until she died, an occasion which Schopenhauer celebrated with Champagne. Schopenhauer was not a very nice man. Nevertheless, Schopenhauer's work is important -- particularly his aesthetics -- so that his writings (deservedly) continue to receive the respectful attention of scholars. Unlike most German philosophers, Schopenhauer is fun to read and his nastiness can make your day when you're in a foul mood:

"... optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbour nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of mankind."

"The World as Will and Representation," trans., E.F.J. Payne, Bk. I, p. 326.

III. Aesthetics: Plato and Kant.

The philosophers who have made the greatest contributions to our understanding of art are Plato and Kant, although aesthetics as a distinct field of philosophical inquiry does not emerge until Baumgarten's work in the eighteenth century. Plato was hostile to art:

"This was because of his mistaken view that works of art are imitations of things and events in the phenomenal world, giving us their appearance without their function; and since the things themselves are mere transient images, works of art are doubly fraudulent in that they are images of images. The aim of every genuine seeker after truth, thought Plato, should be to pierce the veil of phenomena and enter the eternal abstract world [of the forms] beyond it; but the degenerate semblances of art, by their very attractiveness and charm, rivet our attention to the ephemera they represent."

Bryan Magee, "The Philosophy of Schopenhauer" (Oxford: OUP, 1983), p. 174. Compare "The World as Will and Representation," Book I, 530-31; and Book II, 406. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")

For Plato, empirical objects in the world of human experience, including people, are mere shadows on the cave wall. They are semblances of the perfect forms perceived through intellectual effort alone. The task of the philosopher is -- to use the metaphor of the cave from "The Republic" -- to exit the cave and see the world in the light of the sun, to perceive the abstract forms freed from the dross of empirical reality. Art is a representation of our perceptions, which themselves are mere representations of perfect forms. Worse, these representations are doubly distracting to the thinker, tying the mind to this imperfect earth when it should be soaring. ("The Allegory of the Cave.")

Since what we know of art is only our mental representations of artistic representations, they prevent us from "seeing" ultimate reality. "Art is the shadow of a shadow," Plato says. It follows that poets and all artists must be banished from the ideal state, according to Plato, so that they will not obstruct our contemplative efforts. Schopenhauer pondered the necessity of doing the same to children, whom he detested with a W.C. Fields-like passion.

Totalitarians are not overly fond of artists, especially poets. Plato (despite his genius) displays a fondness for the kind of totalitarianism that would lead in the twentieth century to National Socialism and Stalinism. These criticisms that we owe, most recently to Karl Popper, have some merit. Yet Plato is a great thinker -- certainly one of the greatest in the history of our civilization -- and it should not be forgotten that the realm of the forms was a way of establishing the reality of the shared perfections or beauties encountered not only in aesthetic experiences, but also in mathematical equations found in the icy realm of abstractions to which the mind alone has access. Thus, mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose comments:

"I imagine that wherever the mind perceives a mathematical idea, it makes contact with Plato's world of mathematical concepts. (Recall that, according to the Platonic viewpoint, mathematical ideas have existence of their own and inhabit an ideal Platonic world, which is accessible via the intellect only ...) When one sees a mathematical truth, one's consciousness breaks through into this world of ideas, and makes direct contact with it ('accessible via the intellect'). I have described this 'seeing' in relation to Godel's theorem, but it is the essence of mathematical understanding."

"The Emperor's New Mind" (Oxford: OUP, 1989), p. 428.

Among roughly contemporary Platonists may be listed George Santayana, Iris Murdoch, George Steiner (to some degree). Kant's focus is somewhat different. Professor Robert C. Solomon has spoken of the Kantian tendency to organize discussions in tripartite divisions. It is certainly true that Kant recognizes the unacceptable schism in his philosophy after the publication of the first two Critiques. Kant understood the need to unify noumenal and phenomenal aspects of reality by means of a third and more inclusive form of apprehension of reality that would complete the Critical philosophy.

Kant also sought to establish a faculty in the aesthetic arena to correspond with understanding in epistemology or practical reason in ethics. Hence, Kant's most important contention in "The Critique of Judgment" is that the faculty of judgment "mediates" between the other two faculties, understanding and practical reasoning. Judgment has both an objective and subjective aspect. This is an insight that is illuminating when we consider seemingly unrelated phenomena, such as adjudication and ethical reasoning, also the theology of belief in the Mystery that is God.

Judgment allows us to see the empirical world as conforming to practical reason and practical reason as adapted to our knowledge of the empirical world. This Kantian principle will have an impact on Hegel's thinking a generation later, also on the philosophies of Schiller and Schopenhauer. For a neglected comparison, see F.H. Bradley's "The General Nature of Judgment," in James W. Allard & Guy Stock, eds., "Writings on Logic and Metaphysics" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 20-21. ("I am talking of the meaning, not the series of symbols ...") The fundamental problem, for Kant, is that:

"According to the 'Antinomy of Taste,' aesthetic judgment seems to be in conflict with itself: it cannot be at the same time 'aesthetic' (an expression of subjective experience) and also a 'judgment' (claiming universal assent). And yet all rational beings, simply in virtue of their rationality, seem disposed to make these judgments. On the one hand, they feel pleasure in an object ... not based on any conceptualization of the object, or on any inquiry into cause, purpose, or constitution. On the other hand, they express their pleasure in the form of a judgment," speaking of beauty 'as if' it were an 'objective quality.' "

Roger Scruton, "Kant" (Oxford: Oxford Univesity Press, 2001), at p. 100.

The next big step in this choreography arrives with Gadamer's aesthetics in the twentieth century and the idea of a "fusion of horizons." The meeting of emotional and cognitive experience in the objectivity of judgment (construction) provides a model for quantum reasoning in terms of interlocking networks defined as elegance or beauty. The solution to the paradozes of quantum mechanics will arrive, I suspect, with a greater appreciation of the need to invert Heisenberg's famous "uncertainty principle" as a principle of contruction explaining not the alteration of an external and pristine natural order by the observer's presence, so much as the "constitution" of variable as well as protean fields in a most dynamic set of empirical realities involved in a dance or romance with consciousness.

The solution to the puzzle of art lies in Kant's "transcendental deduction in aesthetics." We must think of nature as being "purposive without purpose." We must regard aesthetic experience as having a "prescriptive" component. We must think of our pleasure as being made valid by its object. In this way, we demonstrate how aesthetic judgments are possible, that is, the condition for their possibility. Aesthetic judgments abstract from every material or instrumental interest of the observer, who regards art objects not as means to his or her ends but as ends in themselves, although not moral ends. This act of transcendence is conducted while one's energies are directed to the individual object, in a moment of "singular apprehension." It is this energy of transcendence which permits the observer "to play the part of a judge in matters of taste." See "Critique of Judgment," s. 205. See also, Terry Eagleton, "The Death of Desire: Arthur Schopenhauer," in "The Ideology of the Aesthetic" (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 153-172.

I am going to suggest a set of comparisons that may well alarm students and the usual bullies, who will have no idea of what I am saying. I have suggested that the unifying power of the aesthetic faculty may well receive a mathematical expression or scientific conceptual articulation in developing theoretical possibilities in quantum mechanics and spaces. Please read very carefully Stephen Hawking's "Inaugural Lecture at the Royal Society of Science" entitled: "Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics?" All of Roger Scruton's work is recommended.

"It seems, therefore, that even if we find a unified theory, we may be able to make only statistical predictions. [We must search for the most BEAUTIFUL probable instantiations in terms of multiple options.] We would also have to abandon the view that there is a unique universe that we observe. Instead, we would have to adopt a picture" -- a picture? -- "in which there was an ensemble of all possible universes with some probability distribution. ..." (We will have to "construct as we perceive," freely, in exactly the way that we approach a work of art or another person.)

Stephen Hawking, "Inaugural Lecture," in John Boslough, "Stephen Hawking's Universe" (New York: Avon Books, 1985), p. 134. Compare E.J. Lowe, "Abstract Entities," in "The Possibility of Metaphysics: Substance, Identity, and Time" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 210-228 with Bernard Haisch, "The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What's Behind it All" (San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2006), pp. 127-149.

O.K., now let's get fancy. Daniel Greenberger said that Einstein insisted: "... if quantum mechanics were correct then the world would be crazy. Einstein was right -- the world is crazy." Amir D. Aczel, "Entaglement" (New York & London: Plume, 2003), pp. 203-234 ("Triple Entaglement"). As Einstein made this statement, Dali was painting his surrealist canvases and Cocteau was creating his films. Both men -- like Beethoven's symphonies and Turner's landscapes in the previous century -- were described as crazy. ("Beauty and the Beast.")

Einstein did not consider the possibility that there is something crazy or bizarre about the extraordinary beauty hidden in all that is ordinary. This beauty is seen only by strange persons who are curiously uninterested in going to the mall on Saturday afternoons. This next comment should be borne in mind when considering my description of a great painting later in this essay. As analyzed by C.D. Broad, "it" -- the antinomy of the "specious present" -- "leads (Mabott shows) to the paradox that the further the act of sensing takes, the shorter the specious present it can apprehend." Errol E. Harris, "The Reality of Time" (New York: SUNY, 1984), p. 84.

How long is "now"? When is "now"? Does duration of the "now" depend on what we are experiencing now? Do these ideas frighten you? We transcend ourselves in a directedness towards the beautiful, forgetting ourselves in the process. The similarity to my discussions of love is striking and not coincidental. (See "Martha Nussbaum on Iris Murdoch's Philosophy of Love.")

Piaget and other scholars (Robert Coles) have noted that the temporal sense of children is centered on the "now" of "play." This suggests that children inhabit, naturally, the temporal space of aesthetic experience or great scientific-mathematical insight, also of the mystical encounter with God. Artists always possess this child-like quality to reinvent reality and great recipients of art are blessed with the same gift. It is also this gift which allows thinkers in the sciences and philosophy to imagine and reason through what is impossible for others to think, or what is "not yet." All art and original philosophical as well as scientific thinking, mathematical genius, is an invitation to "play." ("A Review of the t.v. Show 'Alice.'")

Analogies to creativity in adjudication are available, if not applicable to some distressingly familiar jurisdictions -- like the Garden State -- then in an ideal sense. (See also "Is it rational to believe in God?") I recall an interview with Placido Domingo in which the Spanish tenor spoke of his hope that audiences may be brought to forget their worries and problems, being taken to another level of experience during a great Operatic performance. Mr. Domingo also spoke of his own experience -- in singing one role in particular -- of, literally, forgetting himself entirely and disappearing into the character. This is an example of the power of art. Now think of God. In Kant's words:

"But the necessity which is thought in an aesthetic judgment can only be called exemplary; i.e., a necessity of the assent of all to a judgment which is regarded as the example of a universal rule which we cannot state."

"Critique of Judgment," trans. J.H. Bernard, p. 96.

This Kantian insight led to what would be called the "aesthetic ecstasy" of German Romanticism or what Roger Scruton describes as "the attempt to embody what cannot be thought." Tantric sex explores these same emotions and experiences through erotic-aesthetic-spiritual encounters. Love-making is play. Kant moves from this transcendental deduction in aesthetics to distinguish the beautiful from the sublime in experience, by suggesting that art has the power to make us better, in a moral sense, by directing us to what is higher or more noble. The experience of art is not moral in itself. However, art can guide us to moral wisdom and experience, to achieve a kind of transcendence of our flawed particularity and to the embrace of "otherness."

Is God the "space" where beauty and sublimity meet? Is good entwined with evil in that space? (See "Is this atheism's moment?") Are we invited to share that space in order to be fully human? Let us call such an aesthetic/spiritual space, "love" which involves the choice of "being there," (humanity) "for the other" and constant rejection of evil:

"The beautiful is that which pleases in the mere judgment (and therefore not by the medium of sensation in accordance with a concept of the understanding). It follows at once from this that it must please apart from all interest."

As opposed to:

"The sublime [which] is what pleases immediately through its opposition to the interest of sense."

"Critique of Judgment," trans. J.H. Bernard, p. 107 (emphasis added).

Roger Scruton comments upon and explains this distinction as follows:

"Sometimes when we sense the harmony between nature and our faculties, we are impressed by the purposiveness and intelligibility of everything that surrounds us. This is the sentiment of beauty. At other times, overcome by the infinite greatness of the world, we renounce the attempt to understand and control it. This is the sentiment of the sublime. In confronting the sublime, the mind 'is inclined to abandon sensibility.' ..." (Eros?)

"Kant," p. 109.

IV. Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art.

Schopenhauer accepts the Kantian division of noumenal and phenomenal, recognizing the impossiblity of knowing the noumenal or Kantian "ding an sich." We see all material objects only from the outside, as appearances to us, except that we also are material bodies. It follows that each of us knows him- or herself not only from the outside, but also from the inside. From within, we know ourselves as "will," that is, as free agents acting in an uncaused manner in the world. This is true even if our behavior is explicable in terms of a chain of empirical causes. We recognize the drive or energy in us towards activity and motivation, a drive that is undetermined.

This energy or drive in all things -- anticipating Darwin and Freud -- Schopenhauer also calls "will." The will is the drive in each of us and all things to realize functions, aims and/or desires, which will always be frustrated to some degree, thus causing the inherent misery in the human condition. Happiness or fulfillment is negative: it is the release from this will:

"To be freed from oneself is what is meant by becoming a pure intelligence [mind]. It consists in forgetfulness of one's own aims and complete absorption in the object of contemplation; so that all we are conscious of is this one object. And since this is a state of mind unattainable by most men, they are, as a rule, unfitted for an objective attitude towards the world; and it is just this [objective attitude] that constitutes the artistic faculty." (p. 280.)

Genuine love-making is self-giving "for" the other -- a gift which is sanctified in every mystical tradition, including gnostic Christianity. This is true regardless of sexual-orientation. Hence, a universal theological basis is available for sanctifying same-sex love with the marriage rite in religious traditions all over the world. ("John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism" and "Is there a gay marriage right?") Only one new "error" is much less than I expected to find. Make that two new "errors" since the foregoing sentence was altered after my previous review of this work. ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "What is it like to be plagiarized?")

In the task of achieving this freedom from the desiring ego, which is true freedom, art is very useful. Political analogies to communal enterprises -- like revolutions -- are obvious for those who believe, as I do, that the experience of transcendence is indeed within the grasp of every person, even of atheists (like Schopenhauer) or agnostics (like me). ("Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me.'")

"But the [representative] nature of art is such that with it one case holds good for a thousand; for by a careful and detailed presentation of a single individual, person or thing, it aims at revealing the idea or genus to which that person or thing belongs." (Schopenhauer, p. 282.)

It is important to bear this point in mind later when considering my personal example of aesthetic experience or in considering my reviews of films. It may be useful to think also of F.H. Bradley's discussion of "concrete universals," derived from Bradley's absorption of Hegel's dialectics, combined with Hume's rigor and Berkeley's imaginative flights. Thomas Merton would point to a crucifix. So would Thomas Aquinas. Americans and Europeans today will think of their own great symbols, while persons in New Jersey will reflect on McDonald's "Golden Arches."

The contemplation of the art object brings us face-to-face with the Idea or "form" of the object, as opposed to the object itself, elevating us beyond the phenomenal level, where we spend most of our lives, desiring, getting and spending. Most art is representative in a direct sense. Hence, we remain fettered to the will and phenomena, but music -- for Schopenhauer -- is the highest art, since it is the least directly representative and most abstract. For Kant, on the other hand, music was the lowest form of art, since it appeals only to the senses. I tend to agree with Schopenhauer on this issue. So would our Jewish friends and Muslims, who point not to a representative art object, but towards the great symbolizing texts of the faiths in which they live. Compare George Steiner, "Our Homeland, the Text," in "No Passion Spent" ((New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 304 with Reynold A. Nicholson, "The Mystics of Islam" (London: George Bell & Sons, Ltd., 1914).

"If the reader wishes a direct example of the advantage which intuitive knowledge -- the primary and fundamental kind -- has over abstract thought, as showing that art reveals to us more than we can gain from all the sciences, let him look at a ... human face, full of expressive emotion; and that too whether in nature itself or as presented to us by the mediation of art. How much deeper is the insight gained into the essential character of man, nay, into nature in general, by this sight than by all the words and abstract expressions which may be used to describe it. When a beautiful face beams with laughter, it is as though a fine landscape were suddenly illuminated by a ray of light darting from the clouds." (p. 283.)

We should not be surprised when the greatest artists ...

