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Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a powerful anti-philosopher.  He says in this brief excerpt that facts do not exist; only interpretations do.  He writes: Everything is Interpretation: … Against those who say “There are only facts,” I say, “No, facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretations.” We cannot establish any fact in itself. Perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing

This is called perspectivism, and an interpreter of postmodernism describes the practical outcome of it. We have lost the ‘real world’ and the ‘apparent world,’ he [Nietzsche] thought, and it follows from this eerie situation that there are no facts, only interpretations. With that breathtaking claim we broach the doctrine that Nietzsche called ‘perspectivism.’ It is a shorthand for a group of different doctrines – that truth is perspectival, that logic is, that knowledge is, and so on … There is no absolute, Nietzsche declared: being is always becoming and ‘being human’ is fluid rather than fixed.

This hyper-skepticism can be summed up in one word: postmodernism. It has worked its way into the cultural water we drink and air we breathe.

Christian universities and high schools have accepted perspectivism as if there are no objective truths out there, but only our competing worldviews.  So they teach “Worldview Studies.”

2. Destroying the essence of marriage and gender differences

postmodernism is hyper-skeptical of essences.

If you can find the definition of a pencil, then you have discovered its essence, which distinguishes it from other objects like a pen.

in a debate over same-sex “marriage,” one advocate for redefining marriage proclaimed: “Marriage has no essence!”  In other words, it’s open to reinterpretation and redefinition.  Perspectivism.

take postmodernism to its deeper outcome, it also says human sexuality is fluid, not fixed.  There are no clear gender differences.  The essence of maleness and the essence of femaleness is being shattered.

Humankind used to have an essence: a rational soul.  Christianity added that the essence is a contaminated rational soul.  We don’t even need a biblical text to reach that conclusion, which is deduction.  We can observe humans over the centuries.  That’s induction.

Postmodernism, however, denies humankind’s essence.  So why not overlay it with the (naïve) ideology of wishful thinking?  The West has a secular, easygoing, live-and-let-live outlook, so surely everyone else does.

Postmodernism says key concepts, like justice and rights and even God, are up for grabs like a loose ball in basketball.  Meaning is fluid and playful, and the context and original intent do not limit those foundational truths. So judges, growing up in this postmodern environment at the university, cut the Constitution loose from its original and historical context and interpret it as a living document, subject to the modern, evolving zeitgeist.  The Constitution says whatever they intend per their politics, not what its authors originally intended.

For postmodernism, science (or cause and effect) has no firm foundation (see Hume).  If we have no secure knowledge, then why not overlay and shape it through political ideology?

reject ancient hyper-skepticism, against which Aristotle fought, that has recently morphed into postmodernism.

Expose who many liberals really are.  They’re amoral, anything-goes postmodernists.  Use it as a pejorative.

explain postmodernism, so students can figure out that they are being swept along by hyper-skepticism.

The main thing is that that there really are essences.  Marriage has an essence, and there are essential differences between maleness and femaleness.  Humanity itself has an essence that places it above other mammals.

 Hyper-skepticism is a minority viewpoint.

Don’t deny the obvious that you can see with your own eyes.  Your five senses are an accurate source of common sense

Be confident in this: the real world – which really does exist and can be objectively known without our mental games and interpretations – must come before ideology.

Abortion wasn’t legalized to grant a woman the “right” to a dead fetus. Rather, legislatures or courts — depending on the country — determined that a woman’s right to control her own body should trump the fetal right to life. That being so, once the baby is born the entire issue of protecting female autonomy evaporates and the issue of abortion becomes factually irrelevant.

On the other hand, not only [personal] aims but also well-developed plans are concepts that certainly apply to those people (parents, siblings, society) who could be negatively or positively affected by the birth of that child. Therefore, the rights and interests of the actual people involved should represent the prevailing consideration in a decision about abortion and after-birth abortion.

In other words, babies are not people

A bureaucratic check list has even been published — including in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine — known as the Groningen Protocol, by which Dutch neonatologists determine which sick and disabled babies qualify to be euthanized. Indeed, according to two articles published in The Lancet, about 8% of all babies who die each year in the Netherlands (80-90) are killed by their own doctors.

In place of intrinsic human dignity as the foundation for our culture and laws, advocates of the new bioethical order want moral value to be measured individual-by-individual — whether animal or human — and moment-by-moment. Under this view, we each must earn full moral status by currently possessing capacities sufficient to be deemed a “person.” As the authors of “After-Birth Abortion” put it, “We take ‘person’ to mean an individual [not just a human] who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.” In other words, if you can’t value your own life, your life has less value.

This means that you can be a person today but not tomorrow, and not be a person today and be killed before you become one tomorrow.

Even more radically, according to some personhood theorists, higher mammals — dogs, dolphins, chimps, pigs — are persons and hence have greater value than human non-persons. Princeton’s notorious bioethicist Peter Singer is perhaps the world’s most famous advocate of this view — arguing, for example, that patients in a persistent vegetative state should be used in medical experiments in place of animals with higher cognitive capacities.

Bioethics isn’t about abstract argument. It uses discourse to transform philosophical views into societal action. And while personhood theory is certainly not the unanimous view, I think it is fair to say that it represents the consensus in the field — at least among the majority of bioethicists who don’t have a modifier such as “conservative” or “Christian” in front of their title.

Obamacare has centralized control of health care into the federal bureaucracy, including by establishing a plethora of cost/benefit boards that will start operating within the next several years. Who do you think will be tapped to fill many of these powerful government positions that could ultimately decide what medical procedures will and won’t be covered by insurance — perhaps even which patients will and won’t receive them? Bingo! “Experts” trained in bioethics.

