“To keep it very short, one wonders whether you have read Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith–surely his best and most significant work, and hard-edged despite the perfumed style he picked up at the Harvard of that day.”

I’m unfamiliar with this work, Eugene, although not unfamiliar with Santayana.

It is an old gambit you play in regard to Fides, and the reference to Regulus and Aurelius Augustinus once again pertains.

To keep it very short, one wonders whether you have read Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith–surely his best and most significant work, and hard-edged despite the perfumed style he picked up at the Harvard of that day.

And with these elucidations, comprehenson.

The breadth here is exhaustive with the lynchpin, of course, Laing’s concept, with which, I might add, I have some familiarity. Of Laing, and of your applying of him here, I would have this to say: While nihilism may be an understandable response to the “hypocrisy and pathological emptiness the old have bequeathed” the young, it is by no means the only or the healthiest response. For their sake, I don’t think we simply settle for it. Despair is not an end in itself, neither is it even valid, for suffering always points to something better, something to which it compares itself. And this awareness of something better is innate, it comes with the territory. In Catholic theology it is called “the natural desire for God”, a concept that was quite pivotal in the early 20th century debates over the relation of nature and grace which so profoundly effected the outcomes at the Second Vatican Council. And it is precisely here that we understand both why it is that the Enlightenment’s vision of an exclusive reign of reason has made nihilism the only possible recourse for humanity and come to regret the jettisoning of the priests and the rabbis. At best the promise of reason is ambivalent; in it there are both atom bombs and miracle cures. No so with faith.

There’s an annual AIPAC dinner in the San Francisco Bay Area each December. Local peace groups have protested it before. We need to step it up in December 2008 and get media coverage as we did with last weekend’s die in.

I was referring to your “challenged guy in robes” as a response to “fear of the Future”.

My tendency is not to blame the young for the hypocrisy and pathological emptiness the old have bequeathed them, and to which nihilism, or seeming nihilism, is often the most rational response.

Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor is as pertinent in that context as a Schopenhauer, a Nietzsche, or, in a much different manner, a Kazantzakis.

And, incidentally, mentioning that you did not call Schopenhauer an “atheist”, which was once a reflex among certain of the “theologians”, was a compliment, if lightly put.

It is, merely by the way and perhaps beyond the understanding of most, my inability to accept Hegel as anything but a very learned clown, that prevents me from adopting Marxism save as a critical and analytical tool. One supposes, if really pushed, one might play at the devilish and tongue in cheek “bad faith” of Sartre in that department.

Sartre’s existentialism, on the other hand, is seriously logically flawed, so why bother?

The grosser ideologies of the last century are dying or dead, including “Capitalism”. This will take some time to unfold.

R.D. Laing was a profoundly interesting fellow, and in a sense one of the first real “anti-psychiatriasts”, though he may have denied that name.

His work, which included a first-rate piece of poetry, “Knots”, is well worth the time and effort.

I am no fan of Gregory Bateson, whose thinking is very mixed, but his positing of the “Doublebind” in a specific familial or social setting is also key.

Politically speaking, the United States Constitution is, at least in part, a document of the Englightenment, and it is exactly that which is being attacked, most cunningly by the Straussians.

It is also no secret just how anti-Englightenment the Roman Catholic Church has been over the past few centuries, including the dog and pony show that was the first Vatican Council.

My reference to Aurelius Augustinus on Regulus is more pertinent than it appears perhaps.

That Strauss’ “Athens and Jerusalem” is pulling a Zionist rabbit out of an otherwise empty Old Testament hat does not mean that any more genuinely held version–Paul on the Areopagus–is necessarily more persuasive.

In some ways the early Christians, Pauline or not, were the nihilists of their time. What many Romans could not accept was not what they were saying, but their very Judaic claim to exclusive, divinely revealed possession of it.

Strauss and his followers, a very shallowly educated lot, have tried to turn the same claim, not even sincerely held, to their own uses. The argument is that the masses need to be manipulated by their sort of “philosopher”, and religion is a useful tool, so why not ply the “divinity” of the Old Testament.

It is easy enough to read this in some of the ex-Trotskyite “Neo-conservatives” as turning Marx’s opium on its head.

Like Parsley and Hagee they have a soothing snake oil to sell.

It is debatable which is the least debilitating kickapoo, not only to the consumers, but to those intimidated by the supposed holiness a label sporting so many traditional icons.

You know, I hadn’t even realized that I’d ventured into some philosophical equivalent of a gated community when Eugene launched out with the Schopenhauer business. If I’d had anyone specifically in mind - and I hadn’t - it more likely would have been, say, Kant, Compte, Schilling, Hegel and Marx. The idea had been to fashion the complaint around a view that embraced reason and scientific methodology as the sole avenue to truth, without question the prevailing view at the present time. A culture with such limited access has all the merit of resistance to a hazardous waste initiative in the former Czechoslovak Peoples Republic.

That’s where the policy’s coming from, and that’s the political reason it can’t be stopped. That’s why the Democratic party is useless as an “opposition”.

But of course, we all know what happened to Rachel Corrie. Nobody’s going to get seriously hurt protesting in front of Pelosi’s house, even if they trespass over barriers like these protesters are doing, desperately trying to make themselves heard.

But just try doing this at the Israeli embassy. They’d mow you down in one second, claiming their sacrosanct “self-defense”, and no American politician, nobody in the Israeli-occupied US government, nobody who wants to keep a job in DC, would dare to speak up for you.