"... bring some quite ordinary person before us -- not even one that is anything beyond the common -- to delineate him [-- think of a Rembrandt self-portrait or Kate Winslet's portrait of "Ruth Barron" --] with the greatest accuracy, in the endeavor to show him to us in the most minute particularity. For it is only when they are put before us in this way that we can apprehend individual and particular facts of life ..." (Schopenhauer, p. 282.)

It is by seeing others truly, that we see ourselves best. We all share in the same substance underlying physical reality, the same will is in us as exists in objects and other persons. Hence, for Schopenhauer the true basis of ethics is not abstract duty, as with Kant, but compassion based on the recognition of shared identity. What physicists now tell us is the ultimate nature of reality based on research at the subatomic level, Schopenhauer knew from his philosophical speculations. Reality is one and it is shared by all of us. You are not like your neighbor, you are your neighbor. You are made of the same substance and share in the same fate. This comes as a shock to racists. This is gratifying. Those who prefer scientific to idealist philosophical terminology, may wish to substitute the word "energy" for "will" in Schopenhauer's system.

In the artistic encounter we experience a "transcendence" that allows us to detach ourselves from our obsessive mundane concerns in order to grasp this truth of "primal unity," at a visceral level. We both feel and know the truth of art. As recipients of art works, we share a cultural space with the artist and subject. Artist and recipient stand on common ground in the aesthetic moment, thus achieving a kind of spiritual community. May we say the same of love? I like to call this aesthetic/spiritual space the "Forest of Arden." (See my essay on Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation" and "Why Philosophy is for Everybody.") Or just experience a good movie. Bryan Magee comments on Schopenhauer's linkage of ethics and aesthetics, Goodness and Beauty, by way of metaphysics:

"Empathy and compassion are made possible, he tells us, by the fact that each of us is, in his inmost nature, at one with the noumenal, and the noumenal is one and undifferentiable [will]; therefore all of us in our deepest nature are one with each other, are undifferentiable from each other. Thus, in my innermost recesses I am not merely similar to other human beings -- it is merely on the surface that similarity appears: at the very bottom, they and I are literally one and the same thing. ... The man who thus acts compassionately is behaving in accordance with the metaphysical realities of the human situation. Morality is practical metaphysics."

"The Philosophy of Schopenhauer," p. 199. (What is that "one and the same thing" of which we are all fragments?)

In Schopenhauer's words:

"Only as phenomena is the individual different from the other things of the world; as noumenon he is the will that appears in everything. [To the good person,] others are not mere masks whose inner nature is different from his. On the contrary, he shows by his way of acting that he recognizes his own inner being, namely the will-to-live as thing-in-itself, in the phenomenon of another [person,] given to him as mere representation. Thus he finds himself again in that phenomenon. ..."

"The World as Will and Representation," Book, I, 282, 370.

"Now" it is possible to apply these ideas to the interpretation of a great work of art.

V. Da Vinci's Mysterious Lady.

In December of 1988, I was in Paris and made the obligatory visit to the Louvre, which was a great joy. There is a limit to what one can see in a day. Selections must be made among masterpieces. I made certain to spend some time before what is probably the most famous painting in Western history: Leonardo Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa." I will not consult biographies or works of art history at this point, because my purpose in this essay is much more personal. I wish to illustrate Schopenhauer's theory by attempting to understand and describe my experience of that painting in light of his aesthetics. I offer a phenomenological-hermeneutic account of my experience of this canvas, which was not under glass when I saw it.

Although Mona Lisa is not a very large canvas and it is (or was) surrounded by a number of other great masterpieces, including two other paintings by Leonardo -- one of them, as I recall, being the astonishing "Madonna of the Rocks" -- the encounter with that mysterious figure is unforgettable for all of those who have stood before her. No reproduction comes close to doing justice to the painting.

I wonder if people in Paris take it for granted that the painting is there and simply ignore its presence? I believe that if I lived in that gorgeous city, I would be in the Louvre every day, looking at that painting. It is beyond words to reproduce such an intimate and personal encounter with a work of genius. I can only try to suggest some of the aspects of the painting that I would urge others to consider: 1) the gender ambiguity at the heart of this masterpiece; 2) the theme of doubleness which characterizes the work; and 3) Da Vinci's blending of erotic and thanatic elements, "moods" of love and death in the emotional tone conveyed, somehow, by the textures and colors. These are all themes that interest me. The only rival to an encounter with Mona Lisa is seeing a good performance of "Hamlet." (See "Shakespeare's Black Prince.")

I am sure that some idiot will complain at this point that I am not spelling Da Vinci's name correctly, after deleting a letter from my text. Actually, "Da Vinci" is an Americanized version of "da Vinci" preferred by many writers, including Dan Brown, who is the author responsible for "The Da Vinci Code." At any rate, I am not alone in detecting these "issues" in Leonardo's work, viewers of the painting, including Walter Pater and Henry James, have had similar experiences. In the spirit of Schopenhauer, I should note that of all the paintings that I have seen, Mona Lisa is the one whose effect is closest to music. Mona Lisa is almost a complete Puccini or Verdi Opera.

As one approaches the figure, one has the uncanny impression of a kind of splitting, or multi-dimensional quality in the painting. There is a recognizable portrait of a young woman, more beautiful than we have come to expect from the reproductions that we all know. Yet there is also, hauntingly, another and more masculine presence in the canvas, standing behind and, as it were, blending into the figure of the smiling woman. This second, masculine figure whose presence is "felt," is both more formidable and frightening, also infinitely, nearly intolerably sad and superhumanly intelligent.

It is as though the painter were looking at you, the viewer of his work from beyond the grave, and judging you for presuming to judge his genius, hinting both at your mortality and at the immortality of his canvas. Da Vinci manages to give a sense of his own soul as being somehow grafted on to that painting, of his ghostly presence as his true signature. Oscar Wilde's "Portrait of Dorian Gray" is a pretty obvious reference, except it is this canvas that does not age. Better is an association of Mona Lisa with Sebastian Melmoth, the name taken by Wilde in his final years of exile that was borrowed from Maturin's book. This painting turns up everywhere in Western culture.

The painting is, only on one level, a portrait of a young woman -- smiling at one of Leonardo's witticisms perhaps -- but also of the painter, whose sadness is almost unbearable, as his fearsome scrutiny of you, the viewer, alarms and disconcerts. It is the viewer of the painting who is being seen, even inspected. It is you, the viewer, who is placed "in" the frame. What is unclear is where the boundaries of this frame are found. It is doubtful whether there is a boundary between work of art and world, between masterpiece and admirer. ("Lost in Jane Austen.")

Is it possible to say the same of any written text, including this one, where we now meet? Perhaps it is more possible to suggest such a blending of subjects when it comes to persons we love. Where does she end so that I begin? This portrait offers a formidable hermeneutic challenge. ("Metaphor is Mystery" and "What you will.")

Leonardo is questioning the subject/object division in this painting. He is making a philosophical point about time and reality as well as death and meaning. Mona Lisa is also -- I don't know how else to say this -- a painting of his mortality and yours through the suggestion of the age and death that awaits both its ostensible subject and you, as against the eternal quality in the mountains and landscapes beyond the sitter and (most importantly) the eternal quality of this painting itself. This painting is Da Vinci's "Hamlet." Admirers of the dreadful "Da Vinci Code" are directed to Dimitri Merejkowski's out-of-print masterpiece, "Leonardo."

Is the sitter turning towards or away from the viewer? Do you turn towards or away from your life? Or your death? Is this the portrait of a person who is primarily masculine or feminine? Is this the portrait of a man or woman? Or is the subject both male and female? Do men and women "see" a different painting when they look at this work? Is the persona captured in pigments and charcoal on canvas recognizable? Is the presence even human? Is this a painting, a mirror, or a window into the mind of the artist? Is this painting of Mona Lisa the first work in the history of cinema? Is this painting a portrait of you? Why are we immediately tempted to compare the Renaissance portrait to Rembrandt's painting of Christ?

There are no answers to these questions, there is only the experience of something almost beyond the human realm, numinous, life-altering, enigmatic. The only analogy available to me is to the literature of mysticism, but also to the accounts of great scientists -- such as Newton -- of identification with the mystery and beauty of nature, most of all, to the sense of vertigo accompanying intense, burning romantic passion as epiphany. ("God is Texting Me!")

One thinks also of the union of male and female in hermetic (from "Hermes") or alchemical mysteries. There is no such discipline as "symbology," but there are "semiotics" and "hermeneutics." Both will be needed to grasp this elusive masterpiece. This may be a good time for New Jersey persons to insert another "error" or otherwise deface this essay.

Divinity transcends the realm of opposites in spiritual unity. Hence, the figure on the cross is the true original for Leonardo's "Vitruvian Man" (usually thought to be a self-portrait of Leonardo), who depicts himself as Christ-figure -- God and man, beyond masculine and feminine, at the center of the cosmic wheel. This is not artistic hubris. It is just the opposite. Naturally, Leonardo saw himself as Christ, as everyman. It is what Jung would call the "Mandala" that serves as true background for Leonardo's most famous drawing, just as the tree under which Buddha sits and the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden become one in the cross. (See Cambell, Zimmer and "'The Fountain': A Movie Review.")

I looked at my watch and realized that I had not moved -- being unaware of myself, as if unconscious -- for almost forty minutes. I was required to move on at that point. I have never fully recovered from that aesthetic experience. These moments had nothing to do with my material life or practical interests. I did not make any money during that time. Yet those forty minutes remain among the most significant aesthetic moments of my life. My experience of that painting helps me to understand what Shopenhauer means by "transcendence" and liberation from the will, along with the ways in which we are altered by art through sharing works with others -- others who have also enjoyed similar experiences, over many years and centuries.

In standing before that painting I was participating in a kind of relationship not only with the painter and his subject, but also with all of those observers moved by this work over centuries and standing where I stood then, where someone must be standing as I type these words. My knowledge or "living" (vivencia) of that masterpiece was an entry into a spiritual community. It is comparable to the experience of contemplating and understanding the meaning of a crucifix. Even a crucifix that is bad art delivers a powerful emotional punch -- at least it does to me.

My experience of Leonardo's painting was, therefore, aesthetic and metaphysical. The lessons learned may be described as ethical and theological. Think of reading the U.S. Constitution. The struggle with the principles in that work involves us, with others, in a community of interpreters participating over centuries in the common project of realizing the aims of OUR American Revolution: freedom and equality, making us subjects in common before the power of the State, the rule of law and not of kings. The U.S. Constitution is to politics, what the Mona Lisa is to painting. What is it that the U.S. Constitution "constitutes"? Who are you as an American? What does it mean for you to be an American? ("Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")

For Schopenhauer, art allows us to develop our sense of compassion, leading to the only possible liberation from the ego and its sufferings in a directedness towards others. For this reason, art yields some of the most significant and prized lessons of life, together with the experience of community and pleasure in the freedom achieved through aesthetic transcendence. Incidentally, if you have not figured this out yet, please realize that -- apart from its political and jurisprudential significance -- the Constitution of the United States of America is a work of literary art.

Only two letters and one word in total deleted from and restored to this essay is excellent. I expected much worse.

VI. Conclusion.

Marxist critics have raised valid points concerning the aristocratic nature of this aesthetic theory. Not everyone will receive the education or opportunity to appreciate such works. This is a reminder of our social responsibility to make education available to more people, so that great art can be as widely appreciated as possible. It is certainly not an undermining of Schopenhauer's theory. Nor should we deprive everyone of a great experience merely because it cannot be enjoyed by all. As for changing society, if art changes individuals, then it will also change societies. I think that great art always transforms people. Part of what I bring with me -- as an ingredient in the cells of my flesh -- is my aesthetic, spiritual and intellectual life that I surrender to another only in loving that person. This is what is meant by conversation or dialectic as "marriage." Dialectic can mean many things.

There is also a link to be recognized between this theory of art and the philosophy of love, as an other-directed emotion, allowing for a transcendence of conditions that are experienced as violative or evil. It should be noted that some thinkers have seen art as just the opposite of Schopenhauer's theory -- in other words, as a kind of violent imposition of will leading, in the German tradition especially, to great horrors. (See the film "Harrison Bergeron" and George Steiner's "The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.")

I am still amazed to discover that -- as with intelligence -- beauty and those capable of creating beautiful things, are detested by a few horribly evil persons who desire to destroy works of beauty or original thought and those who create them. One way of destroying beauty and artists is by enslaving both. Garcia? Colin McGinn, "Ethics, Evil, and Fiction" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 74-81. ("Suppose I desire to cause you pain, so that I get pleasure when my desire is satisfied.")

What I like most about George Steiner's work is his recognition of powers for good and evil in language and ambiguity in all genius. Between the view of art as either a form of healing and transcendence, or an expression of Nietzschean "will to power," I am on the side of art's healing powers and capacity to endure. I believe that Schopenhauer is correct to see an association between aesthetic bliss and moral compassion or goodness, between aesthetic and moral beauty. The best authority to quote in support of this view, given the feminist criticisms against Schopenhauer, is Sapho: "What is beautiful is good and who is good will also soon be beautiful." ("Beauty and the Beast.")

Nihilists in Disneyworld.

"So the revolutionary philosophy turns out to be the philosophy of freedom -- not just the philosophy of those who seek freedom but the philosophy of the very free act itself, the philosophy of transcendence; that is, though Sartre does not here call it so, it turns out to be existentialism. And what is more, as the philosophy of freedom, it turns out, according to Sartre, to be the philosophy of man in general. It starts, indeed, in one class, that of the workers -- but a bourgeois doubtful of his own class values may come to accept it; and, besides, it seeks, despite the probable need of bloodshed, not so much to destroy the ruling class as to join workers and former rulers in a community of men [and women,] to make them equally free." -- Marjorie Grene.

I.

The notice that appears above (it may be blocked) surfaces whenever I post items at blogger and is one of many obstacles or harassments that I must overcome in my struggle to set down sentences at my computer. Please imagine what this experience is like for a person who feels compelled to express ideas in writing.

I expect and encounter a war -- one that is conducted, on a daily basis, with the full resources of government arrayed against me -- in order to say things that I believe are true as well as important, things that need to be said today. This horror should be impossible in America. Copyright law and First Amendment protection mean nothing. ("What is it like to be censored in America?" and "More Censorship and Cybercrime.")

Noise, distraction, various computer obstacles (most of them are illegal) are routine aspects of my daily writing experience. Perhaps this is a coincidence. Publish America? Lulu? "The Philosophy Cafe"? "Critique"? Is MSN "closed"? ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "What is it like to be tortured?" then "What is it like to be censored in America?")

There is an urgency to philosophical questions today as well as resonance to be found in my answers, I am told, since many others are tormented by similar experiences and issues.

Writing is a matter of survival for some of us. Attempts at silencing persons whose efforts at communication are struggles to overcome the effects of torture or great trauma are also attempts to murder a person's spirit, like being starved to death.

Being subjected to a colossal effort at emotional or spiritual destruction ("Mind Fuck") is comparable to the ordeals of Palestinians or Iraquis of all factions, or Israelis for that matter.

What I am describing is both a biographical and social phenomenon that is increasingly common -- reduction of human beings to the ontological status "objects" for governmental manipulation. Any form of slavery should also be impossible in America. Censorship is being raped, again, every day. (See "Colin McGinn's Naughty Book" and "Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")

We are losing the sense of what is meant by a person, as locus of rights and responsibilities, subject and not only object. Several aspects of my encounter with sadism and anti-intellectualism on-line are worthy of understanding: 1) I have been raped and stolen from, assaulted, slandered, most or many commercial and personal relationships in my life have been destroyed, while persons I love have been manipulated or injured in order to hurt me; 2) important philosophical, jurisprudential, political-literary, historical and other writings and original thinking are damaged (or destroyed) through what may be called a government "experiment." My writings may be suggestive or illuminating and helpful to others. Nonetheless, essays that are written by me are suppressed or censored, as is my use of images -- images which can be communicative and transcultural; 3) the persons responsible for these great and continuing crimes (and cover-ups) disapprove of my ethics and judge me. I disapprove of their ethics. However, I will not censor anybody's writings. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "Stuart Rabner and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey," then "What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")

I will not legitimate or excuse these crimes. I live in a society that has made a public commitment to the rule of law. America's organic documents guarantee freedom of expression -- especially political or philosophical expression -- to every person, even criminalizing attempts to suppress, censor, or deny civil rights to individuals in particular when such actions are in any way attributable to the mechanisms and forms of the state. It is clear that such state action exists in my continuing experience of censorship and violations of my privacy rights. Rights of access (belonging to readers of these essays) are also violated as a result of these defacements, obstructions, and harassments.

