Hegel, Blanshard, Du Bois, and Me

The first three men listed in the title meant something to me at different times, and today’s date, August 27th, is significant in the lives of all three.

Kugler lithograph of Hegel (1770-1831) with students.

A Marxist undergraduate in philosophy in the early ’70s, I naturally took an interest in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose “dialectical method” Karl Marx claimed to have put on a materialist foundation. Etymology alone should have suggested to me immediately that διαλεκτική (dialektikē), rooted in λέγειν (legein, “to speak”) cannot find fertile soil in a cosmos consisting exclusively and exhaustively of ὕλη (hyle, “matter”). But materialists take for granted their reasoning ability, even though what they presuppose renders reasoning problematic. August 27th is Hegel’s birthday.

Brand Blanshard (1892-1987)

Breaking with Marx in the mid-’70s, I was seduced by the elegant prose of the rationalist Brand Blanshard. His doctrine of internal relations was more hospitable to dialectic than materialism, but no more rationally satisfactory. It was an undemonstrated, and indemonstrable, working hypothesis that requires omniscience to be in back of everything (for which Blanshard never argued). Every particular is the way it is just because everything as a whole is the way it is. This is worthless as an explanation unless one happens to be omniscient. August 27th is also the date of Blanshard’s nativity.

W. E. B. Du Bois, 1907

In 1963, however, it was the deathday, if you will, of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, in whom scholarship, civil rights activism, Pan-Africanism and, ultimately, Communism of the Stalinist species coalesced. He left the herculean task of his editing his literary estate to Herbert Aptheker. This generated work for about a dozen research assistants, including the teenaged edition of yours truly. Du Bois died in Ghana the day before Martin Luther King memorably addressed the quarter-million souls thronged at the Lincoln Memorial after their March on Washington. King was the event’s last speaker; a few hours earlier Roy Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the NAACP (which Du Bois co-founded in 1909), had informed the crowd of Du Bois’ passing. (See the program below.)

Sixty years on, I remember that day. Tomorrow will mark a personal milestone, one I’ll leave my readers to sleuth out.

Rothbard on Aptheker on Slavery

Aptheker and Rothbard — Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003) and Murray Rothbard (1926-1995)

For over forty years, my political history had two Jewish New York intellectual “bookends,” the communist Herbert Aptheker and the libertarian Murray Rothbard. In 2009 “Austro-Athenian” libertarian philosopher Roderick T. Long, in a blog post that first bore this one’s title, noted the overlap of their thought, at least on the subject of slavery, without noting the irony of that convergence.

Before going our separate ways home after a session of Murray’s seminar on the history of economic thought (at New York University in 1984), I gingerly mentioned to Murray that ten years earlier I had worked as Aptheker’s research assistant. His eyes widened in delight. He then told me how “interesting” he had found aspects of Aptheker’s The American Revolution, a subject on which he, Murray, had written Conceived in Liberty (five volumes). This was more cognitive dissonance than I could handle, so I didn’t pursue the topic. (I now regret passing on that opportunity, but then my association with Aptheker was still something I want to move away from.)[1]

Professor Long’s post needs no further preface. Here the link to it: Rothbard on Aptheker on Slavery. I welcome comment.

Note

[1] “. . . [T]he ‘Consensus’ school of historians . . . became ascendant in the 1940s and 1950s. Just as the Progressives reflected the Marxian outlook of American intellectuals of the 1930s, so the Consensus school reflected the neo-Conservative ‘American celebration’ that typified intellectuals in post-World War II America. . . . [B]y deprecating the revolutionary nature of the American Revolution, the Consensus school could isolate it from the indisputably radical French Revolution and other modern upheavals, and continue to denounce the latter as ideological and socially disruptive while seeming to embrace the founding heritage of America. The leading Consensus historians were Daniel J. Boorstin and Clinton Rossiter. . . .

