Daoism update (2): from the Daodejing to Bertolt Brecht

Several of the links to web sites other than my own listed in my post Daoism update of 1 October 2010 are defunct, so here is my updated listing to external links, deleting a couple, adding a couple. There are a number of other relevant gateway sites on the web, probably some new ones since my last post. Consult the previous post for internal links, but start with those mentioned at the bottom of this post.

This list begins with some introductions to Daoism (Taoism) proper, and then to specific ideological uses of their concepts, with focus on their political artistic use by Bertolt Brecht.

Taoism Virtual Library

Tao Te Ching - Translation comparison

tao-te-king

       Quotations / Zitate (Western thinkers on Laozi / Dàodéjing)

Daoism by Chad Hansen, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Daoist Alchemy in the West: The Esoteric Paradigms by Lee Irwin

Legend of the Origin of the Book Tao-Te-Ching on Lao-Tsu's Road into Exile (1938) by Bertolt Brecht

Peasant Dialectics: Reflections on Brecht's Sketch of a Dilemma by Antony Tatlow

Lao Tzu and the Apaches by Ioan Davies

Brecht's Use of Moism, Confucianism and Taoism in his Me-Ti Fragment by Gaby Divay

Brecht's Way (Brecht between Taoism and Marxism) adapted by David George

On my web site, begin with:

Taoism & the Tao of Bourgeois Philosophy (review of J. J. Clarke, The Tao of the West) by R. Dumain

Walter Benjamin on Bertolt Brecht’s Lao Tzu

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground (7)

My understanding of Notes from Underground and its context has developed since I finished reading it. There are a number of factors to consider, among them: (1) Dostoevsky's opposition to Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? and the radical, Westernizing Russian intelligentsia, (2) criticism of the "bookishness" and formulaic expressions of the intelligentsia in relation to real life, (3) the Underground Man's indictment of his social milieu and himself, (4) the Underground Man as unreliable narrator, (5) the divergence between the Underground Man and Dostoevsky, (6) the philosophy of the Underground Man (and of Dostoevsky) in part 1, (7) the relationship of the actions in part 2 to the philosophical position of part 1.

I had equated the Underground Man with Dostoevsky himself, whereas the relationship between the two, as well as the relationship between the stated philosophy and lived reality is more complex in the work. The Underground Man's rebellion against rationalism is a failure, though some self-awareness is achieved where his narrative is broken off, and the entire Russian intelligentsia stands accused along with his self-accusation. Dostoevsky himself has an agenda for attacking rationalism and the intelligentsia. Where does it lead? His alienation leads to authoritarianism, reaction, and Christian apologetics, his torment to the justification of torment.

The reception of Dostoevsky's work, not only in Russia and the Soviet Union but abroad in very different contexts, is also eye-opening.

From this rush of research I compiled the following bibliography, with web links where feasible:

Dostoevsky’s Underground, Ideology, Reception: A Very Select Bibliography

I note briefly the relevance of these references to my projects. Joseph Frank is especially useful for mapping the conceptual structure of the novel. Let me call attention to two other references, which branch out into the big picture:

Carroll, John. Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky. 2^nd ed. London; New York: Routledge, 2010. (Orig. pub. 1974.)

I loathe anarchists, and I prefer Paul Thomas's Karl Marx and the Anarchists, but this book embarks upon a detailed analysis of Dostoevsky's irrationalism, his relationship to Stirner and Nietzsche, and the opposition to the rationalist "crystal palace" utopia celebrated in Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?.

Jacoby, Russell. Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. See esp. Introduction.

Jacoby says nothing about Dostoevsky here, but his book is relevant to the issues, as Jacoby highlights the 'defeated' perspectives of dissident Marxists and reactionary thinkers who analyzed modernity’s underbelly obscured by the scientistic orientation of orthodox Marxism. The Introduction lays out his perspective.