Individuals may be sued for conspiring to violate civil rights. When persons violating rights wield state power -- or are in a position to manipulate government resources -- public concern and malice in the CRIMINAL actions of censors and torturers are enhanced. No one cares. Nothing happens. The prolongation of these atrocities and cover-ups over so many years, alone, may establish the necessary governmental complicity in the horror and lie that our Constitution has become in New Jersey.

Censorship is now a public crime. The world is invited to witness this daily DEFECATION on the Constitution of the United States of America by public officials in the nation's most corrupt state. President Obama's statements concerning America's commitment to free speech for all people -- including the residents of Iran -- did not exclude the state of New Jersey even if we agree that "all politics is local." (In the absence of italics or bold script, I will capitalize words for emphasis.) Bernard-Henry Levy, ""The Stoning of Sakineh: A Looming Atrocity in Iran," in The New Republic, December 30, 2011, at p. 12. (You are witnessing the Internet equivalent of "stoning" in America.)

Mr. Rabner, these crimes are your responsibility, even as the guilt for them must be shared with your colleagues on New Jersey's soiled Supreme Court. These crimes will stain you, Mr. Rabner, the tribunal which you serve, and the legal system in the state where you live for decades to come. ("John McGill, Esq., the OAE, and New Jersey Corruption" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")

Evil will always be with us. There may be very little that we can do about human wickedness. Nevertheless, the widespread and proud ignorance among influential persons found in elite publications in America, trendy ideologies, psychobabble, and brain-dead politics are new horrors that are making the struggle against evil more difficult and less winnable for ordinary people.

We can and should do something about these cultural dangers that we face or we should simply accept that our democracy no longer exists as anything other than a set of "pious myths" (Leo Strauss) uttered for the benefit of the very young or uneducated workers. Nobody seems to believe anymore that we are or should be free persons. Nobody seems to care about the loss of personal freedom. (This is a good time for N.J. hackers to delete a letter from this essay or insert some other "error.")

Promises that will not be expressed in writing concerning what N.J. will (or may) do to compensate for this evil, after twenty years of silence, are meaningless responses to atrocity, Mr. Rabner. ("No More Cover-Ups and Lies, Chief Justice Rabner!")

New Jersey's tactics are a result of an ongoing effort to cover-up crimes by public officials. No doubt many torturers and censors are "ethics" officials. A tiny amount of my trouble is probably due to zealotry or political fanaticism on the part of gorillas (the two-legged variety), who mistakenly believe that this is how democracy and freedom are defended -- by denying both to radicals or "weirdos," or to anyone who disagrees with the political opinions of the gorillas (of both genders) sporting "wife-beater-t-shirts" while munching on cigars. Many of these gorillas are no doubt "Cubanoids" from Miami and/or Union City, New Jersey. A lot of human suffering results from inexcusable and astonishing levels of stupidity among Trenton's public officials. Humor helps in coping with the madness. ("Trenton's Nasty Lesbian Love-Fest!" and "Jennifer Velez is a 'Dyke Magnet!'")

The stupidity and ignorance, as I will argue later, is becoming a major national catastrophe. A steep decline in reading skills, decreased attention spans, decline in memory or retention capacity among distracted and hyper-entertained young people is now very well documented by researchers explaining the disappearance of newspapers as well as the inability to distinguish good from poor writing and argumentation in the general population. Sam Dillon, "Many Nations Passing U.S., In Education, Experts Say," in The New York Times, March 10, 2010, at p. A21.

The trend is expected to continue for years unless there is drastic and immediate action which we cannot afford as we are spending billions to kill people in the Far and Middle East -- in Iraq, Lybia, Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as elsewhere, like Yemen. ("Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba.")

American intellectuals are failing their fellow citizens and themselves. This failure is important because it is deeply limiting of our capacities to resist fascism or terrorism. I will do my best to overcome unofficial state censorship -- and mafia hit squads? -- in order to analyze this controversy with the hope that I can post my essay, as the F.B.I. arrests more lawyers, judges, and politicians in Hudson County, New Jersey. I hope to accomplish this goal before my computer is finally destroyed by cybercriminals. I will then make use of public computers. Perhaps this celebration of stupidity explains many of my troubles with New Jersey cyberimbeciles or A.O. Scott's failure to grasp a single serious theme in the film "Inception," a film Ms. Scott ostensibly reviewed for the Times. Is A.O. Scott also "Allison Gopnik"? ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")

It mystifies me that American journalists are uninterested in public censorship that is clearly content-based and that involves abuse of government power. For journalists to assist in efforts at censorship is truly frightening, that is, if you care about civil liberties. Maybe the shake-up at The New York Times will allow for an improvement in my situation and for fewer persons writing like "Manohla Dargis" to get a byline at that publication.

Internal investigation, eh? Good idea. Ms. Abramson, are you responsible for these problems at the the newspaper of record? ("'Ex Machina': A Movie Review.")

I will discuss America's descent into torture and surveillance. I suggest that these developments are entangled with new phenomena in international politics and dark currents in our intellectual life. I am sure that the long-term results of America's torture policy will be devastating to U.S. national interests, including the so-called "War on Terror."

We will suffer, as a nation, from these tragic and evil blunders. I believe that these torture policies date, at least, from the eighties, and have been used, secretly, against selected Americans (often persons, like me, who have committed no crimes) with damaging consequences for victims and their loved-ones. I am sure that men and women like Mumia Abu-Jamal, African-American revolutionaries, are victims of these tactics that constitute crimes against humanity. ("Justice For Mumia Abu-Jamal.")

According to many observers around the world, the United States of America is determined to commit suicide. I hope that this tendency towards self-destruction has been contained. Recent events are not encouraging this fragile hope. The continuing harassments aimed against me are proof of "moronization." The testimony of Assata Shakur concerning her experiences in New Jersey -- possibly at the hands of many of the same officials responsible for atrocities committed against me and others -- is instructive on these matters. Assata Shakur, "Prisoner in the United States," in "Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War Against Black Revolutionaries" (New York & Paris: Semiotexte & Columbia, 1993), pp. 205-220. (Again: "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "What is it like to be tortured?")

Persons are not "objects" nor slaves existing for purposes that are not their own decided upon by self-proclaimed "superiors" in government offices or at conventions of social scientists. (Compare and contrast "Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory" with "Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")

Development of these torture policies and their acceptance by an apathetic and intellectually comatose electorate is one result of serious "philosophical errors" not seen or called "philosophical errors," even though they are directly linked to debates at the highest level of intellectual exchange in America. The deliberate inaction and apathy of America's legal profession is a shameful abdication of legal ethics. ("An Open Letter to Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., Esq.")

We are discovering the large implications of the idea of entanglement (dialectics) in the humanities and sciences suggesting a comparable set of relationships in politics and law. Enslavement of any one person is the potential enslavement of all.

Is America's first African-American president seeking an "compromise" with slavery and torture, censorship and suppressions of speech on-line, as we express concerns for free speech in Iran? I hope not.

To the best of my knowledge, with rare exceptions, this discussion concerning humanistic and political implications of "quantum entanglements" is not taking place in American journals of opinion, law reviews, or politics. U.S. scholars -- who are well-aware of the issues -- have mostly shied away from public and international debates of these questions for career reasons or other "prudential" considerations. This is not only unwise, it is one abandonment of intellectuals' responsibilities to our society. This failure is unforgivable for philosophers.

Philosophers have an obligation to educate citizens regarding the sources and legacy of discussions of these questions in Western civilization. American philosophers must do more to educate the public by making use of new media. Even "pseudo-intellectuals" (like me) may have something to contribute to this discussion. It may be that the public censorship to which I am subjected today is another "elbow in the face" of Mr. Obama.

I have been dismissed as a "pseudo-intellectual" and "mentally retarded" by American "experts." Few of us are blessed with the intellectual gifts of Mr. Trump or Christopher Christie.

The thought that torture could and would become acceptable PUBLIC practice in America was so far beyond anyone's wildest dreams during the seventies and eighties that it would have been inconceivable to people then that the practice would be restored to America's legal arsenal in the twenty-first century.

We assumed not so long ago that we had moved beyond such barbarism as legally-snactioned torture in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Aside from political rhetoric, we all know what is meant by torture. Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib clearly fit the bill:

"I woke up naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. The room measured approximately [13 feet by 13 feet]. The room had three solid walls, with a fourth wall consisting of metal bars separating it from a larger room. I am not sure how long I remained in the bed. After some time, I think it was several days, but can't remember exactly, I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by [the] hands and feet for what I think was the next two or three weeks. During this time I developed blisters on the undersides of my legs due to the constant sitting. I was only allowed to get up from the chair to go to the toilet, which consisted of a bucket. Water for cleaning myself was provided in a plastic bottle." (Danner, p. 71.)

It is no response to what I am saying to comment on what happened on 9/11 or upon what any "alleged" offender may have done or did. This victim was not charged with a crime or convicted of any offense when these "crimes" were committed against him. Many detainees have been released because it is recognized that they have committed no offenses.

This argument is not about the actions of terrorists or accused terrorists. I am raising questions about Americans and what we should not do under any circumstances, like torture the innocent. The guilt for these tortures is OUR guilt, not one party's or president's guilt or responsibility, but the responsibility of the American people. The burning issue arising from the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo tortures is whether we have strayed from our Constitution. ("Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution" and "'The Reader': A Movie Review," then "American Doctors and Torture.")

"[The Red Cross reports that one detainee] was kept for four and a half months continuously handcuffed and seven months with the ankles continuously shakled while detained in Kabul in 2003/4. On two occasions, his shackles had to be cut off his ankles as the locking mechanism had ceased to function, allegedly due to rust." (Danner, p. 50.)

There is much worse:

"While being held in this position some of the detainees were allowed to defecate in a bucket. A guard would come to release their hands from the bar or hook in the ceiling so that they could sit on the bucket. None of them, however, were allowed to clean themselves afterwards. Others were made to wear a garment that resembled a diaper. ... On several occasions the diaper was not replaced so [detainees] had to urinate and defecate on [themselves] while shackled in the prolonged stress standing position. ... three other detainees specified that they had to defecate and urinate on themselves and remain standing in their own bodily fluids." (Ibid.)

Any society that does such things to persons is guilty of "crimes against humanity." I am sure that such crimes have occurred in the former Soviet Union, Iraq under Hussein, China, Cuba and most other places. However, if one nation regards itself as the moral example for the world and presumes to judge the human rights records of others while engaging in PUBLIC betrayals of its own core principles and professed values -- like public censorship and suppression of my writings that are being seen by the world -- then that nation is hardly in a position to evaluate or presume to instruct others with regard to ethics or legality. This contradiction between our rhetoric and practice is what the world calls "hypocrisy." ("Little Brown Men Are Only Objects For Us" and "John Rawls and Justice.")

By not counting the hits received at these blogs from readers all over the world, for example, you are suggesting that they -- world readers -- do not matter. They are not persons who "count" in America. I am not a person who "counts" in America. My rights do not matter despite the provisions of the U.S. Constitution for which persons (often with names like mine) are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I look forward to discussing "morals" and/or comparing my ethics with those of Stuart Rabner and persons of his level of inhuman disdain for "inferiors," like me, or for America's Islamic "detainees." For any Jew to become "Mengele" is evil beyond what I would have thought possible in America. For persons who dismiss ethics as "all relative" to judge one's character borders on the surreal. Mr. Menendez is not an "ethical" example for any decent person. ("Barack Obama and 'The New Yorker'" and "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" then "Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "Neurons Fire; Therefore, I Am.")

This hypocrisy is more true, as I say, when the contradiction is placed at the center stage of world opinion right next to American denials and calls for others to respect freedom of speech. Each day that the cover-up and protection of guilty torturers in New Jersey continues, for example, is a further denigration and diminution of the U.S. Constitution for all Americans and before the people of the world even as American service people continue to die for our freedoms. An editorial in The New York Times (for once) expresses anger and revulsion:

"After the C.I.A. inspector general's report on prisoner interrogation was released last week, former Vice President Dick Cheney settled into his usual seat on Fox News to express his outrage -- not at the illegal and immoral behavior laid out in the report, of course, but at the idea that anyone would object to torturing prisoners. He was especially vexed that the Obama administration was beginning an investigation."

"Dick Cheney's Version," (Editorial) The New York Times, September 3, 2009, at p. A30. Compare Philippe Sands, "Torture -- The Complicit General," in The New York Review of Books, September 24, 2009, at p. 20 with David Cole, "The Case Against the Torture Memo Lawyers," in The New York Review of Books, October 8, 2009, at p. 14. (Bush torture lawyers have been exonerated and will not face ethics charges or criminal accusations of any kind. Are the torture lawyers examples of America's commitment to legal ethics, Chief Justice Roberts?)

We also know -- even if we pretend not to know -- that these tortures have been a secret part of America's reality, not only in prisons, for a long time. A sub rosa reality of experimentation with technologies of thought control has brought us to America's first concentration camps. An entire generation of legal scholars and judges will be remembered for this "achievement" (Ms. Portiz?) and, even more, for the apathy that has greeted our embrace of cruelty. This is one aspect of legal ethics that is rarely discussed. ("Is America's Legal Ethics a Lie?" and "American Legal Ethics in 2009" then "America's Unethical Medical Torturers" and "American Psychologists' and Psychology's Acceptance of Torture.")

This atrocity of torture is the true legacy of the New Jersey Supreme Court for my generation. Sadly and painfully, this legacy is made possible (partly) by Jewish legal scholars and judges only one generation removed from the Holocaust. It is also one "achievement" of the fifties generation of American legal scholars and judges for the nation. ("America's Unethical Medical Torturers" then "The Experiments in Guatemala" and "America's Unwilling Experimental Animals.")

The same generation of lawyers and judges raised in the aftermath of World War II, under the shadow of the bomb and within the culture of paranoia spawned by the Cold War, has now created a culture of secrecy and surveillance to accompany the tortures of detainees. We are all under suspicion. Philippe Sands, "Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values" (New York: MacMIllan, 2009) and Bob Ingle & Sandy McLure, "The Soprano State: New Jersey's Culture of Corruption" (New York: St. Martin's, 2008).

I review this essay on a day when my security system has been destroyed, after years of daily "error" insertions in my writings, phantom calls to my home, obstructions and suppressions of my writings and various threats against me, even as my computer's hard drive is slowly destroyed by hackers.

Control is a very popular concept with insanely arrogant social scientists who see you and me as not very different from laboratory animals and society as not very different from a laboratory. The thought that experimentation with social forms and individual identity must originate in and for the person or community is inconceivable to these so-called "social scientists" who arrogate to themselves the right to alter the lives of others based on what they determine to be for the good of those others. Dr. Mengele has spawned a generation of American admirers, many torturers are Cuban-Americans protesting against Fidel Castro, others are "Neo-conservative" Jews, still others are Italian-Americans, very few are African-Americans. ("An Open Letter to My Torturers in New Jersey, Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli" and "Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")

The victim of the tortures described above was subjected to much worse than this quotation indicates for months and years by persons who see themselves as "decent" citizens. Some of the victims of torture have lost their lives to these "techniques." How is it possible for some of those torturers to hold medical degrees, allegedly, while managing to use their training to inflict pain on victims, as does "Terry Tuchin" ("Arthur Goldberg") from Ridgewood, New Jersey? Do you have a medical degree, Terry? Or did you lie about your professional status and C.I.A. affiliation? Mr. Tuchin claimed to be a Jew. If it is true that Terry is a Jew, then it is even more sad what he has become. Tactics of psychological torture are intended for and will be used, soon, AGAINST Jews, both in the Middle East and, I greatly fear, also within the United States of America. (Again: "An Open Letter to My Torturers in New Jersey, Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli.")

This may be the tenth time that I have reviewed this essay, usually finding a single letter removed from a word overnight. This policy of "induced frustration" is intended to cause collapse, abandonment of communication efforts that are, literally, a life-or-death matter for me. Daily violation of copyright and Constitutional laws takes place, publicly, to the indifference of legal authorities who are well aware of what is taking place and of all that has been detailed in these posts over many years.

As I experience these crimes and harms my government's officials tell the world that the U.S. is concerned about the protection of dissidents' rights and freedom of speech. ("Psychological Torture in the American Legal System" and "The Torture of Persons," also "Is This America?" and "How Censorship Works in America.")