“. . . But the Consensus historians did make one important contribution. They restored the older idea of the American Revolution as a movement of the great majority of the American people. It replaced the view held by Progressives and Imperialists alike that the revolution was a minority action imposed on a reluctant public. Particularly important in developing this position was the judicious work by John Richard Alden, The American Revolution, 1775–1783, still the best one volume book on the revolutionary war period. On the left, the Marxian historian Herbert Aptheker also advanced this position. He chided the 1930s Progressives for their opposition to the revolution as a minority class movement in The American Revolution, 1763–1783.” Murray Rothbard, “Modern Historians Confront the American Revolution: Bibliographic Essay,” Literature of Liberty, No. 1, March 1, 1978, https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/modern-historians-confront-american-revolution. (Emphasis added.—A.G.F.)

Dogmatic Uncertainty

Not wanting this month to fade away without my having posted something, I reproduce my critique of Sean Gabb‘s epistemological musings from twenty years ago. I’m not picking on him, just rummaging through old essays to see if any are worth being worn in public again on this site. On my old one I wrote that the “firmest hand in England writing on behalf of classical liberal ideas belongs to Dr. Sean Gabb. Only when he wandered near philosophy proper did I find something to disagree with him about.” Below is my reply to his “On Being Uncertain: A Case for Scepticism,” Free Life Commentary, No. 105, 26 May 2003. He graciously published this criticism in his Free Life: A Journal of Classical Liberal and Libertarian Thought, Issue 47, 4 August 2003. (The links given on my old site are as dead as doornails.)

Dogmatic Uncertainty

“Murderous conviction” are the last words of Sean Gabb’s odd rhetorical exercise, but we must begin with them to understand what precedes them.

He argues that if no one knows anything for certain, then that’s true of agents of the State. Having no convictions at all, one can have no murderous convictions. For those who value their lives and property, utter lack of conviction is therefore a mental state it would be good for everyone to be in.

At first this reminded me of Jackie Mason’s comic observation that if there weren’t any food, there wouldn’t be any garbage. Upon reflection I noticed more serious difficulties. For one, lack of knowledge and lack of conviction do not correlate. One may be full of conviction on matters of which one has the weakest grasp, and cautious to the point of immobility where one is expert. Nescience is therefore no sure impediment to conviction, murderous or otherwise.

There are other problems with Mr. Gabb’s deduction. For one, he cannot, except arbitrarily, restrict nescience to agents of the State. If the State’s victims are equally ignorant, then they cannot ever hope to learn that the State exploits them. He may, of course, retort that while they may not know with certainty that they are victims of the State, they can come to know it, and many other things, “as surely as they need to.” The qualifier “with certainty” now becomes a false knot, and the slightest tug undoes the whole modern “problem” of knowledge and its latent skepticism. And into this crevice pours all that we normally count as knowledge, namely, fallible, probable judgment.

Mr. Gabb implicitly believes that we leap beyond the evidence when we claim to know with certainty the things he claims to doubt. The implicit norm, of course, is that one ought not leap beyond the evidence, but rather proportion one’s belief to it. That is, he values the exigent mind, but unfortunately conceives it according to the modern fixation with theoretical doubt. Of course, he never lets that doubt immobilize him, any more than Hume’s philosophy ever caused him to miss his appointment with the gaming room.

Mr. Gabb’s excruciatingly subjective, personal position, to the effect that he is cognitively holed up in his mind, intends a real world in which things are what they are, and wishing them otherwise will not make them so. This dynamic of self-transcendence is a homing device that orients us toward reality. It is as inescapably his as it is ours. It marks us as human. But he has ideas that lead him to misinterpret that inner compass’s readings. Continue reading “Dogmatic Uncertainty”

The contingencies of history: how John Hope Franklin might have become W. E. B. Du Bois’s assistant (thereby almost certainly preventing me and others from becoming Aptheker’s)

In November of 1943, Dr. Rufus Clement (1900-1967), President of Atlanta (now Clark Atlanta) University, forced W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) to resign his professorship effective the end of June 1944. Their views on the best course of action for Black Americans were incompatible, and Clement had the upper hand.

Pondering his next move, Du Bois conferred with James E. Shepard (1875-1947), a longtime friend and founder of North Carolina College (now North Carolina Central University) in the spring of 1944. Du Bois could have any position he wanted, Shepard promised. Perhaps Du Bois could continue editing Phylon, which he had founded at Atlanta U in 1940. Intrigued by this unforeseen offer, Du Bois replied in the affirmative, but said he’d need an assistant: at 76, he still had many plans but had to be realistic about how much sand remained in the upper bulb of his life’s hourglass.

