Alright
Didn't quite managed to finish my civil procedure outline last night...I'll definitely have it done today by 4. After that, contracts! Hell yeah!!!
Not without a break though. I'm going out at 4 to have tea with a good friend.
Carol singing
Today I went out with Peter and some folks from the Advent to sing Christmas carol on the streets. It was a pretty challenging exercise! I sang the tenor part and it was so easy for me to be distracted by the melodies sung by the sopranos. Now I feel much more respectful for the choir-boys.
After we as a group hanged out at the "Seventh," which is a bar across the street from the Church. It was a very cozy evening, since the place was very packed.
Great...back to civil procedure. I'm almost done with the Erie doctrine.
A little bit of after-thought
By looking at the transcendentalism of Marx, we have a glimpse at what I would call two pillars of all moral thinking: reason and revelation. Marx's critique of ideology and of philosophy itself, cast in this light, is based on reason, which is itself transcendental and could thus only be "revealed."
I wonder what Leo Strauss would think of this. I am so unfamiliar with his work that I don't even know his exact views on Kant, Hegel and Marx. The only thing I do know is that throughout his life Strauss had been battling all forms of moral relativism by insisting on the knowability of a priori moral truths.
Or maybe I'm simply engaging in a right-wing reading of Marx...Maybe I really am a right-wing bastard. Former-socialist-turned-conservative? Doesn't that make me a Neocon? What? A Quaker Neocon? A Neocon Pacifist? Nah. I'd rather be a classical liberal. I like the Levellers.
Readings
Just finished some more outside readings, since today's the last day of my real break--I'll be preparing for my finals starting tomorrow.
In the meantime I finished Marx's "Letters from the Franco-German Yearbooks," "Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," and his notes on various exerpts from "James Mill's Elements of Political Economy." Last week I did Kant's "Introduction to the Science of Right," which is the introductory chapter of his "Philosophy of Law: An Exposition of the Metaphysical Principles of the Science of Right."
This is getting really interesting, since I've started picking up Marx's closet-Kantian self. And in a way both speak pretty well to my Christian Quaker conscience as well. Marx's critique of religion in his critique of "mechanical materialists" such as Ludwig Feuerbach is also quite interesting. He claims that religion, or as Quakers would put, "notions," (or in Kantian terminology "speculative theology") really is a form of alienation, an "inverted consciousness of the world," and a "fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not [under realistic conditions] acquired any true reality."
Or, look at his critique of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. According to Marx, after the Reformation, "it is now no longer a question of the struggle of the layman with the priest outside himself, but rather of his struggle with his own inner priest, with his priestly nature," a nature which compels him to project the majesty of the moral law outside himself, fetishizes it and calls it "God." It is this "priestly nature," I suppose, which leads hundreds of thousands of Christians to engage in the perverse exercise of imagining God as a super-tyrant living in the Heavens, ready to impose his yoke upon his lowly subjects. Why has they forgotten what our Savior had to say? The Pharasees, who are good fetishizers of all sorts of things (including the washing of hands and the avoiding of "unclean" women), would tell the Jews to lo here and there for the Kingdom of God. But "No," our Savior says, "the Kingdom of God is within you and in your midst!"
Another problem with this God-as-super-tyrant model is that many Christians became utterly consequentialist in their outlook. I am God-fearing not because God is holy and just, but because He is the supreme ruler of the Universe and I'm kind of afraid of the meting out of His Divine Justice. This is a most shameless and wicked perversion, since it indicates a topsy-turvy logic.
Consider the Summary of the Law. Our Lord Jesus Christ said
"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord;
and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,
and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind,
and with all thy strength.
This is the first commandment.
And the second is like, namely this:
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
There is none other commandment greater than these.
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."
Now under the consequentialist framework the validity and imperative for us to obey this law is conditioned on its being uttered by the Son of God. So now what? Is it invalid then if it is uttered by someone else? God forbid. A more orthodox Christian view should then be that God, the Transcendent Ideal, through his Spirit, had authored these laws before all the ages (or perhaps even outside the framework of time and space), and the Light of his Spirit has enlightened inwardly all human individuals of what the Law of Love requires of them. It is then and only then that we could even possibly accept Jesus as Christ, for without the Spirit and the Law how is it even possible for us to recognize God? It is not without a reason that Jesus referred to himself as the 'Son of Man,' i.e. the 'Child of Humanity.' For he is precisely the Son of the Trascendent Ideal of Man.
I think the one thing which makes me a classical liberal rather than a Marxist is that despite my empathy with his analysis of human consciousness, I don't think his analysis on the solution is plausible. As Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, the moral implications of socialism is altogether unclear. Will it free us from our human bondage? From our alienation? Perhaps. Perhaps not. And in the meantime we run a great deal of risks. (cf. 1984, the Brave New World, The Animal Farm, etc.)