All of this is to fit into the historical puzzle of the interlocking struggle and inseparability of the contradictions of the modern world, the capitalist world (which includes Stalinism), abstractly designated by positivism vs. irrationalism, or scientism vs Romanticism.

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground (6)

I shall have a lot more to say, plus add additional references. First, let me link to pages on my web site that engage Dostoevsky:

Georg Lukács on Dostoevsky & the future of the novel

Stavrogin’s Confession by Georg Lukács

C. P. Snow on the ‘Two Cultures’: Literary Modernism, Irrationalism & Reactionary Politics

Richard Wright's "The Man Who Lived Underground": Notes for Discussion by R. Dumain

Richard Wright's "The Man Who Lived Underground": Annotated Bibliography by R. Dumain

Gary Saul Morson: Genre, Utopia, Sideshadowing, Tempics, Prosaics, Parody, Misanthropology, Philosophy, Literary Theory, Borges: Select Bibliography by R. Dumain

The Richard Wright connection is key to my future exploration of this topic.

Spinoza, distributed rootless cosmopolitan

I have written about or documented Spinoza-related materials in various cyberlocales (this one included), and it occurs to me I should link to the relevant pages on my own sites at least, because I was not certain where to place this link to an insightful document on Spinoza's rootless cosmopolitanism:

Baruch-Benedictus: From uprooted roots to root-independent ideas? by Marcelo Dascal

This essay can be compared to Rebecca Goldstein's Betraying Spinoza, which was published at or near the beginning of a popular Spinoza revival of recent years. I wrote about this elsewhere, engaged Goldstein personally on the book talk circuit, and in an online forum. I do not recall where, offhand.  However, I began my blogging about Spinoza with . . . .

Rebecca Goldstein on the 350th Anniversary of the Excommunication of Baruch Spinoza

I followed this up with:

• My Yiddishe Spinoza
• Constantin Brunner (1)
• Leibniz
• October Reading Review (1):  Grossman, Neal. Healing the Mind: The Philosophy of Spinoza Adapted for a New Age

Newer entries show up in the current version of my Studies in a Dying Culture blog under the rubric Spinoza. The entries to date are:

• Leibniz’ Spinoza anxiety revisited
• Spinoza’s Semantics

There are a number of Spinoza pages on my main web site. Regardless of subject matter, they all (and also external web pages) can be accessed via my bibliography:

Spinoza & Marxism (with Basic Spinoza Web Guide)

From Adam & Eve to Cain & Abel

In line with an ongoing project, I finally put together a working though obviously non-comprehensive bibliography on unusual treatments of the Eden and Cain/Abel myths, actually two bibliographies, one in English and one in Esperanto (consisting of original and translated works in the respective languages), which do not completely overlap, as there is much that is found in only one of these languages:

• From Eden to Cain: Unorthodox Interpretations & Literary Transformations: Selected Bibliography


• De Edeno al Kaino: Malkutimaj Interpretoj & Literaturaj Pritraktoj en Esperanto: Bibliografio

Suggestions for additions are welcome.

Not everything gets translated, for example, Johannes Linnankoski's play in Finnish, Ikuinen taistelu (1903, ‘The eternal struggle’). See:

Johannes Linnankoski (Pseudonym of Johannes Vihtori Peltonen, 1869-1913): Literature in English & Esperanto

Ever since reading Byron's Cain in 1979, in conjunction with Blake's The Ghost of Abel, I have been interested in the reversal of the orthodox meanings of myths canonized in sacred texts. One sees an autonomous reconfiguration of myth in British Romanticism, in Blake, Byron, and Shelley. I have recently returned to this subject in engagement with literary uses and unorthodox interpretations of the Edenic and Cain/Abel myths, for example, with Imre Madách's classic verse drama The Tragedy of Man and with Erich Fromm's psychoanalytic and humanist interpretation of the Old Testament. I am interested in how far the meanings of these mythical constructs can be stretched in literary interpretations before their deployment bumps up again insuperable limitations. I am also interested in the fundamental flaws and intellectual duplicity of liberal religion. (See my previous post on Erich Fromm.)