Shepard recommended John Hope Franklin (1915-2009). His parents had named him after Du Bois’s friend, co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), past president of Atlanta and then of Morehouse College until 1936. Shepard suggested that the young scholar could take over editing duties when Du Bois retired. (No mere mortal knew that almost two decades of activism and writing still lay ahead of him.) Shepard introduced the men to each other, and they seemed to have hit it off, but Franklin knew he was but one of several men under consideration, and no decision was forthcoming for two years.

Suddenly, however, this prospect evaporated. Walter E. White (1893-1955), NAACP Executive Secretary, met with Du Bois during his trip to New York later that spring (1944), inviting him to return to the organization he had co-founded in 1909—the one he resigned from acerbically a decade earlier. White offered him the position of Director of Special Research with an office in its Manhattan headquarters on West 40^th Street across the street from the main building of the New York Public Library.

The reservations Du Bois may have had about returning did not prevail. “Had Dr. Du Bois returned to North Carolina College,” Franklin wrote, “founded a magazine [sic: Phylon had already been founded], and subsequently retired, leaving the periodical in my hands, I can only surmise that my future would have been quite different.” (Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005, 116-118.)

And not just his future. Moving to New York, Du Bois was back in the same city as Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), the white author of American Negro Slave Revolts, which Columbia University published in 1943. Aptheker asked to meet; they kept their appointment sometime in mid-1946.

Franklin, a Harvard Ph.D., who was racially prevented from serving in the army at a level commensurate with his research training, but had years of teaching under his belt by the war’s end. Contrast his situation with that of Aptheker, a combat veteran of that war and a Columbia Ph.D., but one whose Communist Party affiliation in the early years of the Cold War made him academically radioactive. Also, a condition of his Guggenheim Fellowship (1946-1947) was that he couldn’t take any other employment.

In their conversations about editing Du Bois’s correspondence and papers, Aptheker suggested that he consider Black scholars not weighed down by Aptheker’s political baggage. Du Bois wouldn’t hear of it: Aptheker was “by far the best fitted person” for the job. (Gary Murrell, “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States”: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker, UMass Press, 62-63)

Ironically, Du Bois regarded his decision to return to the NAACP to be, as Franklin put it, “the worst decision he ever made.” Franklin says Du Bois’s “second autobiography,” that is, Dusk at Dawn, attests to this, but a book published in 1940 could not report on an event that lay five years in its future. Chapter XIX of his third autobiography, however, written 1958-1959, is entitled “My Return to the NAACP.” (Therein one finds much evidence supporting the judgment “worst decision,” but not those very words.) The contrast between Du Bois’s satisfaction with Aptheker and dissatisfaction with White’s abuse of the privilege of hiring him could not be starker.

But for White’s invitation to Du Bois—unexpected, given their strongly divergent views on the priority of Black education and racial desegregation—it is virtually certain that Hugh Murray and I would not have worked as Aptheker’s research assistants on the Du Bois projects in the early 1970s. What shape those projects would have taken under another’s editorial supervision and institutional connections and resources is a matter of speculation. But it is speculation that invites reflection on the seeming contingencies of history.

Man’s “true self”: my reply to critics

Last December, I asked Bill Vallicella, my philosophical interlocuter of almost two decades, why in a Substack essay he referred to the soul as one’s “true self.” I noticed only recently, however, that I hadn’t commented on his reply (or the comments it received), and the window for that combox closed some time ago; thus this belated post.

Bill had written on the atheist Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011):

Those of us who champion free speech [Bill writes] miss him and what he would have had to say about the current state of the world had he taken care of himself, or rather his body, his true self being his soul.

On Bill’s blog, I asked:

Briefly, why do you refer to the soul as one’s “true self”? Genesis 2:7 reports that from the dust of the ground (ha-adamah) God created ha-adam, i.e., “the man.” The man became a living soul (le-nephesh hayyah) when God breathed the breath of life (nishmat hayyim) into him. The pre-animated ha-adamah was neither dead nor a “less-than-true” or incomplete human being; the animating nephesh is not the man’s self or ego. When God withdraws the breath of life from a soul, that soul dies. I think know your non-Genesis source, but I want to hear it from you. Your passing comment reminded me that I had written quite a bit about this earlier this year [i.e., in 2022].

