Eternal recurrence
Ah, look, an old friend returns. At that post of Stephen Law’s on Anselm’s proof we talked about the other day. Old friend returns in characteristic form – posting thirty or forty thousand words in each comment, talking about hermeneutics and Gadamer and Hermamer and gadaneutics until the wallpaper starts to peel spontaneously off the walls in very sympathy. He’s also got some new tricks though – mentioning ‘G_d’ a lot, overusing scare quotes or irony quotes beyond all reason, lots of quiet boasting. I wonder if you’ve guessed which friend I mean yet – I wonder if your memories are keen this morning. He used to deposit his book-length comments here often, often; he did it for nearly two years, ignoring nearly all replies in favour of depositing new stand-alone book-length ruminations on hermeneutics and the profundity of it all. I gave him a lot of rope, many chances, abundant opportunities to change; and then I’d had enough, and I banned him. Looking at his new effusions, I have to say, I’m hugging myself with joy that he does not post here any longer, because he can’t. I feel no quiver of regret. I do not miss his little ways. I do not worry that my thinking is the poorer for want of his wisdom.
Shall I give you a taste?
And in Anselm’s world the “problem” of atheism, the non-existence of divinity, was scarcely conceived to “exist”…The upshot here is that Anselm’s “proof” should be regarded in an heuristic and hortatory sense, rather than as logically dispositive…Now I myself am an atheist, though of an indifferentist variety, (noboby gets a leg-up through the profession of their beliefs), and of strongly anti-positivist instincts…But the idea that matters of belief and “faith” can be disposed of, ahistorically and extra-culturally, by technical refinements in logical argumentation just strikes me as silly and beside the point.
Stephen asked him, civilly, to clarify – but ah, he didn’t realize; he didn’t know he was dealing with one who never clarifies, who only ever repeats and amplifies. And so it fell out.
Religious ideas have a “logic” of their own, even if it’s not logical, and if one is going to deal with such matters, one should take account of the complexion of religious ideas and thinking and attempt to understand them as best one can, which does not require regarding them as true. One has to attempt to understand the sources of their compellingness in religious “experience”, such as ideas about suffering, sin, transcendence, redemption, vocation and the like…Religious beliefs are a mixed bag and are not simply cognitive, but contain ethical, expressive, and practical components, as well, but in such a way that they are holistically connected with each other, such that they operate “beneath” the level of the rational differentiation of validities, in terms of which modern forms of rationality and argument function.
And so on, and on, and on – that sample represents only about .1% of the total. It’s funny (and familiar) stuff. But I’m glad it’s being posted somewhere else and not here.
Maybe our friend is bucking for the Templeton prize. Maybe he thinks there’s a good chance that next year they will award it to someone who comments indefatigably and at length on other people’s websites. That seems quite a reasonable hope, doesn’t it? Sure.
Funny thing is, I think that is some of his most comprehensible prose.
Oh, he lapsed into comprehensibility at times even then. But the pomposity index is as robust as ever.
Is it the Archbishop of Canterbury?
Funny thing is, that first extract, taken as a statement of historicity, is perfectly reasonable. Of course, it’s beside the point, if people are still trying to run the same argument today, but still….
Close! Shockingly close.
Sure, but as Stephen tried to point out, the question was whether the argument is any good, not what Anselm had in mind or how he treated his chilblains.
I would guess John C. Halez. Don’t know if I remember how to spell his last name but I do remember the really long posts.
Am I corrent?
-Rich rR.
Who else, RichR? I don’t even need to look at the link itself – it can be only one…
(It’s Halasz by the way. Hungarian for fisherman).
He’s dead wrong about Anselm’s proof. In Anselm’s world may hardly have been a position actually held – but Anselm’s dialogue has “the fool who says in his heart there is no God” as his sparring partner. It most definitely attempts to philosophically justify the existence of God against an imaginary atheist opponent.
Ah those were the days!!! Reading a combination of John and Dsquared of a morning always gave me confidence that the day could only get better.
“Religious ideas have a “logic” of their own, even if it’s not logical”
This argument is very “persuasive”, even if I’m not persuaded by it. Which logical fallacy is it?
It was John C Halasz. Presumably in case anyone mistook him for another John Halasz.
Even though the apostrophes around the first occurrence of the word logic are an attempt to avoid it, it’s still the fallacy of equivocation I think. He’s using the idea of logic/logical in two different ways. If he has a problem with saying that religious ideas are in accordance with logic then he should not say they have a logic of their own, with or without the apostrophes. If he cannot come up with an alternative to the word logic in apostrophes he can hardly expect the reader to do the work for him.
Although I’m committing an ad hominem fallacy here, it strikes me that the guy is operating in a sphere of existence that has little intersection with the real world.