Erich Fromm on religion (3): In the Garden of Eden

I probably first read Erich Fromm's distinctive analysis of the Biblical myth of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in his most important book, Escape from Freedom, which as a teenager I read several times. Over the next few years I read most of Fromm's books in English.  But as with several of my youthful interests, I moved on and only took him up again decades later.

I was always intrigued by his interpretation of the Eden myth, which makes a good deal of symbolic sense, i.e. that what Christians call the Fall really represents man's rupture with his unity with nature, with his unselfconscious animal state, whereupon he gains knowledge of his mortality and becomes embarrassed by his nakedness. I believe he is correct in this, but I cannot accept this as a complete interpretation. Several myths (my interest is primarily in the Edenic and Cain/Abel myths) have been reinterpreted, transformed, even turned upside down. But I think that, at the end of the day, there's an inherent limitation in myth, and I think the Edenic myth is a case in point.

Fromm includes variations of his analysis is various of his works. It seems to me that there is an unresolved contradiction in his perspective. His thesis on the Old Testament is that Judaism begins as an authoritarian religion and ends up as a humanistic one. I think that his approach is fundamentally flawed, but at the moment I would like to point out Fromm's admission that the Edenic myth shows evidence of its development in ancient times and the survival of repressed elements (see my previous post) and that God's judgment on Adam and Eve is a manifestation of authoritarianism. So, if the Edenic myth is interpretable both as anthropomorphically authoritarian and as symbolic of the rupture with the unity of nature, there is an unresolved discrepancy here. I think both assertions are true, but this is precisely why myth is inherently limited and liberal religion inherently ideologically suspect.

Here is my list of significant references.

Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941. In Britain: The Fear of Freedom, 1942; see pp. 27-28.

__________. Psychoanalysis and Religion [1950] (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), pp. 41-42.

__________. The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales, and Myths (New York: Grove Press, 1957 [1951]), pp. 234-235.

__________. Marx’s Concept of Man (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1961), Chapter 6, Marx's Concept of Socialism.

__________. You Shall Be as Gods: A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and Its Traditions. New York: Fawcett Premier / Ballantine, 1966. See pp. 21-23, 57-58, 96-98.

Summary: Naomi Sherer reviews... You Shall Be As Gods by Eric Fromm.

__________. “On Disobedience” [excerpt] (1984).

3 takes on critical thinking

As I have noted before, I have a problem with the theory and practice of critical thinking. From my web guide and links you will be able to see why:

Thinking Critically About Critical Thinking: A Guide

Now here are some recently encountered examples of the problem:

(1) For a Better Society, Teach Philosophy in High Schools by Michael Shammas, The Huffington Post, 12/26/2012

This piece of airheaded fluff disproves the author's thesis. It's typical of a spineless formal liberalism that in fact commits itself to nothing other than the image of its own niceness. It is the clueless bourgeois ideology of an "open-mindedness" that means nothing, and an especially stupid specimen of it.

But since we are on the subject, you should know there is a whole literature on teaching philosophy in the classroom from early childhood on up. See the section on Philosophy for Children in my 'Intellectual Life in Society, Conventional and Unconventional: A Bibliography in Progress'.

(2) Five Critical Thinkers on Television by Breanne Harris, Critical Thinkers, July 26, 2010

Aside from this post being fluff, this web site is a representative of an entrepreneurial/consulting outfit, and the spin as well as the limits of the application of 'critical thinking' in an entrepreneurial setting should be evident. Bourgeois professionals are not prone to turning critical thinking on themselves except in that pseudo-detached fashion outlined in the first example. The exception I suppose is that small corner of left-liberal academia preoccupied by reflexivity, which translates into the politics of guilt.

