Just Curious

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.

posted by James Chang @ 12:16 AM