How likely is it that political leaders and populations in other countries believe these official U.S. statements? Not very likely, surely.

It is fortunate for the U.S. that the Obama administration has recognized this problem and is attempting to repair the grievous harm done to America's prestige, respect, and honor all over the world through the Stalinesque policies of the Bush/Cheney years of "concentration camp" America.

I recognize the painful aspects of these daily correction efforts. Nevertheless, I will continue to revise and correct this essay -- after inserted "errors" are restored to the text -- because what is at stake is the validity of America's Constitutional commitment regardless of what you think of me or my opinions. The silence of America's courts and press is a shameful abdication of the responsibilities of both institutions. Prosecutors and police are far worse. ("Morality Tale.")

When these tortures are used against victims who turn out not to have committted any crimes -- as they have been -- it becomes clear that the real purpose of America's torturers is to control you. You, the ordinary and potentially rebellious citizen, are and will remain the ultimate intended target of all torturers, especially if you are a minority male or any woman in America. Subtle psychological ("touchless") tortures have been perfected by persons like Tuchin, using these sadistic methods against victims secretly designated for destruction by politicians in American jurisdictions. ("The Torture of Persons" and "Behaviorism is Evil" then "Larry Peterson Cleared by DNA.")

I believe that many or most victims will turn out to be political radicals, as I say, especially African-American revolutionaries. Mumia Abu-Jamal, "Interview From Death Row," in "Still Black, Still Strong," pp. 117-201. Mumia Abu-Jamal, "Live From Death Row" (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002), pp. 73-115 ("Crime and Punishment").

President Obama claims the power to order "targeted killings of American citizens" without due process of law or notice. Evan Perez, "White House Defends Targeted Killing Program," in The Wall Street Journal, September 25, 2010, at p. A5. If you can help to oppose racial injustice, I urge you to contact the Partisan Defense Committee. (212) 406- 4252. http://www.partisandefense.org/

Many people in the "inhuman" social sciences are deploying a philosophical machinery akin to a Ford Model-T in an age of Ferraris and Korvettes. To debate these persons is to encounter good minds living in a mental climate of colliding ideas and archaic contradictory assumptions who are empowered to label us as "unethical" or "irrational," then to act upon our lives, illegally and with disastrous consequences, based on absurd or idiotic misreadings of our intellectual history, only to "instruct" us afterwards concerning the ethics of our actions. Geoff Dwyer & Richard McGregor, "Obama Vows to Press On With Plan to Shut Down Guantanamo," in Financial Times, May 1, 2013, at p. 3.

These are the social scientists or lawyers who presume to define what it means to be an American, or a good person, "intelligent" or educated in the twenty-first century. They bear much of the responsibility for America's sharp decline over several decades. The parallels during the Bush/Cheney years in terms of monitoring and security to the paranoia of the McCarthy era are obvious to me. Little has changed under Mr. Obama.

The question to ask about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, penitentiary policy, or our methods of increasingly popular "mass rational persuasion" (i.e., social coercion) is whether this manipulation as "therapeutic pain-infliction" comports with our societies' structural or foundational values. If these "extra-judicial" techniques do not comport with our values, we must wonder whether abandonment of those values will bring unwelcome consequences to society that are far worse than the things that we rightly fear and wish to protect against. Compare Neil A. Lewis, "In Senate Judiciary Wars, G.O.P. Struggles With Role," The New York Times, April 1, 2009, at p. A20 with Scott Shane, "Debating Release of Interrogation Memos," The New York Times, April 1, 2009, at p. A22. (Republicans and retrograde Democrats, like Bob Menendez, seek to undermine or "hold up" Mr. Obama's appointments to crucial White House positions. "Boss Bob Holds a Grudge!")

The litany of horrors and besmirchment of the American legal profession and federal judiciary in this appalling evil continues to astonish the world: Scott Shane, "Lawsuits Force Disclosures by the C.I.A.," The New York Times, June 10, 2009, at p. A12.

Lies and cover-ups of outrageous criminality by intelligence agencies are far worse than what was imagined. Revelations of horrors continue to be published on a daily basis. Thanks to some brave judicial decisions, against the tide of complicity and cowardice from judges, we are beginning to learn the terrible truth. ("C.I.A. Lies and Torture.")

Given evidence of acceptance of hideous tortures, gagging and silencing of artists and intellectuals in violation of America's Constitution (I had to fight off computer harassment, again, to reach my blog today), our pronouncements concerning freedom of speech and concern for human rights seem hypocritical or absurd to other countries.

This is my answer to the question I posed earlier to readers: We have become an unlivable contradiction as opposed to the happy paradox that we always were and should be. Our policies have gone dangerously out of balance in favor of an illusory security at the expense of priceless liberties. The docility of America's media -- the partnership between journalists and politicians -- poses a greater danger to our "free press" than any external terrorist threat. There must be someone at the "Times" who is not being paid by the C.I.A.

Do you want to chat about ethics, Debbie? Stuart? Anne Milgram? Compare "The Dysfunctional Human Rights Council," (Editorial) The New York Times, April 11, 2009, at p. A16 (We are the good guys who must stand up to "chronic abusers" who are, no doubt, "in denial"?) with "The Next Guantanamo," (Editorial) The New York Times, April 13, 2009, at p. A20. (Bush era abuses and grabs for power are suddenly attractive to some members of a new administration torn between morality and ambition or power-hunger.)

The reason you will not see images in these blogs or why I cannot reach my MSN group to post new images is that someone with political power in New Jersey government is afraid of those images, worried about the truth captured in photographs of American murders of children and mafia arrests in New Jersey as contrasted with official propaganda. This censorship would have been impossible in America not so long ago. Despite thousands of readers visiting these blogs, the number of hits that appears in my profile has not changed for weeks as I type these words. I cannot accept that this is a coincidence or an accident of some kind. It is estimated that less than one-third of the readers of these essays are counted. The true number of my readers may be in six figures.

The revolting spectacle of nearly daily arrests of lawyers and public officials in New Jersey stealing the people's money and molesting children -- often the same people who comment on my "ethics" after approving of tortures that I have endured -- makes it abundantly clear that the "Garden State" is America's open cesspool of criminality and ample proof of U.S. decline. Apathy greets revelations of sickening behavior by persons affiliated with New Jersey's power structure and of murders committed by U.S. soldiers at Guantanamo. ("Is Senator Bob 'For' Human Rights?" and "New Jersey's Child Sex Industry" and "Is Menendez For Sale?")

When the politicaly powerful in American society are frightened by one man writing, peacefully, of injustice and cruelty, something priceless about America's political system has been lost. If you are any kind of writer or artist in America, my experiences should frighten you.

I have lost count of the number of times when this essay has been vandalized, then repaired and reposted by me. Mr. Obama, history will not forgive the failure to make the photographs of America's tortures public (1,000 photos are still classified) nor any accomodation by your administration with slavery and torture. We must not become our enemies.

"We must not abandon our core values because of expediency." These were your words, Mr. Obama.

Allan Bloom's demonized "Closing of the American Mind" was interesting to read not because of its alleged "elitism," but because of the warning issued in that book concerning the pervasiveness in American culture of dangerous half-understood (mostly) German ideas pertaining to values, knowledge, and truth. I will reexamine that warning -- not the entirety of Bloom's book -- attempting to address the more timely concerns of the work in today's intellectual climate by making use of the philosophy of Marjorie Grene whose recent death I mourn.

About 80% of Bloom's book does not interest me. Furthermore, I agree that much of Bloom's book is simply wrong. However, Bloom's philosophical diagnosis is correct about some important matters that call for America's attention -- attention that is more necessary today than when the book appeared. Professor Grene offers one important set of trivialized and ignored answers to Bloom's "problematic" of the American Mind derived from German and now global philosophy. Ideas matter so much in this debate that they are essential to the continuing torture controversy. ("How can we be Moderns again?")

Unexamined ideas are driving many of the economic and cultural developments in our world, including our recent disdain for basic human ECONOMIC rights. Grene answers Bloom's theoretical challenge for future generations of students -- provided that those future students read and understand her answers as expressive of the same profound philosophical ideas that have created our intellectual problems and confused cultural identities.

Philosophy is not a luxury. Philosophy is inescapable if you wish to survive the interesting times in which "new" generations of Americans will live their lives. Philosophy is for you. ("Why philosophy is for everybody.")

It astonishes me that children can be told by teachers that "philosophy does not matter" or that "science is so much better than philosophy that students should not bother with philosophy at all." Such a message to young people is dangerous stupidity. You will damage young people by saying such things to them. ("Whatever!")

II.

What does philosophy have to do with questions of torture and public policy?

Well, the background assumptions and understandings of life that are "pre-reflective" permit some actions and not others. For the vast majority of persons who are not absolutely evil or saintly, only "normally" struggling to lead moral lives, intellectual boundaries in life are often predetermined by philosophers they have never read. Most of these "pre-reflective" understandings are derived from philosophical masterpieces that are watered down and translated into the common discourse of a culture happily ignoring the origins of ideas, and thus failing to appreciate the baggage that comes with those ideas. Please see Martha C. Nussbaum, "Public Philosophy and International Feminism," in C.P. Ragland & Sarah Heidt, eds., "What is Philosophy?" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 121-153 and Calvin O. Shrag, "Radical Reflection and the Origin of the Human Sciences" (Indiana: Purdue U. Press, 1980), pp. 77-94.

The intricate structure of ideas which constitutes the picture of mental reality -- the intellectual world in which we must live at any moment -- yields one sense of our responsibilities to others which is distinct from the view of those responsibilities found in other societies or in our own society when a different world-view prevailed. In today's America, we live in the "Colbert Report" age of public discourse as a kindergarden party. We have become nihilists in Disneyworld. Danny Yadron, "Comedian, Laborer ... Expert Witness?," in The Wall Street Journal, September 25, 2010, at p. A4. (Stephen Colbert "testifies" before Congress.)

The following was an actual question posed to an American presidential candidate on network television: "Can you summarize America's foreign policy and your proposals in 3 minutes?" The candidate attempted to comply with this request. The result was about what you would expect. Given our recent disdain for the higher education of poor or minority young people these dangerous tendencies are likely to become worse. The result will be more crazed gun wielding semi-illiterates walking into Synagogues and firing indiscriminately at worshippers. Jonathan Glater, "College in Need Closes a Door to Needy Students," The New York Times, June 10, 2009, at p. A1 and David Stout, "Security Guard Is Killed in Shooting at Holocaust Museum in Washington," The New York Times, June 11, 2009, at p. A16. (Jewish physicians and lawyers assisting in the torture of persons in this climate of hatred defies rational comprehension because it will make such incidents MORE likely in the future.)

It must be easier to be a good person in a democracy than in Nazi Germany. Periodic episodes of insanity erupt, regularly, usually as a result of ruptures in the public morality of a good society, even in the best democracies. Examples include medieval tortures of Jews; witch hunts; inquisitions; slavery; the Holocaust. The disruptions in America's culture and public as well as private morality since the sixties, at least, have produced alterations in the ways Americans come to experience themselves, the world, knowledge, truth, and morality ("it's all relative!"). 9/11 made things worse. These changes in perception and experience have drastic consequences in terms of what is intellectually possible for young Americans reared in this mental climate (the "Whatever" generation) to do at the orders of superiors. Stanley Milgram, "Obedience to Authority" (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), pp. 123-153 and Bruno Bettelheim, "The Informed Heart" (New York: Avon, 1960), pp. 108-260.

How else does one even begin to comprehend the images from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo than with a consideration of all that has been lost in terms of ethical training and judgment for a generation cut loose from its intellectual and moral foundations, religious and secular? ("Whatever!" and "Why Jane can't read.")

We are witnesses to this desensitizing of young people. Americans have lost much of their appreciation of good and evil in public life along with any sense of objective intellectual standards and ideals. This was one price of abandoning the suffocating conventions of the Reagan era. With the loss of values and standards, however, events such as 9/11 have left us bereft of a vocabulary of outrage to which both the actions of others and our own deeds may be subjected.

George W. Bush's talk of "evil" made educated Americans uncomfortable -- even after 9/11! -- because it is taken for granted that "morality is subjective." What that means (if it means anything) to most people is anybody's guess. Everything depends on whose ox is being screwed over, ethically speaking. (Again: "The Wanderer and His Shadow" then "Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")

I am the last person to suggest an exceptional moral quality in America during the Reagan years. However, there was at least a concern during the eighties on the part of Democrats and Republicans to appear successful and moral by public standards of "normality and ethics." What is most shocking about the images of torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo -- if "Critique" is still available, I urge readers to see the photos I have posted there -- is the absence of shame or guilt in the faces of young people displaying perfect smiles and flawless skin-tones along with a complete disconnection from the moral reality in which they participate and find themselves "placed" by government.

It cannot be a coincidence that one does not see many African-American faces among prison guards enslaving and torturing detainees at Guantanamo. Also visible in those young faces -- even among some strikingly beautiful young women -- is a spiritual poverty accompanying sparkling white teeth and freshly shampooed hair arranged in the latest styles. Please see Salman Rushdie's "Fury."

Torture and cruelty without guilt (or judicial concern) defines an important part of Bush/Cheney's and/or the Tea Party's American identity. Evil is banal. Darth Vader, Lucifer, Dracula are all "cute." For millions of otherwise apparently sane persons the Holocaust is a "myth." Torture by your government is "boring." Who cares? "Somebody's 'texting' me!" The inner life has dried up for many young people unaware of how shallow the culture has become. This is true even among students at some of our best universities. ("Whatever happened to the liberal arts?" and "What you will.")

Where are the hundreds of thousands of human rights marchers protesting before the White House, as they did in the sixties, in response to revelations of U.S. war crimes and drone killings? Politics and war are not "reality shows." Or are they? In the era of media sound bites and scripted news programs, public events may no longer be "real" -- and this may help to explain the apathy among young people. You cannot feel responsible for events that seem absurd or unreal. Abu Ghraib looks like a bad "reality" t.v. show. As Donald Trump proclaims: "Whatever." ("America's Nursery School Campus.")

There is no other way that blithe and smiling photos of torturers makes sense. "Normally," people committing crimes prefer not to be photographed in the act of violating the law. Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib guards appear to have no idea that there is something reprehensible about committing "crimes against humanity." Perhaps the victims can be called, "unethical"? Terrorists? ("Little Brown Men Are Only Objects For Us" and "John Rawls and Justice.")

Rationalizations of atrocity by legal experts knowingly crafting legal sophistries to excuse the inexcusable speaks volumes concerning the laughable contradiction that is today's American legal ethics. The judgments of such persons concerning my "inferior" intellect and character do not trouble me. ("Edward M. De Sear, Esq. and New Jersey's Filth.")

Ms. Milgram, are you an ethical attorney? Do you claim not to know of these crimes against me? Mr. Chiesa? Mr. Christie? Mr. Rabner? Ms. Guardano? ("American Psychologists' and Psychology's Acceptance of Torture.")

Interviews with persons responding to disclosures of U.S. complicity in torture, Wall Street greed, Bernie Madoff's financial crimes, every day criminality are framed in terms of legalities, sophistries, or talk of subjective "values." ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")

Young people express outrage concerning "sexist speech" and "intolerance" (meaning any expression of moral judgments), while failing to recognize that these "relativist" opinions are also judgments of an absolutist character, even as they engage in censorship or cybercrime for a small fee.

Relativist conclusions are either judgments or they are meaningless. Murder of 500,000 children by our nation's government is just politics. No big deal. The statistics are supplied by Tariq Ali and the International Socialist Review. The numbers are probably worse today than ever before. Hence, the antiamerican protests in Iraq and Pakistan this week.

Our drone attacks in Pakistan will bring unpleasant consequences to us for many years ahead in the form of more car bombs and low-tech disruptions of our Internet economy. One hundred suitcase bombs going off in Manhattan, at different locations and at the same time, would be enough to shut down this city, think of what the Internet equivalent would do to the economy. (These issues were discussed extensively on public television.)

Compare "Driving While Black [DWB] in New Jersey" and "America's Holocaust" with Siobhan Gorman, "Cyber Attacks Test Pentagon Allies and Foes," in The Wall Street Journal, September 25, 2010, at p. A5.

During some weeks I average more than twice the number of intrusion attempts against my computers than the Pentagon receives on a daily basis. In fact, my computers were eventually destroyed by "hackers" with New Jersey government addresses.