This leads me to my last point. "Does facts beget moral?" My former political science professor Ellen Kennedy gave this question an emphatical "No" as answer. I think she's right. If morality is truly trascendental, as both Kant and Marx as well as the Gospel seem to agree on, then clearly its binding power cannot be conditioned on any outward circumstance. So in this sense our duties towards ourselves and others do not diminish even if we do live under an alienating society. This last point is also my final answer to Professor Jon Hanson of Harvard Law School, co-founder of Critical Realism, and a self-styled Utilitarian. (Upon closer look there's nothing utilitarian about his theory. With the exception of product liability law he mentioned explicitly that much of his outrage towards our existing "dispositionist" system is based on his understanding of right and wrong, and this sounds deontological to me. On the other hand a deontological system such as Kantianism or Marxism simply does not condition the validity of a moral command on the situation. But here he would tell us "ah you should not blame the obesity of the fat man who ate too much McDonald's on himself: it really is McDonald's fault to advertise its Big Mac; we ought to assign the moral blame to McDonalds through Bob Ellickson's norm theory by allowing the fat man to sue McDonald's.")
So here we are. What is to be done? (Pun intended.) I have no clue. Maybe I should write a note or an essay about this junk. Depends on whether I have the time or not.
Professor Mitchell Franklin
I was wrong earlier. Professor Mitchell Franklin (1902-1986), LL.B. '25, S.J.D. '28 (Harvard) was an expert on Marxian, Hegelian and Kantian jurisprudence, comparative law and Louisiana civil law. He was W.R. Irby Professor of Law at Tulane University School of Law until his retirement in 1967 and Professor of Philosophy at SUNY-Buffalo after that. He wrote a book on the development of natural law jurisprudence in the U.S. Supreme Court from a Hegelian-Marxian perspective. Interesting guy. I should perhaps read him in the summer.
Christmas carolling
I'll be Christmas carolling with folks from the Church of the Advent this coming Tuesday in Beacon Hill starting 6 pm. My friend Peter Buchak from MIT invited me, and I'm sure this would provide us a very good opportunity to bring a little more warmth to the neighborhood during this cold season...
They just don't get it, do they?
People for the American Way is doing it again :) asking Hollywood actors to promote their cause. We don't quite want to beat the dead horse over and over but can't these people just get it and quit doing stupid things?! Getting support from Hollywood pseudo-"liberals" hurts your cause, Mr. Neas. By now it's open secret that there more support you get from Sharon Stone, the less likely you'll get support from the average Joe from Ohio or Kansas. By aligning yourself with Sharon Stone you're essentially feeding the Republican quasi-myth that liberalism is some asinine set of belief held by latte-sippin' red-meat-avoidin' orgy-goin' limousine-drivin' lily-white upper-class unreconstructed former pseudo-"radicals", who (many would agree with this...) should long have gone to hell.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/07/politics/politicsspecial1/07alito.html
Kantian jurisprudence
The other thing I am dissatisfied with is that there has not been many English exposition of the Kantian idea of (and about) the law and justice. Professor Charles Fried of Harvard Law School relied heavily on Kantian ideas of the moral law, etc. when he wrote "Right and Wrong" (1971) and "Contract as Promise" (1981). Neverthtless these books do not present us with a complete picture of the Kantian critique of the law. Unlike Thomas Aquinas, who fortunately had John Finnis to carry on his natural law theory legacy, Kant seems to have been forgotten as a jurist. Yet how could this be? How can we actually overlook the jurisprudential contributions of the preeminent moral philosopher of the Western world?
The origin of obligation, duty and morality
I have been doing less outside readings lately, since the workload at the law school has increased considerably since September, and I gotta hit the books real hard for the coming January finals...
Nevertheless, I managed to finish Immanuel Kant's "Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals," (a smallish book very very hard to read) and a chapter from Soren Kierkegaard's "Training in Christianity." I kinda' read them against both my tort law professor Jon Hanson's article on Critical Realism and situationism, the Gospel of St. John, Marx' philosophical manuscripts from 1844 and fragments from the various Confucian classics I read in high school. The reading on Kant also shed light on "Contract as Promise" by Charles Fried, a book I read earlier.
This really has become interesting, since I think by now I have finally got a vague sense of the a priori foundation of morality, as well as the source of authority of moral imperatives or commands, as well as its interplay with the Marxian notion of the human individual as a collection of social relations. I think I should sum this up some time after next week, after the end of this semester, when I will have time to do my own stuff...