(3) Educational Objective: Critical Thinking Skills, Ruthless Criticism

This little article is in a whole different category, as is this far left web site. The problem with several articles on this site is that there is no mediating analysis between the abstract concepts under review and the particulars of a political/social configuration in a way that would give us more than generalities.

If you read this article carefully, you should see that its critique applies to the tacit ideologies of the first two examples, especially the first. I do not find this to be an adequate critique, but it contains essential elements of a critique of 'critical thinking' that dovetails with my own.

The first point in this criticism relates to the educational emphasis on the critical subject, i.e. self-criticism. While the student is urged to be self-critical, where does one find the discussion of the objects that one can or should or cannot or should not be critical of? The sense of neutrality, of even-handedness and the avoidance of partisanship, is mocked, as it deserves.

The second admonition of the educational ideology of critical thinking, is skepticism. Again, there is an implicit critique of the formalism by which one can subjectively approach any topic with a skeptical point of view without actually knowing anything one way or the other. Note the criticism of the indifference to content.

Third, there is a criticism of relativization, that is, of the posture of modesty, which I presume to be an aspect of the posture of even-handedness and impartiality which is presumed to be ethically superior to 'ideology', extremism, partisanship.

Fourthly, there is a criticism of the presumption that there is a general critical capacity that needs only be awakened. This criticism and article ends most aptly, pooh-poohing "the possibility of criticizing something specific is supposed to exist in abstraction from each specific criticism, namely in the individual and not in what he has to criticize."

Such critiques of critical thinking seem to be very rare, at least in this part of the world. All these points are good ones, but the argument is far too adumbrated: without further exposition, the reader is likely to fail to grasp these points and to fill in the missing pieces of the argument as well as its necessary correlative overall structure.  This does nevertheless add something to my critique of the formalist, approach endemic to the critical thinking industry, without degenerating to postmodernist irrationalism.

Ludwig Feuerbach redux

I have just updated my bibliography of works in the English language:

Ludwig Feuerbach: A Bibliography

Aside from the addition of print works, there are now links to YouTube videos.

Here are a few stray quotes gleaned from the Internet, not yet sourced:

‎"The present age . . . prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence . . . for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane."

‎"'Faith moves mountains!' Certainly! Faith does not solve difficult problems; it only pushes them aside."

‎"The pious one bases faith on human weakness. How weak must be something that is supported by weakness."

And here is a very interesting quote from Feuerbach's Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843), Part II: Critique of Hegel, § 21 (different translation):

‎"The Hegelian philosophy is the last magnificent attempt to restore Christianity, which was lost and wrecked, through philosophy and, indeed, to restore Christianity—as is generally done in the modern era—by identifying it with the negation of Christianity."

Feuerbach constantly highlights the tug of war between philosophy and theology, and which won wins out within the thought of particular philosophers. Here though note also that Feuerbach's remark is applicable to liberal, (partly) demythologized religion.

From a quick scan of Feuerbach's works in English, I've concluded that I first most need to read Lectures on the Essence of Religion (1851).This is a later work than his other noted works on religion and by this time he has revised some earlier views. Also, it seems to be the most general treatment of religion beyond Christianity, with some interesting remarks about philosophers. Lectures I & XXX are available at the Marxists Internet Archive. Both are worth checking out. Lecture I has some interesting commentary on Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, for example. I intend to scan Lecture II, which begins with a treatment of Pierre Bayle. Lecture XXX is "Atheism alone a Positive View."

Theorizing Social Paranoia (2)

 Listen to my podcast on this subject:

Dumain, Ralph. “Theorizing Social Paranoia,” 22 May 2011, 58 min., an episode of "Studies in a Dying Culture" on "Think Twice Radio".

