Brand Blanshard – Anthony G. Flood

AnthonyFlood.com: An Emerald Anniversary Retrospective

December 2004, Executive Assistant to William J. Ledger, M.D., Chairman Emeritus, Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology, Weill Cornell Medical College. Note the Three Musketeers bar in the shirt pocket.

Twenty years ago today I launched this site’s ancestor: AnthonyFlood.com. (No middle initial.) Building it with Microsoft’s (no-longer-supported) FrontPage, made to order for this low-tech bookworm, I had swiped the look and feel of a color specialist’s site (how could I go wrong?), chose a font that conveys text to the brain with the least eyestrain (Verdana 10-pt Bold), slapped an image of the Owl of Athena in the upper left corner, and experimented with log lines. (An early mouthful was “Where Panentheism, Revisionism, and Anarchocapitalism Coalesce,” developed here; later, the terser “Philosophy against Misosophy.”)

A lifetime ago, I had it “all figured out”: Whitehead in philosophy, political economy via Rothbard, historical revisionism (e.g., Acton, Barnes). I scanned, in some cases typed from scratch, articles from my paper archives and formatted them for the site. Many global visitors (sometimes descendants of the authors) sent encouraging notes of appreciation for bringing the text of not easily accessible essays to their attention. The articles are worthless for citation purposes, of course, but readers hungry for their contents can consume them.

The site’s live, but dormant; I can no longer update it; it’s all I can do to maintain this one. Take a gander at the index. Behold its holdings for Blanshard, Langer, Lonergan, Hartshorne, Rothbard, Whitehead. My dear friend (and fellow Aptheker research assistant) Hugh Murray (an anthology of whose historical essays I’m editing) has his portal.

And, last but not least, this writer, roadkill in the fight to publish or perish outside of academia, at least had a platform for stuff he wrote that others might consider as he eked out a living in the “corporate world.”

Maverick Philosopher William F. Vallicella, Ph.D., in the hills of Gold Canyon, AZ

One of those others is Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, an analyst’s analyst and early (and continuing) source of encouragement and criticism. (An earlier version of his site is approaching its 2oth.) He thought enough of an essay of John Deck’s (posted because, I say, it “broke Thomism’s hold on me”—I was well on my way to that waste of time called panentheism) to critique my appreciation of Deck. This sparked a decades-long correspondence and a friendship that transcends our differences.

Continue reading “AnthonyFlood.com: An Emerald Anniversary Retrospective”

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.

1949: What were my influencers doing?

Last December 15th in Birdland, 1949-1965: Hard Bop Mecca, I marked the 70th anniversary of the opening of that legendary Jazz club on Manhattan’s Broadway off 52nd Street. Over the weekend I wondered what else was going on that year, but not the trivia one can learn from Wikipedia, such as:

- President Harry S. Truman’s inauguration in January
- Astronomer Fred Hoyle’s coining of “big bang” (a term of disparagement) in March
- Hamlet’s Best Picture Oscar win later that month
- The opening of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in February at the Morosco (six blocks south of Birdland’s near-future site)
- The Soviet Union’s successful A-bomb test in August and Truman’s sharing that news a month later
- Twin Communist victories: the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on the first of October and of the German Democratic Republic a week later.

World War Two was in the rearview mirror. but the Cold War with its threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction was straight ahead.

No, I was remembering what writers who influenced me over the past fifty years were doing in 1949. Most of the embedded links below will take you to posts that elaborate upon that influence. Continue reading “1949: What were my influencers doing?”

“Helping you navigate this dispensation’s last days”: What do I mean?

Before launching this site in October 2018, I put a tagline under my name in the masthead. At first, it referred rather boringly to the half-century of retrospective I wanted to set down here. I eventually changed it to “Navigating this dispensation’s last days” and cited a couple of Biblical verses to justify the reference to “dispensation.”

Still boring, perhaps, but at least it suggested the unity of my interests.

My understanding of the current historical phase—the dispensation of the grace of God (Ephesians 3:2)—informs how I evaluate events, arguments, apologetics, liberty and threats thereto, and everything else, and therefore what I write on this blog. Every visitor here should know that. We’re living in this dispensation’s last days with its syndrome of 21 wicked symptoms (2 Timothy 3).

That unity hasn’t always been clear. The hundred-plus posts published so far have struck even me as an aggregate, not an organic whole, a “many” without an obvious “one.” Mixed messaging may have resulted.