Or, should I have said, “real world”.
Well, the thing is that the points he is making aren’t necessarily all that bad. I disagree with them, but he’s not engaging in total waffle or anything. It’s just that he could probably make the same points in a few clear, readable, brief paragraphs. At the risk of engaging in an ad teutonem fallacy, he’s taking way too much stylistic pointers from that German hermeneuticist philosophy.
The points he is making aren’t necessarily all that bad – but since he is John “C” Halasz, they are contingently all that bad.
‘This argument is very “persuasive”, even if I’m not persuaded by it.’
cackle
John C never engaged in waffle, but it could take so long to work out his point that, by the time you realised that it only peripherally touched on a merely tertiary issue, it was too late and you were engulfed.
He is actually very good at textual analysis, but perhaps genuinely incapable of editing his prose style down to something one could engage with and stay sane.
Oh, I think he did engage in waffle, at least in a sense – the refusal to engage with replies could be considered waffle, or meta-waffle. I frequently asked him what I took to be perfectly genuine and reasonable questions, nearly always to no avail. In that sense I think his entire presence here, or his ‘project,’ amounted to a giant waffle. A protracted monologue that refuses to notice disagreement is inherently evasive and shifty.
That’s why he no longer gets to do it here. The endlessly long posts were very tedious, but I would have put up with them; the refusal to engage however simply rendered them worthless – no, worse than worthless, more like an assault on the whole idea of argument and reason. Maybe that was his point – he was dramatizing and performing the impossibility of reasoned debate in a posthuman world. Well, if so, he made it, at length.
“by the time you realised that it only peripherally touched on a merely tertiary issue, it was too late and you were engulfed”
I imagined he had a personal vendetta against the written language. Death by parenthesis. I asked him once to try to reconvey his point as if he were addressing a taxi driver, but for some reason he ignored me.
You know, one would almost say you missed him, given the attention his absence is generating… If I were a Freudian, I’d be awfully suggestive at this point…
Dave,
Hah, it’s odd. He is clearly a highly intelligent guy, but it used to drive me wild trying to get a straight answer; it was like wiggling a loose tooth.
Who’s you? You mean me? Or all of us. If you mean me: no. Really not. I find his reappearance and his continued similarity to himself both interesting and amusing – and I’m quite happy to be able to skim his torrents somewhere else – but as for missing his presence here – really really not. He was like fingernails on a blackboard; it was nothing but relief to get rid of him at last and has been nothing else ever since. He is clearly intelligent and erudite, but so are lots of people, and his particular intelligence and erudition are embedded in such a lava flow of pompous preening blather that they lose most of their value.
I thought before I banned him that I might feel guilty and hence regretful in that sense; but in fact, no. This is hardly the only place in the world that JH could post comments, and he obviously hated it, so what’s to feel guilty about? It’s not as if we were all his best friends and he would miss us. But guilt can be irrational; but I never felt even irrational guilt.
The great human cost of the battle agaisnt John (C) Halasz was Karl…
I know; Karl did miss him, alone among mortals.
You know…I’m afraid something bad did happen to Karl. He used to email me regularly, in fact often; I think he would have said if he’d just moved on or something. And after awhile his email address became defunct – which seems sinister. But I never knew his last name, so can’t look him up or anything. I hope he was just being elusive, and is alive and well somewhere.
P.S. If you really want to laugh you should check out the thread at Stephen’s again. Oh dear…
Stephen asked him yesterday to state his actual argument, as briefly as possible, without digressions; just a formal one, two, three. So what does he do…?
Haaaaaaaa….
And he ends (almost ends – he has to come back to add a third post) with this:
“But you and I have already wasted enough of my time as it is, on a matter that doesn’t concern me all that much.”
Stephen’s wasted Halasz’s time! Right – because Stephen showed up at Halasz’s place of work and grabbed him with force and violence and compelled him to write these 40,000 words posts. Stephen wasted Halasz’s time much the way I wasted Chris Bertram’s time by forcing him to make that pointlessly spiteful comment on the litacha post. People who write things are evil beings who waste the time of people who comment on the things those people write. It’s an outrage!
Man, he’s funny. At a distance.
I posted a comment, in that thread on Stephen Law’s blog, which boiled down the crux of John C.’s argument to a mere three sentences, and he basically agreed with me. This left me scratching my head as to why he didn’t start the debate with something as simple, rather than trotting out every last volume of a History of Philosophy, the Oxford English Dictionary, Readings in Western Religious Thought, Das Kapital, and the Encyclopedia Britannica; the complete, unabridged, with exhaustive concordance editions, of course.
Now I know. Scarred for life, probably.
Well done.
The latest posts are even funnier. He’s just a riot, John C is. Kind of the Borat of blog comments.