Theorizing Social Paranoia (1)

Theorizing Social Paranoia: A Précis for Discussion

By Ralph Dumain

“Fascism has awakened a sleeping world to the realities of the irrational, mystical character structure of the people of the world.”  — Wilhelm Reich

“You’re not paranoid if they’re really out to get you.” This adage reveals a fundamental problem in addressing the question of social paranoia and the concomitant phenomenon of conspiracy theories. Without the consideration of truth content, or a commitment to some view of social reality by which we could divide rational from irrational truth claims, we are left with a formalistic account of social paranoia based solely on defining characteristics of what Richard Hofstadter famously dubbed the “paranoid style.” Here are some essential questions to be addressed.

Is social paranoia essentially the same in all historical periods, and in all social and political circumstances and movements, or are there qualitative differences which need to be highlighted? What is the relationship between occult and supernaturally based paranoia—in primitive societies, the civilizations of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity—and secular paranoia—about elites or cabals openly or secretly controlling social institutions, the state, the economy, the world order?  What transformations has the granddaddy of social paranoiac obsession—anti-Semitism—undergone since the Middle Ages? How shall we compare paranoia in power (in those who command state or institutional power) with the paranoia of the putatively powerless? Is there an equivalence between left and right, or are irrationalist worldviews associated with social paranoia essentially the property of the authoritarian right-wing? If there is an essential difference between right and left, what are the telltale signs of right-wing ideology? Are progressives vulnerable to appeals from the right, and are there examples of right-wing tendencies ensconced within the left?

Are the “moderate men” who evince a plague-on-both-your-houses attitude toward left and right guilty of shifting political discourse to the right?

The pooh-poohing of “conspiracy theories” is deployed by the right when it seeks to dismiss legitimate political criticisms and exposés, and often by the left as a distraction from structural social criticism. Given the shifting boundaries of what might be considered outlandish conspiracy claims in light of covert actions revealed over the past half century, how do we distinguish between at least marginally plausible conspiracy theories and totally outlandish or outright crackpot claims? What are the telltale code words and concepts associated with right-wing or other crackpot thinking? What are the tacit assumptions and characteristic fallacies in reasoning to look out for?

Finally, what does a climate of fear do in itself to break down rational processes and confuse attributions of causality? Wilhelm Reich, quoted above, himself succumbed to paranoiac thinking—even while diagnosing it—under the pressure of real persecution and the political horrors of fascism and Stalinism, and descended into crank pseudoscience even while making astute observations of the mystical mentality. Does a climate of fear—in which one has real reason to fear social forces which themselves may be imbued with social paranoia—bear the danger of impairing the rational capacity of a rational opposition?

In preparation for our forthcoming discussion, please consult the bibliography (with web links) I have prepared:

The Paranoia Papers: Theory of the (Un)Natural History of Social Paranoia: Selected Bibliography

10 April 2011

Marxism & the Jewish Question

There are certain foci of social and historical investigation, which, when plumbed to their depths, unravel the entire weave of the modern world. Such are the roles of Jews in Europe and blacks in the Western hemisphere. In addition to the question of instrumental politics, there is the theoretical grasp of the collective existence of these groups, which, I argue, is the most symptomatic indicator of the progress and limitations of social theory.  Thus, to advance one of my research projects . . .

Marxism & the Jewish Question: Selected Bibliography

This links to a related project of mine:

L. L. Zamenhof & the Cultural, Religious, Professional & Political Context of 19th-20th Century Eastern European Jewish Intellectuals: Selected Bibliography

Here is another resource, from the Marxists Internet Archive:

Jews, Marxism and the Worker’s Movement

Joel Augustus Rogers & the Universal Races Congress of 1911

Joel Augustus Rogers (September 6, 1880 — March 26, 1966) carried on a tireless war of ideas against the pervasive white supremacist ideology of his time. Here's another sample from his landmark 1917 book From “Superman” to Man, to which I've given a title . . .