Brand Blanshard (1892-1989)

Greg L. Bahnsen (1948-1995)

For example, if an essay on Brand Blanshard or C. E. M. Joad drew you in, you may have been put off by posts on the metapologetics of Greg Bahnsen (which he learned from Cornelius Van Til).

Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987)

Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995)

Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003)

Or perhaps you appreciated reading about the libertarian Murray Rothbard, but couldn’t care less about Stalinist Herbert Aptheker or Trotskyist George Novack.

(Or vice versa.)

Then there’s my goal, puzzling to some who know me, of producing a life-and-thought study of Otis Q. Sellers, the independent dispensationalist you’ve probably never heard of.

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992)

The manuscript is growing, but as I’m challenged to summarize his thought (already clearly expressed, but spread out over many publications and recordings), I’ll be blogging much of the rest of the book into existence. Continue reading ““Helping you navigate this dispensation’s last days”: What do I mean?”

Reflections on Ernst Cassirer

Ernst Cassirer

Over the years I have collected several short essays on the great morphologist of the human spirit, Ernst Cassirer (July 28, 1874—April 13, 1945) by very different thinkers whom I also admire and posted them on my other site. Here I provide links to them and excerpts from them, in the hope that they will stimulate interest in Cassirer and the problems he wrestled with.[1]

In his review of Cassirer’s An Essay on Man, Brand Blanshard sounds a note of disappointment:

It is hard not to think, as one reads a book so wealthy as this in historic and scientific erudition, but at the same time so oddly inconclusive, that Cassirer was rather a distinguished reflective scholar than a great speculative philosopher. The learning is not mobilized in the interest of any theory; the book is not so much an “essay on man” as a series of essays, all suggestive and enlightening, which converge on—what? It is hard to say. Perhaps there is no end, or harmony of ends, toward which all these activities are moving. But then, on Cassirer’s own showing, no philosophy of man would seem to be practicable; there would only be a theory of art, a theory of religion, and so on. This is in fact what he gives us. And an admirable gift it is, for which I, at least, am thankful. Only it is not what he sets out to give, nor all that the reader hoped to gain.

William Schultz, in his Cassirer and Langer on Myth, commented directly on Blanshard’s assessment:

Here is the assumption of a continental philosopher that a system must ‘converge’ on something or lead to an overall unity of experience, an ideal unity. To some extent, the criticism is correct, for the main arguments are not in An Essay on Man, yet Cassirer’s claims about the need for unity should have alerted Blanshard that they were in his previous books, as Cassirer himself said in the Preface to that work written almost twenty years after the three-volume masterpiece [The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms]. Ironically, both Blanshard and Cassirer share some of the same assumptions about what philosophy should do, but Blanshard did not study Cassirer’s work enough to recognize the revolutionary way in which Cassirer satisfies traditional expectations about what a philosophy is and does.

The other subject of Schultz’s study, Susanne Langer (1895-1985), the German-American philosopher whose thought was shaped to a large degree by her early absorption of Cassirer’s writings in the original as they were published, contributed an essay his theory of language and myth to the Library of Living Philosophers volume dedicated to him.

Continue reading “Reflections on Ernst Cassirer”

The spiritual preconditions of rational debate: Eric Voegelin’s diagnosis revisited

The “national conversation” Leftists urge us to have about social order is about as genuine as Mao Zedong’s Hundred Flowers Campaign and, for patriots tempted to participate, about as safe. Debate has spiritual conditions, and the Left-dominated academedia complex guarantees that they’re rarely, if ever, met (except perhaps among family, friends, and trusted associates, at least for now).

No one made that point with greater profundity and learning than Eric Voegelin. On November 2, 2018 I posted a vignette of my interaction with the great philosopher of consciousness, enriched by extensive quotes from his classic essay, “On Debate and Existence.” Our perilous times call for reposting it. Those who vaguely remember it should take another look; it’ll be new for those who don’t.—Anthony Flood

Eric Voegelin: no debate without accord on existential order

(First published November 2, 2018)

“What ‘banged’?”

That was the derisive reaction of Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) to someone’s mentioning the prevailing cosmology, the Big Bang theory (not to be confused with the television comedy whose theme song’s lyrics encapsulate the disordered cosmology Voegelin analyzed*).

He asked that rhetorical question on March 26, 1983 in Newton, Massachusetts during a Friday night-Saturday afternoon conference arranged by organizers of the annual Lonergan Workshops. (During that year’s meeting in June I’d meet Bernard J. F. Lonergan, SJ, whose mind I revered as much as Voegelin’s.)