Bill replied:

What I wrote suggests that there is a difference between body and soul in a person, and that the soul is the person’s self. But why true self? Well, if I can exist without a body, but I cannot exist without (being identical to) a soul, then “my” soul, or rather me qua soul is “my” true self.

I invite my reader to consider Bill’s 634-word post. Here I can only reply to points of contention, not work out a biblical anthropology.

Continue reading “Man’s “true self”: my reply to critics”

“Presuppositionalism”: a reply to an implicit criticism

In “Christ on the Possibility of Social Order without Christ (Matt. 12:24-6)”, an anonymous blogger led into his polemic against “political presuppositionalism” with a swipe at unnamed advocates of generic “presuppositionalism.”

Presuppositionalism, at least in some of its articulations, is the Christian epistemological and apologetical philosophy according to which knowledge is only possible on the condition of a self-conscious presupposition of the existence of God and the truth of his revealed word. One of the problems with presuppositionalism, at least insofar as it represents a distinct theory, is that it confuses the metaphysical conditions for the possibility of knowledge with the epistemological conditions for the possibility of knowledge. God’s existence and role as first cause may be metaphysically necessary for there to be knowledge, but it doesn’t follow from this that God has therefore made it the case that the presupposition of these truths is necessary to have knowledge. (The Natural Law Libertarian, June 19, 2023)

No, presupposing the worldview is necessary, not to have truth, but in order to give an account of how one has it. Accounting for knowledge is an epistemological task.

Continue reading ““Presuppositionalism”: a reply to an implicit criticism”

Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 7: The Apostles, Governing the Tribes of the Mediatorial Nation Israel, Will Identify the Nations with Christ

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

Baptism as identification also has a future application: the so-called “great commission.”[1] In the KJV of Matthew 28:19 Jesus’ command is rendered this way:

Go (πορευθέντες, poreutentes) ye therefore, and teach (μαθητεύσατε, mathēteusate) all nations, baptizing (βαπτίζοντες, baptizontes) them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

Sellers notes three things. The first is that Jesus was speaking to the eleven apostles: this is the apostles’ commission under the conditions of the future manifest Kingdom of God, not ours in the dispensation of grace. The second is that those to be identified are nations, not individuals. The third is that imperative mood in the Greek qualifies the verb “to teach,” not “to go.” Let’s take the last point first.

Jesus doesn’t direct His apostles to go anywhere: poreutentes is a participle form of πορεύω; if Jesus wanted to command them to go, the inspired writer could have written πορεύου (poreuou), the imperative form, but he didn’t. He wrote πορευθέντες (poreuthentes):

It was to these men just before His arrest that the Lord Jesus said, “You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you, and appoint you that you should go and bring forth fruit” (John 15:16). He did not tell them when or where they should go, but they knew from His words that in due time they would be going. After His death, burial and resurrection, He took up the same theme again by saying “having gone” or “going then.” This is one word in the Greek (poreuthentes). It is a participle which is an auxiliary to the main verb which is matheteusate (disciple). He did not say “Go” or “Go ye,” as many wish that He had and finish up putting these words into His mouth.

Continue reading “Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 7: The Apostles, Governing the Tribes of the Mediatorial Nation Israel, Will Identify the Nations with Christ”

Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 6: One Merges with Christ by Believing on Him

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Otis Q. Sellers with daughter Jane (left), and wife Mildred, 1934, the year he vowed, “I’m going to do my own studies!”

According to Sellers, in 1 Corinthians 12:13—“For in one Spirit are we all baptized (merged) into one body . . . and are all made to drink of one Spirit”—theologians have found a doctrine of the body of Christ. Believers allegedly become members of this body through baptism. But, Sellers, argued:

The truth declared in the promise “He shall baptize you in the Holy Spirit” and the truth declared in the words “in one Spirit are we all baptized in one body” are not the same. The first has to do with Jesus Christ identifying men with the Holy Spirit, and the second has to do with the fact that those “identified in one Spirit” are merged in one body.