Race, Equality of Intellect, & the History of Civilization by J. A. Rogers

Here you find a distillation of the style and content of Rogers' argumentation, which also serves as a window into the time in which he lived. There are several facets of this extract that could be annotated at length. Aside from the marshaling of facts and figures available to Rogers, note the refined and even-tempered tone of the protagonist Dixon contrasted to the frothing hysteria of his white racist antagonist. Note Rogers' insistence on a scientific perspective, to the point of pushing religion aside, for example in Dixon's argument:

“Finot, whose findings ought to be regarded as more valuable than the expressions of chose who base their arguments on sentiment or on Hebrew mythology, says,— ‘All peoples may attain this distant frontier which the brains of the whites have reached.’”

Also of historical interest is Rogers' citation here (and elsewhere in the book) of the First Universal Races Congress of 1911. The centennial of this landmark ideological intervention has so far gone virtually unnoticed, a situation which I am now endeavoring to rectify:

First Universal Races Congress, London, July 26-29, 1911: Selected Bibliography

Stalking the Mystic Bourgeoisie

Here's an interesting reading guide on amazon.com:

So you'd like to ... protect yourself from the Mystic Bourgeoisie, a guide by Christopher Locke

Locke claims to be working on a book with the working title Mystic Bourgeoisie: Numinous Lunacy & the Sanctimonious Narcissism of the New Age. Here's a tidbit from his rant:

"Far more expensive, however, is the widespread attitude that this kind of 'mysticism' is a harmless, even socially beneficent 'lifestyle option.' As it was in the past, it's actually the 'spiritual' underbelly of political fascism—and it's bearing down on the present like a fast freight."

Daoism update

Well, this is really just a collocation of my various links on the subject, particularly on the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching), the fundamental philosophical text of Daoism (Taoism). Here are my relevant blog entries and web pages, and links to other sites.

These are the most relevant entries among several on Chinese philosophy on my Studies in a Dying Culture blog:

Daodejing (Tao Te Ching), a new translation

Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching), Ames & Hall

Chinese Philosophy in the West: Globalization Gone Bad (1)

The Tao of Brecht

On my main web site:

Taoism & the Tao of Bourgeois Philosophy (review of J. J. Clarke, The Tao of the West) by R. Dumain

Eastern & Western Philosophy: Unpublished Letter to the Editor
[rejoinder by R. Dumain to 'The Great Divide' by Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad]

Hegel on Daoism (Taoism)

Hegel on Number Mysticism: Pythagoreanism, Astrology, I Ching

Walter Benjamin on Bertolt Brecht's Lao Tzu

T.W. Adorno on Zen Buddhism

Washington Philosophy Circle: meetings April-June 2005

Taoism (Daoism) in the West (bibliography)

Offsite links:

Taoism Virtual Library

Tao Te Ching - Translation comparison

Dao House... of discourses and dreams

Quotations / Zitate (Western thinkers on Laozi / Dàodéjing)

Daoist Alchemy in the West: The Esoteric Paradigms by Lee Irwin

Legend of the Origin of the Book Tao-Te-Ching on Lao-Tsu's Road into Exile (1938) by Bertolt Brecht. Or see at Dougsblog.

Peasant Dialectics: Reflections on Brecht's Sketch of a Dilemma by Antony Tatlow

Lao Tzu and the Apaches by Ioan Davies

Brecht's Use of Moism, Confucianism and Taoism in his Me-Ti Fragment by Gaby Divay

Brecht's Way (Brecht between Taoism and Marxism)

Hans Blumenberg, Descartes, & the agony of modernity

A few secondary bibliographic references:

Three Intellectual Histories of Modernity: Arendt, Blumenberg, and Dewey
by Colin Koopman

Collective Self-Legislation as an Actus Impurus: A Response to Heidegger’s Critique of European Nihilism
by Hans Lindahl

Hans Blumenberg's Philosophical Anthropology: After Heidegger and Cassirer
by Vida Pavesich

Generative Anthropology: BS alert!

Is there any end to the pseudo-intellectual diarrhea excreted from France? Is there any academic discipline more devoid of integrity than anthropology? Political Science maybe? Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse: Generative Anthropology.

