RESURRECTED WORDS BATTLE ZOMBIE WORDS: So of course someone put his finger squarely on the weakness of my Parmenides/Huckabee post: What now?

Well, I want to say a few things. I’m going to do my thing first, because this is my blog, and then if I think it will help to respond to my interlocutor I’ll do so; otherwise I’ll yield the floor.

First: Does BDFAR actually disagree with my premise? That is, does he actually think that “reason” or “nature” or “happiness” or “pleasure” are either a) a basically uncontested category in American politics, or b) a good-enough basis for politics? I’m going to say that the first three are radically contested, and the fourth is a frankly gross basis for politics. Does he disagree?

I honestly don’t know how you can look out your window and not think that virtues have become brain-eating zombie words. But if somebody wants to say, “Oh yes! We have all kinds of virtue beliefs in common, and those are the most important ones!”, well shoot, I’d love to listen.

Second: Of course we do actually share an enormous amount in common. When I talk about marriage I can say “Song of Songs” and most people know what I mean. This is important for the next point, but it isn’t really the same as having a cultural consensus on marriage, as–again–I think almost anyone would agree.

On the one hand, I want to beat up the leftist postmodernists with copies of Donald Davidson’s “On the Very Notion of a Conceptual Scheme”–you really can’t get away from Shakespeare, sweeties! (which is not at all what DD meant to say, because he’s naive about language, but it’s still kind of obviously true)–but on the other hand, of course, the Left arises out of the same tradition and the same facts about the world that produced Shakespeare, and is thereby almost as universal as he is. (Not quite as, because he’s multivocal, while the Left by definition tends to flatten all voices into one voice. I’m sorry your philosophy arose after the Enlightenment screwed up philosophical practice. Desperately not my fault, though, y’all.)

[eta: Sorry!–that previous paragraph was not at all in direct response to BDFAR, and I wasn’t assuming that he (?) is in any unusual or interesting way “on the left”; I don’t know his political beliefs.]

Third, and most excitingly: All anyone can ever do is present descriptions of how persuasion happens. This meta-discussion is vastly less interesting (and likely less fruitful philosophically) than simply persuading; but every now and then maybe it has to happen.

So here’s what Huckabee should do, a.k.a. what everyone should do.

Get on your hands and knees. Humbly feel around for shared premises. Listen, listen quickly!

Talk about why you believe what you believe, in terms which you think might be persuasive to people who don’t already agree. This ridiculously basic step is the one Huckabee missed, of course. He was a Rortyan without a secular canon–Rorty writes as though of course we all draw the same lessons he drew from Western lit, and Huckabee shows the same naivete about the Bible. I’m not sure which of them comes across as more provincial: Rorty with his canon which can never get outside the boundaries set by some projected self-shadow he called Nabokov, or Huckabee with his Bible which can never get outside the boundaries set by the Washington Times. Neither one of them exemplifies self-overhearing, to be frank.

So yeah–feel around, on your hands and knees, for words. If you find a word that might work, pick it up and wave it around and see where it catches the light: sublimity, beauty, honor. Maybe people who are allergic to talk of good and bad, or wrong and right, can hear those words when the light glints off them just right.

Eventually I think you should look for the light source; but then, I would say that, and I don’t think it’s a desperately useful thing to say in this conversation. For the moment let’s just go with feeling around on the floor, listening, feeling with your palms until some shard of something really hurts. Pick that thing up. Look at that thing. That’s the thing your culture teaches you to avoid. That’s something worth looking at.

Fourth: To resurrect a word, you need to be a leader. That’s actually the definition of leadership: resurrecting a word for a community.

John Keegan’s Mask of Command is the most profound study of leadership I’ve read; the only other option is Plato’s Symposium. Philosophy cannot proceed–maybe ever, but certainly in our day–without leadership, and therefore it cannot proceed without authority.

Where do words take meaning? From our culture, from our wants? From our beloveds? Or perhaps from some other–some Other–who pushes somehow beyond self and culture and beloved?

Philosophy, as eros, is precisely the eros for this other option, this hidden god, this Other. Apollo yearns for Dionysos, always, always.

Thus every resurrected word will lead–if we follow her–back to her tomb and then to her Savior.