An anonymous student posted a link to this remarkable display on the earlier thread concerning the "Other"; the author of this new piece, Michael Marder, is the reviewer lambasted in the earlier thread. His latest bit of sophomoric obscurity is, alas, naturally read as a "reply" to the beating he took. According to Marder, naturalists (which he doesn't seem to realize includes "critical thinking" folks like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud [the latter of whom Marder even invokes!]) are opposed to "critical thinking" and committed to the "status quo." (This will also come as news to Carnap and the other logical positivists who were actually opponents of both Nazism and capitalism.) It helps, to be sure, that Marder appears to have no notion of what naturalism is, as when he writes:
Under the title of naturalization, which remains suspiciously vague in a discourse ostensibly committed to the rigors of argumentation and clarity of expression, we encounter nothing more than a reductivist comprehension of nature as a set of empirically verifiable causal relations and quantities of force.
Actually, it is usually quite clear what is meant, as even a quick consultation of relevant articles in SEP would reveal--but, of course, Marder isn't doing scholarship or philosophy, he's just bluffing and licking his wounds. And one thing one might learn if one actually read some philosophy is that lots of naturalists aren't committed to "a reductivist [sic] comprehension of nature as a set of empirically verifiable causal relations and quantities of force."
I have, as I'm sure Marder knows, some views on "naturalizing jurisprudence," so I was especially amused by this paragraph, which would get a student expelled from even a mediocre PhD program, but apparently passes as "thinking" in some circles:
In the legal domain, "natural law" presupposes the pre-modern, teleologically inflected ontology of nature; this kind of law works when an entity fulfills its telos or function well. The universal principles inherent in this image of the law are metaphysically determined in keeping with the objectively fixed hierarchy of ends and, later on, the standard of truth emanating from the word of God.
Historical forms of natural law depended on a teleology of nature; contemporary forms do not.
Legal positivism is usually taken to be the exact opposite of natural law, though, in fact, it is nothing but the end result of the global translation of the old notion of "nature" into the categories of modern science.
Legal positivism does deny what at least some natural law theorists assert, namely, that there is a necessary conceptual connection between legal validity and moral justifiability. Some versions of natural law theory do not, however, claim such a connection, raising the question whether there is any dispute left (vide Mark Murphy's essay on natural law theory in The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory [2005] for a good overview). Positivist theories typically hold that law is, in Hart's formulation, the union of primary and secondary rules, and that among the latter, is a "rule of recognition," which is just a complex social fact about the actual practice of officials in deciding questions of legal validity and their attitude towards that practice (their acceptance of it from an 'internal point of view' as Hart says). I'm sure that's what Marder had in mind by saying positivism is "the global translation of the old notion of 'nature' into the categories of modern science."
The naturalization of jurisprudence, with the attendant conceptualization of legality on the basis of cause-effect relations, enables the same legal oppression as the one that marked the pre-modern notion of the law.
Even God probably does not know what the last half of the sentence means ("enables...pre-modern notion of the law"), but the first half is another citation-free bit of free association. The naturalization project of the American Legal Realists did not involve a "conceptualization of legality on the basis of cause-effect relations," since it didn't involve a conceptualization of legality at all; the naturalization project of the Scandinavian Legal Realists [like Alf Ross] involved a translation of the normative concepts in law into predictions about behavior. So what does the author mean? Who knows?
What both approaches have in common, then, is their insistence on the objectively fixed meaning of the law, whether it is defined by the teleology of nature, by the word of God, or by the impoverished ontology of effective causality.
Neither Ross nor I, nor any legal positivist believes that there is an "objectively fixed meaning of the law." But it's another trademark of "Jewish poker" philosophy to lump together competing positions on the basis of total misunderstandings of those positions.
I do agree with Marder that "the response has to be both harsh and rigorous" to those who are "the enemies of thinking;" we differ, apparently, as to who the real enemy of thinking and serious critical thought is, though I can't imagine it's too mysterious to any literate person.
ADDENDUM: Michael Rosen suggests an apt bit of music for this occasion, from 1938: "Hes' dead--but he won't lie down."
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