Havel regards "home," following Patocka,2 as an existential experience that can be compared to a set of concentric circles on various levels, from the house, the village or town, the family, the social environment, the professional environ-ment, to the nation as including culture and language (Czech or Slovak), the civic society (Czechoslovak), the civilization (Europ-ean), and the world (civilization and universe). Havel stressed the equality among all concentric circles, especially the national, civic, and universal ones with their corresponding national self-determi-nation rights, civic rights, and human rights.

Every circle, every aspect of the human home, has to be given its due. It makes no sense to deny or forcibly exclude any one stratum for the sake of another; none should be regarded as less important or inferior. They are part of our natural world, and a properly organized society has to respect them all and give them all the chance to play their roles. This is the only way that room can be made for people to realize themselves freely as human beings, to exercise their identities. All the circles of our home, . . . are an inalienable part of us, and an inseparable element of our human identity. Deprived of all the aspects of his home, man would be deprived of himself, of his humanity

Having cleared some confusions of "home" with fixed resi-dence and place of birth and having seen that home may be a struc-ture of several single level homes (on different and identical levels) which may change in time, it is time to attempt a more positive analysis of home. In "home is where the heart is;" "at the turn of the century Vienna is my real home;" and "my marriage was a home-coming," "home" is marked by an emotional attachment: to a place, a person, an intellectual environment, etc. "I am at home in Prague, reading Patocka, listening to a Mahler symphony, with my love in my arms," as well as the sentences identifying the homes of Socrates, the British monarch and Franz Kafka stress the strong relation between personal identity and home (as Havel claimed in the above quotations). Home is where we could or can be ourselves, feel at ease, secure, able to express ourselves freely and fully, whether we have actually been there or not. Home is the reflection of our subjectivity in the world. Home is the environment that allows us to fulfil our unique selves through interaction with the world. Home is the environment that allows us to be ourselves, allows us to be homely. Since in a home environment we can express our true iden-tity, home is the source of home truth. Home may be an emotional environment, a culture, a geographical location, a political system, a historical time and place, etc., and a combination of all the above.

We are all descendants of immigrants. The natural home of humanity is the dry land of the planet. People, unlike trees and bushes, are not "rooted" -- people are born with legs. The fact that we are born with legs and intelligence opens to us ever new spacial and intellectual horizons. The human race, like other animals, is a migratory specie, from our ancient ancestors who, as we are told by anthropologists, migrated from Africa’s planes to settle the globe some three million years ago, to present day refugees and migrants. The human ability to migrate has been one of our basic assets for survival, allowing us to free ourselves of geographic constraints, from bondage to the earth. Bosnians, East European refugees in German hostels, Chinese, Haitian and Vietnamese refugees, like our ancestors and ourselves, whoever we may be, are searching for a home. This search for home is a basic trait of being human. It seems though that in today’s inhospitable world, the search may end in homelessness rather than in homecoming.

Mistaking the language of Chinese philosophy for, in Richard Rorty’s phrase, a “mirror of nature” is like mistaking the menu for the food. The essence of kung fu — various arts and instructions about how to cultivate the person and conduct one’s life — is often hard to digest for those who are used to the flavor and texture of mainstream Western philosophy. It is understandable that, even after sincere willingness to try, one is often still turned away by the lack of clear definitions of key terms and the absence of linear arguments in classic Chinese texts.

In the art of kung fu, there is what Herbert Fingarette calls “the magical,” but “distinctively human” dimension of our practicality, a dimension that “always involves great effects produced effortlessly, marvelously, with an irresistible power that is itself intangible, invisible, unmanifest.”

Pierre Hadot and Martha Nussbaum, partially as a result of the world-historical dialogue of philosophy in our time, have both tried to “rectify the name” of “philosophy” by showing that ancient Western philosophers such as Socrates, the Stoics and the Epicurians were mainly concerned with virtue, with spiritual exercises and practices for the sake of living a good life rather than with pure theoretical endeavors.[3] In this regard, Western philosophy at its origin is similar to classic Chinese philosophy. The significance of this point is not merely in revealing historical facts. It calls our attention to a dimension that has been eclipsed by the obsession with the search for eternal, universal truth and the way it is practiced, namely through rational arguments. Even when philosophers take their ideas as pure theoretical discourse aimed at finding the Truth, their ideas have never stopped functioning as guides to human life. The power of modern enlightenment ideas have been demonstrated fully both in the form of great achievements we have witnessed since the modern era and in the form of profound problems we are facing today. Our modes of behavior are very much shaped by philosophical ideas that looked innocent enough to be taken for granted. It is both ironic and alarming that when Richard Rorty launched full-scale attacks on modern rationalistic philosophy, he took for granted that philosophy can only take the form of seeking for objective Truth.

This kung fu approach shares a lot of insights with the Aristotelian virtue ethics, which focuses on the cultivation of the agent instead of on the formulation of rules of conduct. Yet unlike Aristotelian ethics, the kung fu approach to ethics does not rely on any metaphysics for justification. One does not have to believe in a pre-determined telos for humans in order to appreciate the excellence that kung fu brings. This approach does lead to recognition of the important guiding function of metaphysical outlooks though. For instance a person who follows the Aristotelian metaphysics will clearly place more effort in cultivating her intelligence, whereas a person who follows the Confucian relational metaphysics will pay more attention to learning rituals that would harmonize interpersonal relations. This approach opens up the possibility of allowing multiple competing visions of excellence, including the metaphysics or religious beliefs by which they are understood and guided, and justification of these beliefs is then left to the concrete human experiences.

If philosophy is “a way of life,” as Pierre Hadot puts it, the kung fu approach suggests that we take philosophy as the pursuit of the art of living well, and not just as a narrowly defined rational way of life.