The key statistic in the foregoing paragraphs has been altered several times by New Jersey's protected hackers. The correct number is five hundred thousand children killed by U.S. and Taliban warfare in Afghanistan and the Iraq wars. Over a million persons have died in these conflicts. You are paying for these deaths to the extent of $1.2 BILLION per month. Many of these deaths result from U.S. weapons or bombs. American "robot bombs" are killing civilians in Pakistan and elsewhere. Pakistan is an ally of the U.S. and that nation's government is in trouble with an Islamic population that is highly sympathetic to Ossama bin Laden's views. Pakistan is a nuclear power. All of this should make you nervous. Danny Hakim & Nicholas Confessore, "Feeling Slighted, Rich Patron Led Albany Revolt," The New York Times, June 10, 2009, at p. A1.

Suppose a drone bomb strikes Manhattan. Several hundred persons are killed because one of the victims is "deemed" a terrorist by the nation firing the weapon. The leader of this small nation explains to the world that other Americans killed in this operation are only "collateral damage." Suppose, furthermore, that this incident is repeated every day over a period of years.

Would Americans approve of this drone policy by a foreign government? Would it help if that government offered us "foreign aid"? Incidentally, we may need that foreign aid soon.

The primary source of moral concern in the media today is a rejection of gay marriage rights by a candidate for the title of "Miss America." Evidently, one of the judges of the contest was "offended" and/or "conflicted" over these remarks. I am sickened by this nonsense and hypocrisy when the very idea of a "Miss America" pageant should be much more repulsive to feminists than any one young person's right to say something stupid.

You want something to be angry about as a feminist? Here you go: "The [Supreme Court] will hear argument in a [law] suit brought on behalf of a 13-year-old girl who was strip-searched based on a fellow student's false report that she had possessed ibuprofen pain-relief pills." See "Unreasonable Search," (Editorial) in The New York Times, April 20, 2009, at p. A26. (Did this young girl "lawyer up" -- as politicians say -- when citizens make use of their Constitutional rights by retaining legal counsel? I hope so.)

I wonder how Tiger Woods is doing? The permutations of Mr. Woods' marriage is what I worry about in terms of world events. It is a symptom of our bunker mentality (post-9/11) that this absurd and horrifying event (the strip searching of a young girl in school) is greeted with dull boredom by most of the media. This CHILD was sexually assaulted by school officials -- persons responsible for her safety who are legally required to act in locus parentis (not the OAE?) -- because another student, who may have envied the victim's lunch box, accused her (falsely) of having a glorified aspirin in her bag. Advil? This sort of vigilance of middle school students is said to make the nation more secure from Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. This is the level of paranoia and irrationality that we have reached as a nation. This is not a Supreme Court case. This is a matter for the police in the local municipality who should arrest the MORONS who touched this child demanding that she expose her "breasts" and "lower her undergarmnents." ("Albert Florence and New Jersey's Racism" and "Driving While Black in New Jersey.")

Cultural acceptance of late nineteenth century German theories concerning facts and values, subjective versus objective brings the detritus of nihilism with it. There is no moral truth. There are merely preferences of an "emotional" kind (a dirty word for would-be scientists is "emotional") that are not subject to rational evaluation. These skeptical ideas leave us without "emotional" or philosophical-intellectual resources to resist totalitarianism when the terrorist turns on us and says: "Objections to torture and the murder of innocents are only impositions of American 'values' on others. Isn't it all relative? Aren't you merely ventilating your emotional hostilities when you object to the murder of innocents?" ("America's Love of Violence.")

The currently dominant relativist view of the world is directly traced to a set of mostly German ideas associated less with Modernity (17th century philosophical revolution) than modernism (late 19th century literary movement) which arrived in America early in the twentieth century. Most media adherents of currently fashionable perspectives on life have never heard of these movements. Contemporary "pundits" probably will never read major theorists of any kind. The worst shock to anyone encountering America's lawyers and judges on a regular basis is the low-level of scholarship and learning in the profession with many exceptions granted. ("More Cybercrime and Censorship.")

For Allan Bloom many young American minds have been shaped ("closed") by these imported philosophical ideas absorbed from the culture. (Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Carnap, etc.) The process of "opening" the mind involves being clear concerning: 1) the origins of these worldviews; 2) problems with those ideas; then 3) alternatives to them. Mr. Bloom's dread of "rock-n-roll" and the "dark sounds" from Africa are somewhat puzzling as well as worrisome and false culprits to identify. ("A Philosophical Investigation of Ludwig Wittgenstein.")

For a society born out of the Enlightenment faith in progress, truth revealed by the light of reason, perfectibility of man and heroic optimism, dark Germanic assertions of hopelessness before the inevitability of decline and loss, disillusion and death seem very strange -- until they are transformed into America's daytime television fare. Everything is flattened and banalized on the small screen, including nihilism. This is not a Republican or Democrat issue. Bloom was a liberal Democrat, "for" civil rights and not a dreaded Republican, also he was a gay man.

Only in America does Wedekind's "Lulu" become "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

I am well aware of the angry criticisms of Bloom's book -- many of which I share and endorse -- including Martha Nussbaum's long and devastating article in The New York Review of Books. I am "for" something called, "feministing." Bloom's diagnosis merits detailed consideration, however, now more than ever. It is Bloom's proposed solutions that are mostly inadequate, in my opinion, and in the evaluation of Richard Rorty and so many others.

I am against any non-merit-based elitism because it must become something other than elitism.

I make use of Professor Grene's important philosophical work and positions -- which are so similar to mine -- articulated by a world-thinker whose gifts and accomplishments are certainly far greater than Allan Bloom's (or my) achievements and yet whose academic life unfolded at the margins or periphery of the intellectual scene. Luckily, unlike me, Grene was not violated and censored. Grene's books are not (yet) suppressed, defaced, or vandalized in America. People who will be introduced to this thinker (by me) will, nevertheless, presume to instruct me concerning her ideas in about a week or two. (Once more: "What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "What is it like to be censored in America?")

Grene corrects Bloom's mistakes. More importantly, Grene's LIFE is a correction of Bloom's worldview and offers hope in terms of the genuine ills that Bloom identifies. Professor Grene's philosophical achievements, until recently, were ignored by American philosophers. Allan Bloom was not ignored. I am sure that this difference in reputations is not insignificant to my argument. ("Censorship and Cruelty in New Jersey" and "What is it like to be tortured?")

Bloom was on to something in detecting impoverishment of spirit in a wealthy generation of students who, genuinely, cannot tell the difference between a Mozart Opera and the "tasty-but-less-filling" stuff on Broadway. ("Wicked?") "It's just whatever you like, right?" I expect that these ideas will be plagiarized by journalists who are not censored or suppressed, as I am, every day. Remember, you discovered these ideas here first. ("'Ex Machina': A Movie Review.")

Truly weird to me is offense at the very notion that there is a distinction between higher and lower, greater and lesser, or great and not-so-great aesthetic works. Excellence and ideals, Romanticism and hopefulness about the future infuriate some pundits who cannot accept that it is hardly undisputed that all "art is a matter of preference" or that "life is shit." ("Is humanism still possible?" and "How censorship works in America.")

You cannot argue that "Wicked" is better than, or preferable to, Mozart's "Don Giovanni" if you believe that there is no distinction between lesser and greater works of art. If you reject all objective or "public" aesthetic values then everything is a matter of preference: "I Love Lucy" is not a better dramatic performance or work than, say, "King Lear."

If you argue that one artistic work is "better" than another then you are granting my point about the objectivity of criteria of merit. Why bother to argue? Alternatively, you can admit that some works are better than others, but that you prefer the crappier stuff. We all have guilty pleasures, aesthetically speaking. Few people want to tell the world that they have lousy taste in art, outside of New Jersey. ("Manohla Dargis Strikes Again!")

"The psychological obtuseness of our students is appalling, because they have only pop psychology to tell them what people are like" -- worse, they learn about life from Homer Simpson or "The Family Guy"! -- "and [such ephemera defines] the range of [human] motives. As the awareness we owed almost exclusively to literary genius falters, people become more alike, for want of knowing they can be otherwise. What poor substitutes for real diversity are the wild rainbows of dyed hair and other external differences that tell the observer nothing about what is inside." (Bloom, "The Closing of the American Mind," p. 64.)

Too often there is nothing inside the mind (George W. Bush?), except for more trivia and shallow substitutes for real art and thought. Less important than form or style, in my estimation, is thematic ambition, concern with meaning, truth, freedom or love. How can such concerns exist if we deny that these concepts have any "real" meaning or importance in human life? They're all "subjective." They're all "relative."

This emotional wasteland or "hunger game" is a situation that is pleasing to powerful forces in society that benefit from an ignorant population where everybody has at least one meaningless degree from a so-called "elite" school.

I realize that part of the motivation for inserting "errors" in my writings is inarticulateness and ignorance. People who cannot argue against my views wish to do something to oppose my views (often because they are not understood), computer crime seems like the best option. "Gloria Anzaldua"? ("Whatever" and "America's Nursery School Campus.")

It is crucial to see that these psychological-social developments are rooted in philosophical controversies and transformations of the last century. This is true even for those who have no interest in philosophy and will not read many books in their lives. This will remain true no matter how often you delete a letter or word from this essay.

Please understand that this is not a criticism of today's students. I am providing a criticism of MY generation's intellectual failures made possible by an earlier generation of political and judicial scholars as well as officials. It is the failures of my generation of American intellectuals and professionals that has created a situation of intellectual deprivation with material abundance for young people today. This is not an importantly autobiographical point; it is a social observation for today's students bearing "dragon tattoos":

" ... Values are not discovered by reason and it is fruitless to seek them, to find the truth or the good life. The quest begun by Odysseus and continued over three millennia has come to an end with the observation that there is nothing to seek. This alleged fact was announced by Nietzsche just over a century ago when he said, 'God is dead.' Good and evil now for the first time appeared as values, of which there have been a thousand and one, none rationally or objectively preferable to any other. The salutary illusion about the existence of good and evil has been definitively dispelled. For Nietzsche this was an unparalled catastrophe; it meant the decomposition of culture and the loss of human aspiration. The Socratic 'examined' life was no longer possible or desirable. ... In short, Nietzsche with the utmost gravity told modern man that he was free-falling in the abyss of nihilism. Perhaps after having lived through this terrible experience, drunk it to the dregs, people might hope for a fresh era of creation, the emergence of new gods." (Bloom, "The Closing of the American Mind," p. 143.)

The only way to survive great trauma caused by the experience of torture and loss is to discover an indestructible center of value and truth within the self. This is as true for persons as it is for civilizations.

When the terrorist or torturer turns on you and demands to know what you believe -- really believe, enough to endure agony or to die for that belief -- the word "whatever" will not be enough. When you are asked what is the core set of American values for which you will make the ultimate sacrifice, the answer will not be "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" "The Simpsons"? "Dance Moms From Miami"? ("Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution" and "Civilization and Terrorism.")

President Obama is correct to insist that this nation will not abandon its core principles for expediency. Was President Obama sincere in making this statement? Or has Mr. Obama abandoned this principle because of expediency?

Our fundamental values -- especially concern for the dignity of every human being -- will not allow us to torture, kill, or enslave people without trials or in secret. We will not do such things even to those who would enslave or murder others, and this is true no matter what persons are proved to have done. We will see to it that terrorists are punished, after they receive due process of law and not before they are heard, and only if they are convicted of the offenses with which they are charged. Most of them will be convicted.

I am aware that the foregoing paragraph produces laughter today. It seems almost pointless to note that another error was inserted in the foregoing paragraph since my previous review of this essay. Hundreds of intrusions into my computer and continuing alterations of this text must be expected. Censorship and harassments attributed to persons claiming to speak on behalf of disenfranchised women are especially loathsome and unforgivable. Do you speak to me of "ethics," Mr. Rabner? ("Have you no shame, Mr. Rabner?" and "What did you know, Mr. Rabner, and when did you know it?")

I appreciate the merits in the works of Jessica Valenti and probably agree with many of Ms. Valenti's opinions. The epistemological incoherence and lack of theoretical sophistication in some feminist writings, aside from Ms. Valenti, truly defy description. American feminists must develop organic intellectuals among young women and men. Altering writings that you do not understand is not striking a blow for the cause of women's rights, but engaging in censorship that will be applied to your writings soon. ("What is it like to be censored in America?" and "Barack Obama and 'The New Yorker.'")

A plague of nothingness, belief in non-belief, afflicts our society at the moment. Maybe that explains censorship committed by writers, like "Manohla Dargis." There is a lack of connection to our organic documents or to the religiously-based dignity of persons enshrined in those documents -- documents which forbid censorship, state cruelty rationalized by rules and procedures, psychological torture, surveillance, invasions of privacy, sanctioned rape and theft, enslavement as well as other New Jersey-like horrors. Edward S. Corwin, "The Higher Law Background of American Constitutional Law" (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1955), pp. 72-85. ("New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead" and "Law and Ethics in the Soprano State.")

Objections to criminal atrocities by governments are not mere "opinions"; they are true judgments going to the essence of what a society and its institutions are and always must be as well as defining what we must avoid.

Threatening a critic's family members or injuring persons with controversial opinions will not alter these truths:

"Nobody really believes in anything anymore, and everybody spends his life in frenzied work and frenzied play so as not to face the fact, not to look into the abyss. Nietzsche's call to revolt against liberal democracy is more powerful and more radical than is Marx's [Communistic Modernity.] And Nietzsche adds that the Left, socialism, is not the opposite of the special kind of Right that is capitalism, but is its fulfillment. The Left means equality, the Right inequality. Nietzsche's call is from the Right, but a new Right transcending capitalism and socialism" -- towards State Totalitarianism? -- "which are the powers moving in the world." (Ibid.)

Something similar to the German nightmare is visible in the images of torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, not to mention in all of the subtle tortures and dehumanizations that some of us experience on a daily basis. Americans are routinely violated (raped) by politically powerful "big shots," especially in New Jersey. The rule of law should not distinguish between "big shots" and "not-so-big-shots."

Equal protection of the laws means that rape, theft, abuse, assault and other abominations -- like censorship and suppressions of creative work taking place before your eyes -- are crimes. This is true even when victims are poor and criminals are rich. They are even worse criminal actions when they take place with the assistance of state governments. I will never legitimate these crimes nor will I stop calling them to the attention of law enforcement in America. ("Jaynee La Vecchia and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends?")

The idea of a fundamental dignity in human beings seems nostalgic (or unscientific) to a generation reared on the opinion that there is no significant difference between persons and large apes. I agree only when the apes are compared with Republicans or psychobabblers. Irony?

These are "value judgments," of course, and therefore they can not be right or wrong -- except that the judgment that such conclusions cannot be right or wrong is objectively correct and scientific -- as everyone in social science departments knows, or so we are told. ("Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism" then "Bernard Williams and Identity.")

This ill-fitting second-hand suit of absurd philosophical opinions does not accord with our shiny new American shoes. Nihilism in the land that created the "Disney vacation experience" -- which I have enjoyed! -- is only possible because it is interpreted as a license to delight in bizarre and frequent sexual activity. Nihilism is comical in a nation with so little appreciation of tragedy and loss in its public culture of optimism and progress. Mr. Colbert? We are committed to a psychobabble-like "denial" and fantasy, as a culture, perhaps explaining our artistic richness, notably America's cinematic genius:

"Doesn't nihlism mean that you can have sex with whoever you want?"

No, that is promiscuity or stupidity. Nihilism is belief in nothing. Sexuality may not be irrelevant to the images from Abu Ghraib. Libido is never unimportant to the "lust" for power or the desire to injure others. Torturers hurt people because they like it. They like it sexually. Diana? Terry, this means you. Rationalizations are provided after the fact and are almost always irrelevant to the real reason for cruelty. Cruelty is enjoyable for the person who delights in hurting others, usually anonymously. Mr. Ginarte, how are things in your law practice? The person inserting "errors" in these writings is deriving SEXUAL pleasure from the process. ("The Torture of Persons" and "Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.")

What we see in Guantanamo and in our indifference to numerous cruelties as well as disparities in wealth and opportunity in America is loss of affect, indifference and anomie produced by absorption of this German "world-abandoning" philosophy. Rejection of humanism, celebrations of cruelty, rationalizations of the will to power lead to some very dark places indeed. This is a journey investigated in the works of thinkers as diverse as Alfred Adler and Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking (memory and madness) and R.D. Laing. Feminist critics of Bloom's bestseller have mostly ignored or not seen these issues -- issues which should concern women as much (or more) than Bloom's alleged "insensitivity to women's issues." Bloom is dead. Social oppression of women is very much alive. (See the film "Another Day in Paradise" and "Why U.S. Courts Must Not Condone Torture" then "Not One More Victim.")