Sellers builds up to his defense of that distinction by adducing Romans 6:3, which he believes refers to the most important baptism in the Bible: that of being baptized (ἐβαπτίσθημεν, ebaptisthēmen) into Jesus Christ by being baptized (ἐβαπτίσθημεν) into His death. Paul avowed Christ, and Christ will do the same for him before the Father: “Whosoever shall be avowing Me before men, him will I also be avowing before My Father Who is in Heaven (Matthew 10:33). Continue reading “Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 6: One Merges with Christ by Believing on Him”

Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 5: Identification with the Holy Spirit, Who Produces an Attitude of Submission to the Kingdom

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

503 Chestnut St., Winnetka IL, the building where Otis Q. Sellers lived in 1935 (before moving to Grand Rapids, MI in 1936) and wrote “The Glory of the One Baptism.”

The first way to submit was to accept John’s baptism, a water ceremony God gave him to perform. God regarded Israelites who underwent it as submissive to the Kingdom. They thereby incurred responsibility, and failure to meet it entailed dire consequences.

To illustrate this, Sellers invoked the military recruitment drive in the United States that began after Pearl Harbor. Millions of civilians became, by a solemn ceremony, oath, and profession of submission, members of the U.S. military. “In this oath there is a promise of submission. So, once a man steps forward, raises his right hand, repeats the oath, he becomes identified with the military, he is no longer a civilian.” Any transgressions he might commit are adjudicated by the system of military, not civilian justice.

Jesus underwent John’s baptism because He wanted to be identified with Israel’s submissive ones: “I do not seek my own will, but the will of him who sent me (John 5:30); “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to accomplish His work (John 4:34). John’s ceremony didn’t add to this submissiveness, but it did identify Him with those who were submissive, thereby “fulfilling all righteousness” (Matthew 3:15).

John the Baptist was a divinely commissioned herald. It was his duty to announce what God told him to announce. He would have been unfaithful if he had changed the message by addition, omission, or alteration. The first word of his proclamation was μετανοεῖτε (metanoeite). This means “be submitting,” and it indicates a state or condition, something that would be true of them every day of their lives.

Submission is an attitude toward God that His Spirit produces in men.

Continue reading “Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 5: Identification with the Holy Spirit, Who Produces an Attitude of Submission to the Kingdom”

Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 4: John’s Identification of Israel’s Submissive Ones with the Kingdom of God

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

The rulers in Israel, Sellers wrote, “showed great zeal for the commandments and traditions of men such as the washing (νίψωνται, nipsontai; see Mark 7:3-4) of pots, cups, copper vessels, and couches.

The ceremonial application of water in any manner was held to be especially devout (Mark 7:7-9). These “washings” were called baptisms [διαφόροις βαπτισμοῖς, diaphorois baptismois; Hebrews 9:10), but many of them were not out of God. They were merely the traditional practices of men. John did not take one of these “baptisms” and make it a practice of his own.[1]

John had to have baptized himself before he could baptize others. “I do not think that John played a childish game with one of his disciples saying: ‘I will baptize you and then you can baptize me.’ John the Baptist had divine authority to baptize, and thus the title. This was not a nickname given him because he baptized. . . . He was John the Baptizer before he ever baptized even one person.” He “had the divine authority and he had the ceremony. Both of these were given to him by God.

No one can say today exactly what this ceremony was. It seems to have been a simple dipping into water. Neither do we know what words were spoken. . . . We would suppose that his words would have referred to their avowal of submission and a declaration that they were now identified with the submissive ones in Israel. This was the declared purpose of his baptism: “I indeed identify you by means of the water into submission [μετάνοιαν, metanoian].” (Matthew 3:11).

Sellers saw an analogy between being baptized and enlisting in military service. Yes, the taking of an oath is a ceremony, but one whose performance enacts an irrevocable reality: the enlistee is no longer a civilian but a solider subject to Uniform Code of Military Justice. Continue reading “Sellers’s Baptismology, Part 4: John’s Identification of Israel’s Submissive Ones with the Kingdom of God”