Greg Gauthier

A Philosophical Journal

Two Routes to the Same Good

Plato and Aristotle were very different thinkers. They came at the same fundamental philosophical problems from radically different directions. Rafael nicely characterized this in his famous “School of Athens” painting – Plato, ever the tutor, sternly pointing to the sky; Aristotle, the indignant pupil, gesturing reflexively toward the earth. But this image is somewhat deceiving. To anyone unfamiliar with the territory, you might walk away from the work thinking that Plato and Aristotle differed fundamentally, rather than merely instrumentally.

The Garden of Liberty

This is a fantastic video. Highly recommend, especially today. Just a few caveats: He over-emphasizes Milton, and under-emphasizes the influence of Locke and Rousseau. Milton actually precedes Locke by about 25 years, and Rousseau by about 100 years. Milton was a proto-Enlightenment figure, who’s literary work seeded the ground for Enlightenment political philosophy (much the same way that Dostoevsky seeded the ground for Nietzsche and Marx after him). He characterizes Milton’s understanding of “rights” by reading Jefferson and Madison’s view backward into him.

A Future History of Vice

We now live in an era in which Pride is Sovereign, and his two concubines Vanity and Lust are his apostles amongst men of weak will. He is the inevitable successor to the rule of his brother Greed and his two accomplices, Sloth and Gluttony. Pride’s rule will come to an end, eventually. But it will not be by succession. There is but one Sovereign of vice remaining, and he has no patience for seduction.

Pride Is Nothing to Celebrate

“…It was Pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels…” - St. Augustine The layers of inversion involved in “pride” month are breathtaking when you really look into the matter. Thomas Aquinas says of the sin of Pride, that it is “inordinate self-love [which] is the cause of every sin… the root of pride is found to consist in man not being, in some way, subject to God and His rule.

Telos Is Arche

From Love, Friendship, Beauty, and the Good: Plato, Aristotle, and the Later Tradition by Kevin Corrigan: "…Just as teaching and learning involve two different subjects, but constitute a single activity (energeia) from different perspectives, so also what is an action or an external motive force from one viewpoint is a manifestation of the deepest reality from another viewpoint. The same activity involves two distinct subjects but is nonetheless a single activity seen from two different points of view.

Negotiating the Value of a Single Life

In 1973, Ursula Le Guin wrote a short story about a utopian city called 'Omelas'. The story is, at its core, a philosophical thought experiment. To summarize: Let’s just accept for the sake of argument, a city that is so self-sufficient, and so devoid of want or suffering or strife that the people of the city were able to live in an unceasing state of joyous bliss. Every season involved weeks-long festivals of celebration, and nobody was deprived of any need, material, moral, or psychological.

A Conservative Starter Library

Here are some 20th century books that guided me away from contemporary American Liberalism (and its Germanic progressive bias), and contributed to my understanding of Conservatism as an evolving worldview. I will offer four philosophical, and four political suggestions: Philosophical: After Virtue (1984), Alasdair MacIntyre - This book began my divorce with both Enlightenment modernism, and the English analytical tradition. MacIntyre makes a powerful case for Aristotelian ethics, and against the Germans, especially.

The Death of the Transcendent

A good one from Paul Joseph Watson: The emptying out of The Beautiful has finally come to fruition. As a civilization, we now worship nihilism in truth thanks to Rorty, Derrida, Simon Blackburn and others; nihilism in goodness thanks to Russell, Mackie, Hare, Foucault, and others; and nihilism in beauty, thanks to a long train of motley vandals starting at the beginning of the 20th century (some of them mentioned here in Watson’s video).

Marxism as False Religion

The ‘marxist professor’ (Glenn Bracey, Villanova) highlighted by the video linked in this article is not wrong in the most broad outline, about Marx’s theory of alienation, as a critique of commodity markets. He just so mangled and misapplied the concept that it’s almost unrecognisable. The theory of alienation is about the separation of human activity from fundamental human nature. It’s a metaphysical theory about where value derives from in the products of human labor.

Change, Technology, and Society

Once again, I am inspired to respond to Bryan Lunduke. This time, he posted the following commentary on the inevitability of change in tech, and it inspired the subsequent short editorial response. Not All Change Is Good When I was young, I naively and enthusiastically embraced all technological changes. The more ubiquitous the tech, the better. The more connected, the better. The more distributed, the better. The more integrated, the better!