Being a Rothbardian libertarian, I could hardly resist asking Voegelin about the seminars that Ludwig von Mises led in Vienna in the twenties. Smiling, Voegelin said he appreciated learning from Mises that inflation is not an increase in prices but rather the central bank’s increase in the money supply not commensurate with an increase in production of commodities. (A government may politically “freeze” prices, but then the economic effect of the inflation, that is, of the physical increase, is a shortage of the goods whose prices were frozen.)

At the cocktail hour I asked Voegelin (I paraphrase from memory) how he could communicate with scholars whose grasp of the historical material was far below his (among whom he did not number Father Lonergan, but I certainly include myself). “With a kind of controlled irony,” he deadpanned.

Continue reading “The spiritual preconditions of rational debate: Eric Voegelin’s diagnosis revisited”

Brand Blanshard on wisdom

Brand Blanshard. Photo by Richard P. Lewis, published in “Man of Reason: In Memoriam Brand Blanshard.” “A memorial service in honor of Brand Blanshard was held December 16, 1987, in Dwight Memorial Chapel of Yale University. The memories and appreciations spoken that day and some from letters are printed in this booklet,” which Roberta Yerkes Blanshard, his widow, mailed me on May 5, 1992.—Anthony Flood

The wisdom that American philosopher Brand Blanshard (August 27, 1892-November 18, 1987) sought was not intelligible in terms of his rationalism and determinism. (Of course, wisdom is no more intelligible in terms of the empiricism and indeterminism Blanshard opposed.) In the perennial pendulum swing between the static block universe of Parmenides and the endless flux of Heraclitus, Blanshard unambiguously favored the Eleatic thinker over the Ephesian. As Van Til memorably put it, however, one chooses between these anti-theistic options as one chooses hats.[1]

His doctrines could not help him account for the epistemological (or metaphysical or ethical) “hat” he chose. He gave reasons for his choosing, but the deterministic worldview to which he was committed could not ground an account for reason-giving itself.

Nevertheless, it is ironic, pleasantly so, to note that Blanshard articulated precisely and elegantly almost everything one might want to say about wisdom. Today I want you to know, in his own words, what I think he got right.

In my opinion, what he got wrong (and in this he was not alone) was his presupposing, as all non-Christians do, that pursuing wisdom occurs in an impersonal context (rather than in a divinely personal creation). For Blanshard (again, not just for him) wisdom is a possible achievement of the human being. The human being, in turn, is regarded as the ultimate point of reference (or background or “atmosphere”) of that pursuit (or, indeed, of any predication whatsoever). This presupposition of autonomy leads only to one or another species of foolishness.[2]

As followers of this blog know, my work-in-progress is entitled “Philosophy after Christ”—after not only in the sense of temporally subsequent to Christ’s earthly ministry, but also in the sense of “according to” the Wisdom and Truth that Christ is. This post may be taken as another occasional progress report. Continue reading “Brand Blanshard on wisdom”

Brand Blanshard: rationalism’s “working hypothesis” and the Van Tilian verdict

In the discourse we call philosophy, noncognitive interests are in play, interests that compete with, threaten to interfere with if not overwhelm the interest in knowing the truth. Brand Blanshard—the one member of my pantheon of former philosophical heroes whom I could have met, but now regret never having exerted myself to do so—acknowledged their efficacy:

What our intelligence wants is, of course, the truth. What the rest of our nature asks from our intelligence is not what is true but what will satisfy. By that we mean what will appease our impulsive and emotional nature, our longing to be liked, our desire to see our future secure, our character respected, our faith vindicated, our party shown to be the party of sober sense, or nation triumphant. When one considers how hidden and barricaded the truth commonly is, how definite it is, allowing no alternative, how feeble is our passion for it, and how overwhelming the tendencies in us to look for it through distorting prisms, the wonder is not that most of us are irrational but that some of us are as rational as we are.[1]

He denied, however, that non-cognitive interests smothered the interest in truth. He thought it worthwhile to cultivate the latter to see (almost experimentally, ironically enough) how far one could go if one gave reason its head.

Unlike Blanshard’s empiricist and pragmatist critics, however, I affirm an irreducibly distinct love of truth. But that’s because I presuppose that the One who is Truth (John 14:6) created the context within which human truth-seeking takes place and makes sense. Continue reading “Brand Blanshard: rationalism’s “working hypothesis” and the Van Tilian verdict”

Blanshard, Langer and Voegelin on Cassirer

Over the years I’ve collected short essays by and about the morphologist of the human spirit, Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945)* by diverse thinkers I also admire and posted them on my other site.

