Some of you have asked for examples of entries from a philosophical journal. Below are two entries that I have written. They were chosen almost totally at random. The first is from 1997, during my second year of graduate school. The second is from 2000, when I was rereading Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil for personal pleasure. These entries do a pretty good job of showing how to keep things philosophical, but I didn't get very personal in either one. If your writing is more personal than mine, that's fine. But it does need to be philosophical as well, and these entries might help you in that regard.

 

I.

We are the intellectual heirs of the analytic method in philosophy. Traditionally this method has been used to dispel metaphysical nonsense, so called, by reforming statements that lead us to posit entities when in fact there is no need to do so. A simple example of this is the statement, “Square circles are nonexisting things”. This seems to indicate that square circles are members of the class of nonexisting things. Hence, both the entities and the class to which they belong have some place in our inventory of the world. Now comes the analyst to save us from such ontological sloppiness. We can, he says, parse the above sentence thusly, “There are no square circles.” This saves us from positing either square circles or a class to which they belong. All of this is well known.

I want to point out that if the analytical project is well-founded, it presupposes something about ourselves and our language, namely: We are creatures capable of creating a language and misusing it. What exactly does this mean? At the very least it means that humans are creative creatures. This creativity is presupposed by analysis, hence the analytic method cannot be used to argue against it. I take this to militate against any reductivist analytic programme which would dispense with creative persons in favor of an ontology composed purely of the entities sanctioned by physics. Thus, on pain of self-stultification, analysis can never reveal that there is no such thing as qualitative, subjective experience. A fortiori, it cannot reveal there is no such thing as the self.

 

 

II.

Nietzsche says that slave morality is based on both resentment and utility.  This is puzzling because resentment and utility are not easily correlated, e.g., there are so many obvious cases in which resentment is not useful. In fact, we usually think of resentment as clouding good deliberation and judgment. Stories of jilted lovers come to mind.

Perhaps Nietzsche means to suggest that the theoretical and/or historical origin of slave morality is resentment, but its practical methodology is utilitarian. It is easy enough to see how resentment of the masters could foster a sense of separateness and opposition among the slaves. (But why specifically a moral separateness?) If this opposition were to give rise to moral principles, it would have to play to the main advantage the slaves have over their masters, i.e., their superior numbers. Thus, the utilitarianism, far from being a benign appeal to the greatest good for the greatest number, is really just a crass grab for power following the most likely course of success. What a bitter irony that this utilitarian appeal is usually disguised as compassion or pity.

Practical examples of this kind of moral bullying abound. Just consider all those who defend moral principles on the basis of majority opinion. I've heard it argued that the death penalty is morally acceptable because most people say it's moral. Even if this is not relativism of some kind, it still smacks of the crass power-mongering Nietzsche describes in Beyond Good and Evil .