I have blogged about René Girard before: the author of Violence and the Sacred exposes what he considers to be the root cause of the sacred—sacrificial ritual as the regulator of violent impulses—only to promote Christianity as something legitimate and distinct from all other superstitious belief systems. Eric Gans singles out the genesis of language as the driving causal force—the originary event—behind the evolution of the human race. Isolating this as a single factor both reflects the postmodernist semiotic-fetishist agenda and constitutes a radical form of idealism once again converting anthropology to a pseudoscience. And note how the term "originary event" resonates with religious origin myth.

Here is a particularly revealing as well as sickening specimen of this ideology:

Eric Gans, "The Unique Source of Religion and Morality," Anthropoetics I, no. 1 (June 1995)

Why doesn't it surprise me that Gans is in the French Department (of UCLA)? Anthropoetics, what a steaming load: there are no atheists in foxholes, and all religion is an outgrowth of semiotics. Postmodernism has been exploiting religion for some time. Opportunists of a feather . . . Get a load of footnote 1:

Generative anthropology articulates our postmodern dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment version of secularization, which either denies the transcendental altogether or reduces it to the most abstract version of the metaphysical "first mover" (Deism), without ever explaining the transcendentality of the language it uses in the process. Revolutionary atheism is an inverted religious fundamentalism that makes use of verticality to tell us that the vertical does not exist.

This article is equally delicious:

McKenna, Andrew. (2001). "Signs of the Times: Rorty and Girard," Paper read at COV&R Antwerp.

Here is a bibliography of this trash:

Bibliography of Generative Anthropology

There are no standards and there is no accountability. Academia is like the rest of society: a zoo with all the cages open and the dumb beasts running amok.

History of atheism, freethought, rationalism, skepticism, materialism: bibliography

Behold my latest bibliography:

Historical Surveys of Atheism, Freethought, Rationalism, Skepticism, and Materialism: Selected Works

There is no fixed boundary between analytical treatments of this subject matter, readers, and anthologies, on the one hand (which are now quite prevalent thanks to Hitchens and others), and historical and reference works on the other. Still, I've attempted to focus on historical surveys of varying generality and on dictionaries and encyclopedias, which are obviously basic reference works for historical inquiry.


I have preserved humanism as a separate topic, per my earlier working bibliography:

Secular Humanism—Ideology, Philosophy, Politics, History: Bibliography in Progress

As far as texts on atheism as a subject matter, my last attempt to list important recent and not-so-recent books is now quite out of date:

Ralph Dumain on atheism, irreligion, and rationality


I invite additional suggestions for this new bibliography. The most notable omission is the history of the skeptical movement—by this I do not mean skepticism as a philosophical concept, which is covered here—but skepticism in the sense of investigation of claims of the paranormal and fringe science. I know of no histories of this movement, so it is a gap that needs to be filled if the relevant literature has even been written.

I have only one possible such item of relevance (buried somewhere in my files):

Still, Arthur; Dryden, Windy. ‘The Social Psychology of "Pseudoscience": A Brief History’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 265-290, Sept. 2004.

I have not attempted to cover the history of naturalism, which is a much broader, more diffuse, and better covered subject than the history of materialism per se in the USA. Historically there are far more public advocates of naturalism in the USA than of materialism, due not only to prevailing philosophical trends and not only to opprobrium, but also to the witch hunts of J. Edgar Hoover and McCarthyism. There are other specialized areas, such as black freethought, Indian religion and philosophy, and atheism in the USSR, that I cover elsewhere.

Feuerbach revisited

Some years ago I compiled an essential bibliography of works by and about Ludwig Feuerbach in English. Little of the material listed is (or was) readily available online. (Most likely Google Books did not exist or was not as extensively developed back then, so you might want to check there now.) I've just had occasion to check for more material online, albeit not in a systematic fashion. So let's begin with an overview of Feuerbach.