This brings us to the plight of philosophy: "Philosophy in the past was about knowing; now it is about power. This is the source of the deep drama being played out so frivolously about us. Intellectual life is [reduced to] the struggle of wills to power." (Bloom, "Western Civ.," in "Giants and Dwarfs," at p. 24.) ("The Allegory of the Cave.")

This threat to philosophy creates a new and highly dangerous crisis of values and standards:

"The quarrel is not about Western and non-Western but about the possibility of philosophy. The real issue is being obscured due to a political dispute. If we give in we shall allow a very modern philosophy to swallow up all philosophers from Socrates up to and including Marx. Postmodernism [whose postmodernism?] is an attempt to annihilate the inspiration of Greek philosophy that is more effective than that of the barbarians with their Dark Ages after the fall of Rome, more effective because it is being accomplished by the force and guile of philosophy itself. [Derrida?] I am not asserting the truth of philosophy's old claim to break through the limits of culture and history, but I am asserting that it is the only question. It is neither a Western nor a non-Western question." (Ibid., at p. 28.)

Is this "question of truth" philosophy's only issue?

Perhaps the solutions to these troubles will require a woman's wisdom. Maybe we should return to those German philosophers and debates to determine whether the same "problematic" may lead us towards a more attractive set of options.

I will make use of the work of a graduate of Wellesley College, holder of a Doctorate in Philosophy from Harvard/Radcliffe, who studied under Heidegger, Whitehead, worked with prominent scientists and probably wrote much of Michael Polanyi's great book "Personal Knowledge." Ms. Grene was an expert on Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Sartre, phenomenology and biology, as well as the philosophy of science who could not find a job teaching philosophy in America as a woman in the thirties, forties, or fifties. Grene was expected to marry and have children. She was certainly not to bother with "women's philosophy." ("Master and Commander.")

Professor Grene confessed to being puzzled by the concept of "women's philosophy," as distinct from philosophy concerning (or by) women. Like Grene, I cannot say what is women's mathematics, science, physics, or philosophy. Ms. Grene was adept at the use of Continental theory and also a biologist, expert in phenomenological-hermeneutics on the same level with Paul Ricoeur, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida and others. Grene's "ethico-socio-biology" (she was trained in zoology) meets Foucault and Gadamer on their own turf. Yes, I know about E.O. Wilson.

Ms. Grene is still mostly unknown among her country's intellectuals. Grene's languages included French, German, Latin and some others, probably including Hebrew. There is no doubt in my mind, after having read Ms. Grene's books since the early eighties, that she is one of the most important American philosophers of the twentieth century. Read Jessica Valenti (if you must) but please read Marjorie Grene for the heavy theory. My concern is that students today can only read one of those two women -- and it is not Ms. Grene who is accessible to them.

What you must appreciate is that such very different thinkers may compliment one another. ("Magician's Choice.")

I must now pause to iron some shirts and wash the family dishes before returning to Professor Grene's ideas and my comments on them. ("A Doll's Aria.")

III.

An article in today's newspaper reports on the efforts of scientists to isolate memory "molecules" (cells?) and "erase" them with drugs that will allow recipients of these drugs to "move on" after trauma. The fascinating aspect of this article and others like it is the easy equating of brain and mind. There is a failure by neuroscientists to see what many writers, artists, philosophers and social scientists have known and argued for years.

No mind/brain identity theory that denies the experiential reality of the mind (qualia) will be persuasive. Next they will tell us to get in touch with the "chi" of our "inner children." I have enough concerns with my "outer child" not to worry excessively about my "inner child."

The neglect of culture in the formation or in explaining the contents of minds will prove to be a lethal mistake. ("Erasing Painful Memories" then "A Review of the Television Series 'Alice.'")

"Persons are made, not born, and participation in a culture is indispensable for the transformation of a human organism into a person. The human genetic endowment (or at least, one would presume, a genetic endowment that supplies its owner with the same sort of capacities as ours gives us) is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for becoming a person. Being a person is an achievement which our genetic endowment [and proper brain functioning] makes possible."

Anthony N. Perovich, Jr., "Persons, Minds, and 'The Specter of Consciousness,'" in "The Philosophy of Marjorie Grene" (Illinois: Open Court, 2002), pp. 178-179. ("John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness.")

Human memory is linguistic and associative as well as integrative. Memory is essential to human identity, as John Locke understood. To "erase" memory is to "erase" yourself, or your life's meaning, affecting the purposes of the events and trajectory of an entire life-story. (See my forthcoming essay, "What is memory?")

The results of this new memory-losing science will be tragic for humans whose language-based selves and social-consciousness make them, inconveniently, different from laboratory rodents despite biological similarities. ("Brian Greene and the Science of Memory" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.")

I suggest that scientists ponder the section of Hacking's study of memory and the "soul" dealing with severe trauma:

"Traumatic events, traumatic experiences -- we know what they are: PSYCHOLOGICAL blows, wounds to the spirit. Severe trauma early in life may irrevocably damage the development of a child. Trauma is psychic hurt. ... Trauma took the leap from body to mind just over a century ago, exactly when the sciences of memory were coming into being." (Hacking, "Rewriting the Soul," p. 183.)

The removal of memory that makes subsequent events meaningful and important in a person's life will impact on identity, on who a person was or is -- or can be -- also on moral capacity and growth. This is recognized (to some extent) in this newspaper article. Placement of the victim in a torture chamber should finish the job of psychological assassination very nicely. ("'Ex Machina': A Movie Review.")

What is involved for a person or culture in the aftermath of shock -- say, 9/11? -- is disconnection from and atrophy of moral emotions, psychic numbness, loss of affect. ("Would you have helped Catherine Kitty Genovese?" and "The Torture of Persons," then "'The Prisoner': A Review of an AMC Television Series.")

Any more letters or words that you wish to delete from this essay? Are italics and bold script available today? These are daily concerns for me.

America has suffered a kind of amnesia after the trauma and shock of 9/11. We have forgotten some of the values at the center of the American adventure which we asked the world to share for the past two centuries. We are in the midst of an identity crisis: Do we want military domination of the world and absolute security? Or do we wish to remain free and equal citizens of a democractic Republic? We must choose one of these options. Please do not plagiarize this essay after vandalizing it, Mr. Menendez. (Again: "What is it like to be plagiarized?" then "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")

The impoverishment of students' souls that Bloom notices is one result of cultural amnesia which is worse today than when Bloom wrote his books, loss of memory, of the values and purposes of our society -- of who we are, as a people, and from whence we come -- everything that government must be concerned to protect in our lives.

Separation of persons nurturing shared memories for one another is a kind assassination of self-chosen identities through the destruction of life-projects and self-created communities, or "families." Telling a child that her father is a "fool" because you disagree with him may be one example of what I describe, seeking to injure that young woman is much worse. You may expect to see these ideas plagiarized soon in our major publications, probably by Daniel Mendelsohn. ("What is it like to be censored in America?" then "How censorship works in America.")

The harm done to people through emotional isolation is devastating and permanent. Torturing a victim's family member before his eyes is an attempt to force a reality of oppression upon that tortured family member -- an attempt that is doomed to fail. Contrived or forced association with persons for whom all affection or respect is lost makes things worse. Atul Gawande, "Hellhole: Is Solitary Confinement Torture?," The New Yorker, March 30, 2009, p. 36. (Isolation can be accomplished through destruction of the victim's capacity to trust others as a result of betrayals and other harms, often producing severe and life-long injury to those cooperating in the effort to isolate a victim in addition to the victim's pain.)

Destruction of memory or history is why I speak of African-Americans as a tortured people -- deprived of their names, religions, languages and given artificial substitutes derived from another culture that were aimed at making them "laughable" whites (minstrel shows), or philosophical slaves, subhuman beings whom one might torture or kill with impunity.

The struggle of African-Americans to achieve liberation is an ongoing one, a struggle which begins for each person by reclaiming memory and collective history. This claim of justice for African-Americans cannot be made by nihilists or those who reject any and all morality. If you are a nihilist then nothing is either good or evil. Anything goes. It all depends on who has the power to impose his or her will. ("Little James and Big God.")

African-Americans were divided from one another, deliberately, prevented from forming communities. These tensions in the African-American community, exploited in the past by government, are still present under the surface relations of all of us. I do not know how else to say this, so at the risk of offending people I will say, bluntly, that an attempt has been made at genocide in America not only with regard to native Americans, also when it comes to persons of African ancestry. This is an on-going attempt at destruction of a people which explains America's grotesque incarceration rates and the disproportionate economic and social burden placed on minorities, especially African-Americans. ("America's Holocaust" and "Foucault, Rose, Davis and Meaning(s) of Prison.")

This is not the sort of experience that "just goes away" because of the election of one public official. Orwellian efforts by government to invade and take over the province of collective memory by redefining the past, regularly, are still not entirely successful. ("'Total Recall': A Movie Review.")

We are told today that the reason we invaded Iraq was not to find weapons of mass destruction, but to bring democracy to the people of Iraq which had nothing to do with the oil being extracted from their wells. ("Weapons of Mass Deception.")

I am afraid that we have traveled some distance from the bleak mood prevailing when Bloom's book appeared. The Reagan era was characterized by moral hypocrisy, a pretense at decency or "normality" was required, whereas today the notion of ANY objective moral requirements of persons is viewed as archaic. There is no universally agreed concept of basic human "decency," but somehow we know it when we see it.

The shallowness among many young people that visitors to America describe is a product of displacements of memory and trivializing of history as well as ideas. Bloom is wrong to focus on rock-n-roll music and other symptoms of what is really a philosophical problem all the way down to the foundations of America's collective psyche. Please read this paragraph by Marjorie Grene carefully:

"We are living beings seeking, in our funny, artifactual, language-borne way, to orient ourselves in our environment: an environment that includes, in our case, laboratories, law-courts, schools, supermarkets -- and above, or before, all, NATURAL LANGUAGES. Language, as William von Humboldt said, is a true world that man puts before himself and reality. That's correct, but also misleading. The world of language, and more generally, of culture, is ONE sphere, so to speak, of our surroundings -- the one closest to our existence as HISTORICALLY developing and developed beings. But the sphere of culture in which we find ourselves is itself contained in nature: not so much as a screen between ourselves and nature as a variant of it: a variant that we have made and that at the same time makes us -- and that serves us as a glass, [irremovable spectacles?] now telescope, now microscope, through which we grasp the realities around us, both cultural and natural." (Grene, "A Philosophical Testament," p. 18.)

Just as spiders weave a web in which they live as a natural environment so persons create webs of linguistic meanings -- religions, arts, economies, politics, laws -- where we live the meanings of our lives that we also reinvent all the time through recollection and reinterpretation. For example, what is "marriage" today? (Lebenswelt)

To damage our memory-capacity is to destroy part of our linguistic aptitudes. This destruction, if it is done thoroughly, will obliterate much of the subject's humanity. This philosophical or cultural lobotomy is well underway in America, which has been described by Gore Vidal as the "United States of Amnesia." The "lobotomizing" power of government was George Orwell's great subject.

Thomas Jefferson rightly warned at the birth of the American Republic: "No people can be both ignorant and free."

Americans seem to prefer ignorance to freedom today. Without freedom, as ignorant persons, we can expect little security.

Do you wish to delete another letter from one of my words, Mr. Menendez?

This is not -- I must repeat this -- to suggest, nonsensically, that "all truth is relative."

To deny me words, thoughts, expressions and loves is to deny my humanity. Such denials are not how we should conduct political debates in America. My opinions have made me an "unperson." I am a casualty of an Orwellian deformation to which America's culture is being driven by fundamentalists at both extremes of the political spectrum. ("'The Adjustment Bureau': A Movie Review.")

May 12, 2010 at 7:20 P.M. Calls received seven times today from 866-219-2430. I am sure that this is an unrelated marketing call. A word was, again, deleted from the foregoing sentence. I have restored that word to the text. I wish the reader to appreciate that these barbaric tortures and censorship are YOUR actions to the extent that you remain silent or accepting of them in a democracy. ("New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court.")

"A 1995 article in The New York Times reported the results of a survey that 40% of American adults (this could be upward of 70 million people) did not know that Germany was our enemy in World War II. A Roper survey conducted in 1996 revealed that 84% of American college seniors could not say who was president at the start of the Korean War (Harry Truman). 58% of American high school seniors cannot understand an editorial in ANY newspaper, and a U.S. department of education survey of 22,000 [representative] students in 1995 revealed that 50% were unaware of the Cold War, and 60% had no idea how the United States came into existence." (Berman, "The Twilight of American Culture," p. 34.)

All of these statistics and many others were worse ten years after the survey was taken. Today there is a further decline from this level of historical knowledge among young people.

The one thing no young African-American, especially, should forget is from whence he or she comes, or the persons who have made sacrifices for the future in the history of an oppressed people. (Angela Davis, James Baldwin, Dr. King, Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, Mumia Abu-Jamal.)

This self-chosen or manipulated loss of cultural memory is how a people commits suicide -- or is made to commit suicide. To paraphrase Jean-Francois Revel -- "This is how democracies perish."

The answer is not to destroy writings (or persons) warning of this suicide. In pursuing a liberal education I suggest that you recall James Baldwin's definition of art: "Art is the attempt to discover the questions obscured by answers inherited from the past." John Searle comments:

"Human beings, Oakeshott argues, are what they understand themselves to be; and the world that human beings inhabit is not a world of things, but of MEANINGS. The understandings of these meanings requires an understanding of that understanding itself. It is a consequence of the relation between human beings and understanding [Heidegger, Gadamer, Sartre, Ricoeur, Grene] that their inherited culture is not an addition to human beings, but is essentially what makes human beings human. 'A man [person] is his [or her] culture,' and 'What he is he has to learn to become.' ..."

This is the crucial point that explains Grene's return to Kant and, through reinterpretations of the philosophical tradition, all the way to Sartre and de Beauvoir -- a new ethics of community, love as mutual care, as the biological response to the need to affirm or defend life. This is a woman's reinterpretation of Modernity. ("The Allegory of the Cave.")

For Grene, epistemology is "ultrabiology." We still have truth and meaning under this feminist phenomenology and philosophy of science. ("Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch On Freedom of Mind.")

My journey -- like Professor Grene's late work -- was undertaken, independently, as part of an effort to rebuild an understanding of myself and the world through a return to Kant, then forward to Ricoeur and phenomenological-hermeneutics. I found it necessary to rebuild my mind and perspective on life after the experience of trauma resulting from the criminal violations of my rights. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" then "Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.")

All of the philosophers whose work seems exceptional to me are survivors of intellectual crises of one kind or another. A great place to start thinking in this "new key" today is by relating the works of Susan K. Langer and Judith Butler to recent developments in Continental theory.

How many of these American women's philosophical works -- which are certainly at the highest intellectual global level of achievement -- are part of the curriculum (or experience) of liberal arts students in the best American universities today?

If you are not responsible for the meanings in your life-story then government or corporate power is going to provide those meanings to you and "for your own good."

As a woman or any African-American, you will not like the meanings and identities that have been prepared for you by powerful forces in this society concerned to make you a "slave." ("'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review.")

If you forget this subjugated status for one minute you will be in trouble:

"A culture for Oakeshott is not a set of beliefs or perceptions or attitudes -- and certainly not a body of knowledge or a 'canon' -- but a variety of distinct 'LANGUAGES' of understanding, including self-understanding. It is important for Oakeshott that culture does not consist in a set of 'Great Books,' but rather, as one learns and reads in conversations that one continues to have with one's inheritance. In a 'culture' there are a number of different voices, and in 'learning' one acquires access to these 'voices.' There is a language of politics, of economics, of art, literature, philosophy; and learning consists in acquiring the ability to join these conversations." -- Memory, books, arts and dialogue become important, not merely "elite" decorative luxuries! -- "Liberal learning, especially at the university level, is therefore the introduction to this conversation, or rather to these series of conversations." (Searle, "The Storm Over the University," pp. 115-116.)

This is called "dialectics." ("Fidel castro's 'History Will Absolve Me.'")

What this points to is Kant's and Hegel's discussion of "the logic of sociability" -- as a necessity of being with others -- by forming a "language" of community which is objective and universal ethics. This need for dialectics is one theme in Cornel West's "The American Evasion of Philosophy."