In his 1944 review of Cassirer’s An Essay on Man, Brand Blanshard sounded a note of disappointment:

It is hard not to think, as one reads a book so wealthy as this in historic and scientific erudition, but at the same time so oddly inconclusive, that Cassirer was rather a distinguished reflective scholar than a great speculative philosopher. The learning is not mobilized in the interest of any theory; the book is not so much an ‘essay on man’ as a series of essays, all suggestive and enlightening, which converge on—what? It is hard to say. Perhaps there is no end, or harmony of ends, toward which all these activities are moving. But then, on Cassirer’s own showing, no philosophy of man would seem to be practicable; there would only be a theory of art, a theory of religion, and so on. This is in fact what he gives us. And an admirable gift it is, for which I, at least, am thankful. Only it is not what he sets out to give, nor all that the reader hoped to gain.

William Schultz commented on Blanshard’s assessment:

The other subject of Schultz’s study was Susanne Langer, whose thought was shaped largely by her absorption of Cassirer’s writings in the original German as they were published. She contributed an essay on his theory of language and myth to the Library of Living Philosophers volume dedicated to him.

. . . myth and language appeared as genuine twin creatures, born of the same phase of human mentality, exhibiting analogous formal traits, despite their obvious diversities of content. Language, on the one hand, seems to have articulated and established mythological concepts, whereas, on the other hand, its own meanings are essentially images functioning mythically. The two modes of thought have grown up together, as conception and expression, respectively, of the primitive human world. . . .

The first dichotomy in the emotive or mythic phase of mentality is not, as for discursive reason, the opposition of ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ of ‘a’ and ‘non-a,’ or truth and falsity; the basic dichotomy here is between the sacred and the profane. Human beings actually apprehend values and expressions of values before they formulate and entertain facts.

Continue reading “Blanshard, Langer and Voegelin on Cassirer”

Return to Philosophy and The Recovery of Belief

The titles of two books by British philosopher C. E. M. Joad (1891-1953) comprise the title of this post. They resonate with me in ways I will try to describe.

Joad’s life and writings are a recent discovery of mine, too recent for me to have dedicated a portal to his essays on my dormant philosophy site as I had done for many other thinkers. I can’t now recall what occasioned Joad’s coming to my attention. Perhaps he wandered onto the stage of his times about which I’ve been reading lately.

It was his prose style, however, that caught and held my attention, which was then drawn to his biography. I get almost as much pleasure from reading Joad as I do Brand Blanshard, Joad’s contemporary, which is to say, a great deal.

The way Joad wrote has reawakened within me the kind of feelings that led me to philosophy almost fifty years ago. A few years ago I found myself unable to write about it anymore after having proposed a metaphilosophy that drew the criticism of William F. Vallicella, a philosopher I respect. I wrote many pages of notes toward a reply, but found myself unable to articulate to my satisfaction my critique of philosophy’s presuppositions, which critique also serves as an apologetic for orthodox Christian theism.

Perhaps I’ve retreated into metaphilosophy because I despair of reaching philosophical conclusions. Really, what end has my site served other than that of displaying my philosophical interests at the expense of committing to definite answers to philosophical questions?

The charge of conflating defense and critique might occur even to sympathetic readers. Such a charge, however, overlooks a key thesis of the critique, namely, that dependence on God, whether acknowledged, unacknowledged, or even denied, underpins every theoretical enterprise. (Even the enterprise of demonstrating the dependence of all theorizing on God.) An implication of the critique is that denial of such dependence is self-stultifying. Even the failure to acknowledge it is an unstable intellectual position.

As it happened, a little book entitled Return to Philosophy (1935) came into my life, and reading it has encouraged me to give the whole thing another try. Maybe. I’m keenly aware that I had begun to pursue worldview-apologetics and metaphilosophy at the expense of actual philosophizing. Whether I have it in me to philosophize any more is an open question.

For most of his life Joad was not only a socialist, but also a professed atheist who became dissatisfied with the worldview that underpinned that profession. He returned to the Church of England of his youth a few years before his death. (He never repented of his socialism, although he increasingly acknowledged, and feared, that the means to that end was a bloated and rights-violating state.) In The Recovery of Belief (1953) the many arguments he had relied on in support of his atheism pass in review. Some of them are arguments that have occurred to me, as have Joad’s criticisms thereof.

An ex-Communist myself, I experienced my own recovery of belief about forty years ago. The work of relating my return to my recovery, however, is a work in progress. This blog may provide a platform for it.