Feuerbach, Ludwig - Introduction (eNotes)

Unfortunately, much Feuerbach commentary derives from theologians. So to know one's enemy, here are a couple of examples:

Anthony J. Godzieba, "Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion"[review of Van Harvey]. Theological Studies. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6404/is_n3_v58/ai_n28691700/

B. A. Gerrish, "Feuerbach’s Religious Illusion" [review of Van Harvey]. http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=77

I've also had occasion to take a look at Feuerbach's Lectures on the Essence of Religion, a copious volume only a little of which is available online. Here is a quote, though, not hitherto found online as of this writing:

"My doctrine or view can therefore be summed up in two words: nature and man. The being which in my thinking man presupposes, the being which is the cause or ground of man, to which he owes his origin and existence, is not God‑-a mystical, indeterminate, ambiguous word-‑but nature, a clear sensuous, unambiguous word and thing. And the being in whom nature becomes personal, conscious, and rational is man. To my mind, unconscious nature is the eternal, uncreated being, the first being-‑first, that is, in time but not in rank, physically but not morally; man with his consciousness is for me second in time, but in rank the first."

-- Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, translated by Ralph Manheim (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 3rd lecture, p. 21.

Next time I get to reading Feuerbach, I'm going to keep an eye out for what he says about the evolution of religion. The Young Hegelians took off from the liberalization of Protestantism, which may have skewed their notions, but the logic of what all of them have to say about the logic of religion and its relation to society is worthy of attention.

Marx on religion

I've begun organizing quotations by Karl Marx on religion, accompanied by sources and web links, as well as a listing of the major English-language anthologies on the subject:

Karl Marx on Religion: Sources & Quotations

I will add to this compilation as I examine more quotes. I will probably add a listing of relevant writings by Friedrich Engels and possibly quotes as well. I will move on to organize the various quotations on this blog into pages on my web site. Also, I will begin to compile a working bibliography of important works by and about Marxists on religion and atheism.

Christ the Vampire & other ghoulish goodies

Let's begin with the publisher in question, III Publishing. This site maintains a blog. There are several categories of essays on the site, for example, Religion: A Guide for the Perplexed (further subcategorized). This outfit maintains a booklist, but one might as well go directly to the book descriptions, with links to sample texts.

The press itself appears to be an anarchist press, but my disrespect for anarchism notwithstanding, there is amusing material here.

The first book I read from this publisher and from this author (several years ago) was:

The Last Days of Christ the Vampire by J. G. Eccarius.

This novel "is set in Providence, Rhode Island, where a small group of people discovers that Jesus really Lives, he rose from the dead and controls the Catholic Church and Protestant sects as well. It's an action-packed battle against the ancient vampire."

I don't remember much about this, but it was highly entertaining. See the sample.

By the same author, I also have:

Resurrection 2027. Sample.

"J.G. Eccarius is back with this science-fiction look at a theocracy governing what's left of the human race. God is a woman, her representatives are women, and yet Ann Swanson, a teenage woman, begins to feel plenty oppressed in Resurrection City. Is she really a resurrected nurse from the late 20th century? Or is the entire society a fabric of lies?"

As you can see, J. G. Eccarius and III Publishing have some offbeat material to offer.

I also have a dystopian novel that is out of print:

A.D. by Saab Lofton

"In a few years the White Aryan Resistance and the Nation of Islam will divide America into racist regimes. Saab Lofton's A.D. starts with a look at one man's life under Farrakhan's regime, then dives centuries into the future to look at a Libertarian Socialist Democracy, Saab's vision of Utopia."

sample from A.D.
Review of A.D. by Darius James
Practical Anarchy review

Given the topic, this is of greater significance than the other two, which may be why it's sold out.

I see some other books with religious, mythological, or cosmological themes have appeared since I last checked out this publisher:

Pyrexia by Michel Mery
Vampires or Gods? by William Meyers