These quotations from Searle bring us to Grene's dual aspect-resolution of the dichotomies explored by Bloom:

"It should be clear ... how, in my view, the thesis of the primacy of perception can tie down the conception of knowledge as justified belief, and keep us from drifting into subjectivism. It should also be clear by now that both the justified belief formula and the thesis of the primacy of perception must be understood in a realistic sense."

The following words by Grene -- if one takes them in -- make it clear that Marjorie Grene continues to be a major American philosopher with vital things to say to future generations of Americans, especially women, and all intelligent persons in the world:

"We dwell in human worlds, in CULTURES, [essences, histories, meanings, or universals] but every such world is itself located in, and constitutes, a unique transformation of, some segment of the natural world, [particulars, empirical or natural reality,] which provides the materials for, and sets the limits to its constructs. Aspects of this theme will recur, ... in what follows. ..." (Grene, 'Knowledge, Belief, and Perception,' in "Testament," pp. 25-26.)

We are dual-aspect phenomena, freedoms-in-the-world living with others, for whom a sharp division between fact and value, subjective versus objective is absurd, ultimately, to the unities that our lives are aimed at achieving or becoming.

When persons or societies ignore this goal of community (with others) and unity (within the self), fusion of knowledge and reality, they disintegrate. Something like "disintegration" is a real danger for America today. You cannot refute this conclusion by deleting a word from my essay. You will hurt yourselves more than you will disturb me by indulging in these criminal methods. ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance," then "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism" and "Why I am not an ethical relativist.")

The censorship of my work and the torture as well as rapes of "weird" persons (like me) is a symptom of this decades-old process of cultural disintegration that can still be halted. It is not seen as an "issue" to seek to condition "objects" (like me) in such brutal ways. After all, my "superiors" merely wish to "instruct" me for my "own good." ("American Psychologists' and Psychology's Acceptance of Torture" and "American Lawyers and Torture.")

To give the reader a sense of the world entered by Marjorie Grene as an American philosopher in the mid-twentieth century, I recommend the writings of Mary McCarthy. Ms. McCarthy is a superb writer, flawless sentences shine in sculpted paragraphs revealing a piercing intellect and ready wit. See especially, Mary McCarthy, "The Group" (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1954).

I discovered McCarthy's prose (as a college student) through her essays and rival evaluations by Mailer and Vidal. McCarthy's friendship with Hannah Arendt, together with their battle in defense of what is now a classic, "Eichmann in Jerusalem," is a fitting subject for a dissertation in feminist studies. Ideas of truth, good and evil that might be examined in such a dissertation (despite Bloom) is what Western Civ. is all about.

We are always involved in a fight for our identities and meanings in culture. To give up the struggle for the freedom to become the persons we are is to accept slavery. My experience of being censored and suppressed by people who go to the trouble of plagiarizing me is surreal. Insults of me delivered to others only concern me if they have the potential to harm the intellectual development and emotional welfare of those "others." Please direct your attacks against me. I welcome them. Do not attack "others" because you dislike me. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "What is it like to be tortured?")

If you are a woman in sexist society, then your identity is always a battleground. This battleground is internal and external. It is concerned with such concepts as truth, meaning, logic, history and beauty. You must not surrender those concepts to people who will seek to define them for you or, worse, tell you that they are "meaningless."

McCarthy and Arendt were in a position to evoke SHARED intellectual standards and logical criteria during the early sixties that allowed them to prevail in their exchanges with Conservative pundits.

I wonder whether those intellectual standards are as prevalent today as they once were? Or would the debate today become a free-for-all where intellectual discipline is abandoned in favor of censorship, silencing, violence and denigration or trivializing of rival views? The "Colbert Report"?

You cannot physically destroy ideas, not even by beating up their proponents, nor by destroying or censoring their writings.

I will explore Grene's return to Kant, then her leap forward to twentieth century science and philosophy as the reinterpretation of our inheritance from Kant, Hegel, then the phenomenological-hermeneutic, pragmatist, and scientific traditions. Grene returned to the birth of Modernity, as an intellectual structure or architecture that we still inhabit, in order to determine where things went wrong. At no point does this involve a denial of our animal natures, evolution, nor a turning away from science. Whether we like it or not, this return requires that we come to terms with Kant and the Enlightenment tradition as well as religion.

I am describing a philosophical and social version of what Jung and Laing called: "Metanoia."

America is the paradigmatic example of an Enlightenment society; also the postmodernist society par excellence. I suggest -- as does Grene -- that the loss of the sense of truth and knowledge as real possibilities is a great error. Fragmentation is the danger associated with a denuded atomism and out-of-control and bankrupt logical positivism leading to the chaotic America that troubled Professor Bloom. This is partly the result of a relativist misreading of Kant and the German tradition.

"One can only conclude," Grene writes, "after Gilbert and Sullivan, that every little boy or girl who's born into this world alive is either a little Kantian or else, alack and alas, a little Hegelian. The present writer emphatically belongs to the former kind." (Grene, "Rereading Kant," in "Testament," at p. 31.)

This is a very "chatty" way of expressing the point. A sexist criticism of Grene's writings is the charge that her style is too "chatty." I regard such a criticism concerning difficult philosophical writings as a great compliment to Grene, one that she embraced, as do I. Philosophy should be as accessible as possible. The connection between fact and value is in us. We ("persons") are the connection between mind and body. ("A Doll's Aria" and "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")

Kant understood the contributions of the human mind to knowledge and also that the universe we seek to know and human realities that we struggle to understand must be integrated. For Grene, this integration is located in the "Transcendental Unity of Apperception" (TUA) based on a radical evolutionary reading (Charles Darwin) of the "transcendental analytic" section of the "Critique of Pure Reason."

"If Locke and Hume, Berkeley and Kant, Descartes and Plato (readers know how long a list might be composed here) regarded their own moral and intellectual lives as representative 'enough' for the purpose of deriving a 'science' of mental life, it would be rash to rule out their mode of inquiry. [Phenomenology, hermeneutics today.] The prepared and serious mind reflecting on the nature of its own operations is not under some special burden of establishing its validity. Actually, it's the other way around: a third-person account of MY toothache is what bears the burden, and it bears credibility only when it matches up very well with most toothaches. In that case, if it fails in my case, there would be grounds for suspecting me or my nervous system [of being] in some interesting way eccentric."

Daniel Robinson, "Consciousness and Mental Life" (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 209-210.

Introspection is not some inferior and merely subjective self-indulgence in the human sciences.

Phenomenological discipline and method together with hermeneutic reflection are the only ways we have of objectifying and making social the vast or infinite terrain of human subjectivity which becomes intersubjectivity. It also works "the other way around" -- we come to acquire the intersubjective terrain through acculturation by making that territory subjective, i.e., "ours." This process of "totalization" (Sartre) may be likened to an "alternating current." Dialectic? (Octavio Paz and see "'Inception': A Movie Review.")

Introspection that goes deep enough will bring you to what is universal for all human beings. At the same time, through the exploration of human creations distant from you (cave paintings that are 15,000 years-old, for example), you will discover what is most personal and individual within your own psyche. ("Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art.") You are Hamlet. Thomas a Kempis titles his work of theology, The Imitation of Christ. We are all the "One." ("'The Matrix': A Movie Review.")

Art and ideas are things that you take in, like food, becoming part of your tissues, shaping you for the future. The italics (which are aptly-named) will appear and disappear, mysteriously, as part of the cyberharassment campaign from New Jersey. I will not alter them. Pop culture may be used by philosophers "fighting fire with fire" in this media age.

Phenomenology is central to all of the great explorations of human psychology, including the works of Freud and Jung, as well as the expressions of artists for centuries. "Rigor" is not lost through a foundation for theory within the experiencing subject. How do you expect to understand what people "feel" if you are struggling to avoid recognition of what you are "feeling" as a social scientist? Worse, if you hope to understand persons, is not to feel anything or to deny the reality of feelings.

Understanding and feeling, reasoning and emoting are points on a spectrum and not opposites. This may even be true of scientists and behaviorists embarked on their "projects," although it can never be "observed" in their behavior. "Observing" also partakes of subjectivity without any necessary loss of rigor, truth, or universality. What you discover at the foundations of your mind (collective subconscious, transcendental ego, species-being) is and must be universal. ("Is it rational to believe in God?")

This point applies to the efforts of scientists as well as artists. ("Stephen Hawking's Free Will is Determined" and "Stephen Hawking is Right on Time.")

Are university graduates today prepared to appreciate this discussion by Grene, which she believed to be available to the "average" educated person?

Grene has commented on the decline of general knowledge without realizing the continuing loss of a common discourse or intellectual culture among Americans. I know what it is like to debate people who have no idea what one is saying but are confident nonetheless that they can provide "instruction" concerning the subject of debate. Deleting a letter from one of my words, again, will not solve your philosophical problems. Such tactics will not allow you to prevail in this discussion, a discussion which is about YOUR education (or lack thereof) and deficient thought-processes, or those of your children.

Deficiency in education is not acceptable and cannot be tolerated in ourselves or in society. You have a right to a good education. This goal of becoming an educated person or civilized human being is a life-long one for all of us. This goal is important enough to endure censorship and psychological torture in order to pursue it and share it with others, also to protest when people try to prevent us from raising concerns about whether education and intellectual culture is in decline.

This is not to accuse people (myself included) of being unintelligent. It is to complain that we are not receiving the life-long education that we deserve and require. We need something like a "University of America" to which all of the world may be invited and that is, finally, possible with today's technology. (See my forthcoming essay: "Remarks of the Vice President of the United States of America, Joseph R. Biden, Before the General Assembly of the United Nations.")

Sigmund Freud provides only one more chapter in this continuing saga of the journey of Western Spirit towards self-realization. In continuation of Arthur Schopenhauer's despairing aesthetics, Freud's psychoanalysis inherits a Kantian epistemology and dread of metaphysics. If you must read the shrinks, I suppose Ricoeur's book on Freud is among the best. Anthony Storr and Anthony Stevens provide good introductions to heavyweight psychoanalytic thinkers, Lacan and Laing, Frankl and Foucault, also Jung and Kristeva are recommended. I like Sartre's psychological and literary essays (they overlap), also "femi-Nazis" will experience multiple orgasms by discovering Juliet Mitchell's tirades and Germaine Greer's advanced dementia. Knock yourselves out. Yes, I have read both of those women's "texts"; no, I am not solemn, only serious. Your conclusions about such writers is less important than your ability to read and understand their texts -- an ability that will require some education in the classics.

I agree with Grene's conclusion, with two provisos: 1) Kant made essentially the same argument in his later volumes of the Critical Theory by sharpening the distinction between knowing (reason) and understanding (reason-feeling). 2) Grene's reading of the First Critique is based on scholarship available during the mid-twentieth century, not nearly as much on the scholarly work emerging at the end of the twentieth century, also into our contemporary scene, scholarship suggesting that Kant was an early "dual-aspect" thinker. See, for example, Richard Bernstein, "Radical Evil: A Philosophical Investigation" (London: Polity, 2003), p. 21. Immanuel Kant said it best:

"There is not the slightest contradiction in saying that a THING IN APPEARANCE (belonging to the world of sense) is subject to certain laws of which the very same thing AS A THING or being IN ITSELF is independent. .... [ultimate meanings.]"

"Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals," trans. T.K. Abott, (1785), p. 77.

There is no contradiction in the very same human being announcing "I am Norwegian" and "I am suffering from appendicitis." The first statement concerns the territory of real human meanings (actions); the second expresses a biological fact or description of empirical reality (events). These are two aspects of our one human world (objectivity) even if ultimate or "non-human" truth is beyond us (metaphysical truth in totality).

There is a fine definition by Kant of the duality in women, especially, but also in men: We live under "the starry heavens above" but also "with the moral law within us." The charge of Cartesianism against Kant is inaccurate. Hermeneutics is traced not only to Hegel, but also to Kant's final Critique. Otherwise, Grene's brilliant forward-looking interpretations of Kant are powerful and more relevant than ever, although her encounter with Kant dates from the forties: Knowledge is possible; knowledge is not all about power; we must live in a natural world AND in a world of meanings as well as values making freedom possible; finally, without freedom we are no longer fully human.

Grene's predecessors in this view include Mary Whiton Calkins, Ernst Cassirer, Hans-Georg Gadamer, many others as well. (Alasdair MacIntyre's comments on Gadamer are highly recommended.) Furthermore, this neo-Kantianism makes science and religious belief equally necessary, as mutually compatible EXPLANATIONS of different aspects of OBJECTIVE human experience. Roy Bashkar and Steven Hawking are good sources to continue Grene's line of thinking, as are Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch.

Is it a coincidence that two of the greatest philosophers in American history (Calkins and Grene) and a woman holding great power in America who may someday serve as President of the United States (Rodham-Clinton) are all affiliated with Wellesley College? Must be a dangerous place. ("America's Nursery School Campus.")

Ricoeur and other philosophers or students (such as myself) contend that Kantian transcendental arguments are more than possible -- they are necessary. Rational agents, situated as we are, must apprehend the world in identical ways -- through languages and logical categories or concepts which languages make possible, based on a generous understanding of language to include art, religion, love. (See the quote from Professor Robinson above.)

This transcendent-linguistic faculty binds us together with our community and its history, making nihilism, separation of fact from value, disintegration (impossible) and integration (easy). (Again: "Is it rational to believe in God?")

I am confident that I can demonstrate a universal tendency to mythologize the HUMAN linguistic faculty or connective power as a feminine deity. I believe that this mythological tendency is important, symbolically, to the development of our emerging worldview in the twenty-first century. (Athena, Lakshmi, Virgin Mary -- others come to mind.)

I suggest that you see "'Holy Smoke': A Movie Review." Study of pre-Colombian civilizations in Latin America suggests that identification of languages (plural) with the feminine may be universal. ("'The Fountain': A Movie Review.")

If Grene historicizes Kant's "transcendental analytic" then Ricoeur makes Hegel's "historicism transcendental." My position is to agree with both Grene and Ricoeur. There is no tension between the phenomenological (idealistic) and the naturalistic (realistic) interpretations of Kant's Critical Theory. Kant INTENDED both interpretations to be available to readers based on posterity's interpretive needs and concerns. Multitasking?

Kant's Critical Theory is the first invitation (aside from the Scriptures and U.S. Constitution, the latter is contemporary with Kant's work) to engage in Modernity's philosophical hermeneutics. Kant is all about choice:

" ... I still find Kant's Analytic, rather than the cogito (let alone some dialectic leading to the World Mind), the proper starting point for philosophizing. For one thing, as would-be knowers (and contra Kant, also as moral agents) we begin and remain where we are, within a concrete, orderly experience, but nevertheless experience. There is nowhere else to be. Descartes's effort to lead the mind away from the senses, if fruitful at the time for the construction of classical physics, was philosophically disastrous. As Merleau-Ponty put it, there is no 'survol,' no Lucretian plateau from which to survey with total detachment the crowds doing battle on the plains below. We start from and return to experience -- sensed experience -- as our base and our medium."

P.F. Strawson should be compared with Marjorie Grene on these issues. What constitutes experience and matter in a quantum universe? ("John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness.")

"That much there is that is true in Kant's doctrine of experience. Not that we are radically cut off, as he believed, from things in themselves; but things as we perceive and learn to understand them are always things in the limited perspective through which we have access to them. That's why, also, knowledge is always partial, the real is never exhausted through our lines of access to it, however sophisticated and ingenious they become. [F.H. Bradley] But neither is our experience atomized, meaningless, without ordering principles, as the empiricist tradition would have it. [T.H. Green] The place we start and return to has its recognizable shapes and ways of being and becoming. It is a question as Benjamin put it in a different context, of remaking the concept of experience." (Grene, "Reading Kant," in "Testament," pp. 35-36.)

Grene's analysis falters at this point through limiting her focus to the First Critique. Some of Kant's most important answers to his original epistemological questions emerge only at the end of his life, with the development of what he takes to be different (if related) inquiries in his system that are concerned with aesthetics and spirituality as seen by Paul Guyer:

"Synthetic a priori judgments are possible, Kant argues, only when some 'third' is available with reference to which we can legitimately unify subject and predicate. In case of mathematics, he believed, it was our pure 'intuitions' (Anschaungen) of space and time that made such unification possible. In the case of metaphysics, of course, the trouble is that there is no such third something, and so, although metaphysics as a natural drive is inevitable, it will never issue in science" -- it may issue in other kinds of knowledge! -- "except in the very limited area prescribed by the principles of the Analytic, with some restricted empirical material built in[.]" (Ibid., at p. 38.) ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz" then "John Searle and David Chalmers On Consciousness.")

Feeling may replace reason to supply knowledge of necessary truth or patterns, beauty or sublimity in nature as well as art in a post-quantum universe. ("Is clarity enough?")

If knowledge (for the subject) is only possible as a construct implying mind; then the orderly patterns of a nature that is experienced as "purposive without purpose" (purpose that we can determine, that is) reveals an order that is always beyond and independent of us because it can only belong to a larger Mind or "intelligence" in nature. ("Pieta" and "Faust in Manhattan.")

The "elegant universe" idea is crucial to developing these insights. I recommend the writings of Brian Greene, especially "The Fabric of the Cosmos" (which I am reading as I write this essay) and "The Elegant Universe." Michio Kaku's "Hyperspace" fits this line of thinking perfectly:

"In the universe's initial moments, these features of the spacetime fabric that, today, can be accessed only mathematically, would have been manifest. Early on, when the three familiar spatial dimensions were also small, there would likely have been little or no distinction between what we call the big and the curled-up dimensions of string theory. Their current size disparity would be due to cosmological evolution which, in a way that we don't yet understand, would have HAD TO PICK three of the spacial dimensions as special, and subject them to the 14 billion years of expansion discussed in earlier chapters." (Greene, "The Fabric of the Cosmos," p. 374.)

What is a good word for the order and elegance that SELECTS some spacial dimensions as more beautiful and better fitting than others in order to achieve greater coherence and development for the totality? A short word may do the trick. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz" then "Is it rational to believe in God?")

Elegance is something which has become CLEARER with developments in quantum theory and, although it is too soon to tell, perhaps with the discovery of dark matter or energy which may be viewed, metaphorically, as the id of the universe. (See Goswami's and Zohar's meditations on quantum physics below.)

Network theory and probability-thinking as well as chaos theory become relevant, once more, as is the new discussion of the "artful universe".

"In April, an international team using a satellite-borne detector called PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Exploration and Light-Nuclei Astrophysics) found a glut of high energy particles, which may be a product of dark matter. According to one theory, dark matter particles are their own antiparticles -- meaning that, if one smashes into another, both are obliterated. [Democrats and Republicans?] These high energy collisions should produce electrons and positrons, which should be a source of the positron abundance turned up by PAMELA."

"Chasing Dark Matter," in "Discovery," July/August, 2009, at p. 10-11.

Let us stay with this idea of particles which are their own antiparticles to think again of masculine and feminine, subjective and objective, binary oppositions. (Again: "Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")

" ... a very important dual figure of this kind is the ANDROGYNE, the male-female who are one. This is the prime symbol of the realization of opposites. [Dialectics] Marriage is an occasion for coming to an experience that transcends your own personal incarnation of one aspect, and, through the relationship in marriage, you may experience an identity with that other you, that is, experience your participation in the androgyne motif ... [placing you in harmony with the energies in the universe.]"

Fraser Boa, The Way of Myth: Talking With Joseph Campbell (Boston & London: Shambala, 1994), pp. 35-36.

The sub-atomic products of dark matter are passing through you every day. The universe "shares itself" with you, also every day.

Scientists do not fully understand the relation between accelerating galaxies and dark energy. I suspect that the answers we may find could well clarify our quantum mysteries. Dark matter is clearly a third term in the dialectic between time and space. The universe is you; you are the universe. This is a scientific idea. This is also a religious insight. Finally, expressing this insight is called "art." Mr. Nolan, this bud's for you. ("'Interstellar': A Movie Review.")

Goswami's world "consciousness," coinciding with many developments in quantum physics since Kant wrote his books and indicating at least "grounds for warranted belief" in God provides a "unifying principle of nature."

What do you think that unifying principle of nature may be? Liberation theology will be useful in this inquiry. ("Ted Honderich Says: 'You are not free!'")

If your problem is the word "God" then feel free to substitute another word -- "consciousness"? Love? Beauty?

"A quantum mechanical model of consciousness, then, gives rise to a picture of our overall mental life that is neither entirely like a computer nor entirely like a quantum system -- indeed, not entirely 'mental.' What we recognize as our full-blown conscious life, using CONSCIOUS in its common vernacular sense, is actually a complex, multilayered DIALOGUE between the quantum aspect (the ground state) and a whole symphony of interactions that cause patterns to develop in the ground state." (Dana Zohar, "The Quantum Self," p. 90; Roger Penrose's work should be plugged-in right here.)

So much for Nietzsche's Superman who was required to create values because there were no true values to be discovered; so much for Weber's radical separation of fact and value; there goes Freud's pessimism. There is truth; freedom is what we are; morality is inescapable; and there is a real world out there that provides limits to our theorizing. Reality says yes or no to our constructions -- constructions that are essential to the unity that we experience and become, or join. Justice is real. We are back in business in Western civilization. We can be religious, if we like, and we can do the science thing. We MUST construct as we perceive our realities. ("John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")

IV.

Grene's concluding assessment of Kant is worth pondering: "What remains of Kant's ... laboriously elaborated argument? Three essentials remain, it seems to me: the active role of the knower in making experience objective; the inexhaustibility of the known, and the indissoluble connection between knower and known." (Grene, "Testament," p. 44.)

Let's take a close look at these ideas: The active role of the mind in knowing things -- i.e., our "subjective" contributions to the process by which knowledge is created, stored, or transmitted -- does not deprive of us knowledge, nor of an objective world in which this "real" knowledge exists and is transmitted all the time. We live in languages. Mother and child symbolism is useful here. Mathematical propositions and the temperature at which water boils, or even the evil involved in killing babies -- are all matters as to which we can and do have knowledge that is true, even absolutely true. Simon Singh, "A Grand Unified Mathematics," in "Fermat's Enigma" (New York: Walker & Co., 1997), pp. 279-287 ("What Andrew had done was to tie together once again areas of mathematics that had seemed far apart.")

This conclusion is one result of the objectivity in mental "experiences" of knowledge-claims. We share truths. We live in such shared truths found in languages. If we do not, then we are no longer human or, perhaps, not rational agents. This sharing in meanings is valid even when we deny these truths. We can spend the rest of our lives arguing about the content of these truths, or knowledge. We may disagree about what both knowledge and truth require and so on. This argument establishes the Kantian point concerning the objectivity of our epistemic species-nature. Again: Why bother to argue if it is all a matter of preferences? No "reason." ("Donald Davidson's Anomalous Monism" and "John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness.")

Knowledge is potentially inexhaustible because we are bottomless mysteries or freedoms directed at other freedoms. Our languages (including the language of images and archetypes) are organic and protean entities to reflect this enigmatic quality in human minds seeking to penetrate the mysteries of a universe that seems to change along with us. "Mirrors set facing each other" is a good metaphor for this experience of "encounter" (crucifix, Star of David, etc.), which is elucidated most powerfully today in quantum theory. ("Solaris.")

This is not to deny ontology nor the reality of knowledge. We need not reach a complete understanding of truth, beauty, meaning, freedom, justice in order to know that these concepts MUST designate genuine and important "phenomena" in unfinished human lives, otherwise those lives would be impossible. We cannot live fully human lives without such concepts. ("Starman.")

Andrew Wiles' decades-long effort to resolve Fermat's Last theorem and his quest for a "unified" mathematics, I believe, is an indirect way of developing the ontological argument for the existence of God. ("Is it rational to believe in God?" and "Is this atheism's moment?")

This unity or unifying power of (primarily) feminist postmodernism must remain essentially FEMININE in expression and understanding -- that is, inclusive and integrating rival perspectives in a dialectic rather than seeking to destroy oppositions. Even David Stove's views are examined, objectively, according to this philosophical approach. Furthermore, this need for a so-called "feminist epistemology" seems to be an increasingly global perception that I hope will develop in the hermeneutic tradition. ("'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Review Essay.")

Just as mother and child are originally one person so universe and humanity are one entity, a unity (love?). We are made of star stuff, governed by the same forces as all other matter that exists, moving towards a single destiny.

Philosophers can make a valuable contribution to a discussion by being mistaken. I am sure that the same is true of scientists. There is no need to suppress what you believe to be mistaken. Censorship is the weapon of those who fear truth. Censorship, vandalism, and destruction of written works makes the future our enemy and not our friend. ("The Heidegger Controversy.")

We are entering a period in the intellectual history of humanity in which the excesses of an out-of-control masculine power will need to be corrected or repaired -- I hope there is still time -- by the ascent of feminine intelligence expressing itself, equally, in the sciences and arts.

This observation is enough to generate hatred as well as attempts to destroy persons making the observation. Hatred which may prove much of what I am saying. Sadly, this hatred may come from women unaware of the deformations to which sexism and other forces in our society have led them.

There is no mind without brain. But mind is not reducible to brain. There are no concepts in human life without knowing agents to discover them (epistemology). This does not mean that truth is unobjective or unreal (metaphysics). There is no possibility of meaning without unity (continuity) between selves and their worlds of theory as well as value. ("Why I am not an ethical relativist.")

Think of a long string where one end is labeled "body" and the other is called "mind." It is one string. But if that string is pulled tight the ends do not meet. Quantum theory is showing us that the ends of this single string can be brought together and -- like a magician's magic thread -- can suddenly be transformed into many strings then reintegrated into a single thread. Your life can be that "Adrianna's Thread" of meaning as love. (Brian Grene, Michio Kaku, Roy Bashkar -- especially interesting are Kaku's "field string theories" as well as "'Inception': A Movie Review.")

Identities are narrative "threads" that we weave and separate, reintegrate then tie together, making use of memory, purpose, situatedness. These threads may be thought of as languages, including the language of images which defines our culture and maybe global culture today.

We need not share in Bloom's despair. All is not lost. The possibilities in the ways that we tie our strings together are infinite, especially when we bring them together by playing nicely with others. Think of this power of self-narration (truthful, shared self-invention) as a kind of "hermeneutics of freedom." All of the strings must be tied together, eventually.

Primary Sources:

It is still not possible to use italics or bold script. I am running scans of my computer. 12 security risks have been uncovered; one has been removed. This is normal for me. Attacks against this essay and all of my writings will continue. A letter is deleted from a word in this essay almost every day. Efforts are underway to obstruct my access to these blogs. I cannot reach MSN groups. I cannot see my books. I do not know whether my books still exist. I cannot make use of e-mail or post images. At any time, I may be unable to continue writing. I live in a country that claims to protect freedom of speech and expression as well as human rights from government overreaching. I am unable to work on a memoir-novel at this computer. I will continue to search for another. Alteration of these sentences continues to take place, including several vandalisms of this very paragraph: 'Eppur se mouve.' (Gallileo)

Sources:

Hannah Arendt, "The Life of the Mind" (New York: Harcourt brace, 1978), pp. 113-149.

Randall E. Auxier & Edwin Lewis Hahn, eds., "The Philosophy of Marjorie Grene" (Illinois: Open Court, 2002).

Morris Berman, "The Twilight of American Culture" (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), entirety.

Bruno Bettelheim, "The Informed Heart" (New York: Avon, 1960), pp. 108-260.

Alan Bloom, "The Closing of the American Mind" (New Yorker: Simon & Schuster, 1987), entirety.

Alan Bloom, "The Crisis of Liberal Education," in "Giants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960-1990" (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), at p. 348.

Alan Bloom, "The Fall of Eros," in "Love and Friendship" (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), pp. 13-37.

Elias Canetti, "Auto-da-fe" (New York: Continuum, 1982) illustrations of ideas in "Crowds and Power."

Benedict Carey, "So You Want to Forget? Science is Working on an Eraser," in The New York Times, April 6, 2009, at p. A1.

Edward S. Corwin, "The Higher Law Background of American Constitutional Law" (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1955), pp. 72-85.

Mark Danner, "US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites," The New York Review of Books, April 9, 2009, at p. 69.

Geoff Dwyer & Richard McGregor, "Obama Vows to Press On With Plan to Shut Down Guantanamo," in Financial Times, May 1, 2013, at p. 3.

Peter Galison, "Sons of Atom," (Book Review) The New York Times, Sunday Book Review Section, at p. 16.

Atul Gawande, "Ordinary Torture," The New Yorker, March 30, 2009, p. 36.

Louisa Gilder, "The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn" (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). (Entanglement in physics and chemistry.)

Amit Goswami, Ph.D., "The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World" (New York: Penguin Trade, 1995), entirety.

Marjorie Grene, "Our Own Recognizances," in "A Philosophical Testament" (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), pp. 173-189, et seq.

Marjorie Grene, "Introduction to Existentialism" (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1948), pp. 95-121.

Marjorie Grene, "Sartre" (New York: New Viewpoints, 1973), pp. 3-97 (" ... the whole point of the argument is to prove that there is a dialectic [entanglement] which can be understood in history ..." p. 88.)

Marjorie Grene, ed., "Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays" (Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 1973) (essays by Stuart Hampshire, Hans Jonas, Hilail Gildin, Leszek Kolakowski, Alan Donegan, also Marjorie Grene's "Introduction.")

Ian Hacking, "Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory" (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 113-128.

Ian Hacking, "The Social Construction of What?" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 100-125.

R.D. Laing, "The Politics of Experience" (New York & London: Pantheon, 1967), entirety.

Neil A. Lewis, "In Senate Judiciary Wars, G.O.P. Struggles With Role," The New York Times, April 1, 2009, at p. A 20.

Alasdair MacIntyre, "On Not Having the Last Word: Thoughts on Our Debt to Gadamer," in J. Malpas, U. Arnswald, J. Kertschner, eds., "Gadamer's Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer" (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), p. 157.

Douglas Martin, "Marjorie Grene, a Leading Philosopher of Biology, Is Dead at 98," The New York Times, March 29, 2009, at p. 30. (Entanglement or symbiosis in biology as Grene's life-work.)

Mary McCarthy, "The Group" (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1954).

Stanley Milgram, "Obedience to Authority" (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), pp. 123-153.

Georg Myerson, "Ecology and the End of Postmodernity" (London: Icon, 2001), entirety. (This one is pretty short.)

Martha C. Nussbaum, "Public Philosophy and International Feminism," in C.P. Ragland & Sarah Heidt, eds., "What is Philosophy?" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 121-153.

Kieron O'Hara, "Plato and the Internet" (London: Icon, 2002), entirety. (It's also short, don't worry.)

Roger Penrose, "The Emperor's New Mind" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), esp., pp. 405-447. (All subsequent editions are recommended.)

Michael Polanyi, "Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy" (New York: Harper & Row, 1958). (Work is co-written with Marjorie Grene.)

Michael Polanyi, "Science, Faith and Society" (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1964), entirety. (Relax, it's a pamphlet.)

"Restoring Trust in the Justice System: The Senate Judiciary Committee's Agenda in the 111th Congress," 2009 Marver Bernstein Lecture, Georgetown University, February 9, 2009. (Is Bob Menendez serving on this committee?)

Daniel Robinson, "Consciousness and Mental Life" (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), esp. pp. 209-210, and entirety.

John Searle, "The Storm Over the University," in Paul Berman, ed., "Debating P.C." (New York: Dell, 1992), p. 85.

Scott Shane, "Debating Release of Interrogation Memos," The New York Times, April 1, 2009, at p. A22.

Calvin O. Shrag, "Radical Reflection and the Origin of the Human Sciences" (Indiana: Purdue U. Press, 1980).

Marlise Simons, "Spanish Court Weighs Criminal Inquiry on Torture for 6 Bush-Era Officials," The New York Times, (Sunday -- International Section) March 29, 2009, at p. 6. (Warrants may be issued for Mr. Bush, Mr. Rumsfeld, and others that are executable in all European countries, including the UK.)

Simon Singh, "A Grand Unified Mathematics," in "Fermat's Enigma" (New York: Walker & Co., 1997), pp. 279-287.

Assata Shakur, "Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War Against Black Revolutionaries" (New York & Paris: Semiotexte & Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 205-220. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")

"Statement on Military Commission Legislation: Remarks by Senator Barack Obama," September 28, 2006. (No Torture, not even of Americans. Murder of Americans is O.K.? Senator Obama seems to disagree with President Obama.)

Robert L. Stone, ed., "Essays on the Closing of the American Mind" (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1989), entirety.

Dana Zohar, "The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics" (New York: William Morrow, 1990), entirety.