Let it go? Well I for one, am just getting started; so:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBo_pLrwAX0[/youtube]
[size=85]Ah, Dasein: the phenomenological closure of Being to mankind, by which Heidegger positioned his fundamental critique of Western thought in terms of a bifurcation of truth (to cite my favored secondary literature on the subject, from the pen of Balthasar) into the ontological a la. Thomistic metaphysics/the Absolute of German Transcendental Idealism and the ontic,- the later constituting man’s existentia or lived-reality, that is, the basic fact of Existence. For Heidegger, the Western tradition had, from its inception, subsumed the ontic to the ontological: that is destruktion; that is the Heideggerian critique. However, the brilliant answer arrived at by Heidegger to this self-manufactured problematics and monumentally inflated straw-man extended to the entire Life of the Mind, at least on the part of the West, was to conduct a reverse operation in subsuming the ontological and all hope of abstract ontology to the ontic, thereby creating a “phenomenological closure to Being” that, besides framing the consciousness of man in terms of a ‘horizon of meaning’ or orientation- a “thrown-ness” into Being, prevented any transcendental Absolute from being used as the basis of an ethos and gave us an equally impermeable and yet vague philosophic Angst, into which all hope of a real ethos (as opposed to the merely cursory ethos of Heidegger’s mysticism or poetics of the Good) and moral project was swallowed up. You must forgive me for not going along with any of that.
" Because out in the world we live in there can be no such thing as true “gender equality” if we forced women to give birth against their wishes."
You forgot one small detail in your line of thinking. That being the fact that the goal of our legal system (the European quasi-states differ in this respect, to be sure) is not gender equality, Iambiguous. We do not respect the group- any group, as the primary ethical or legal category, but that of the individual. Granting women the right to vote for example was more about recognizing the individuality of women and deepening the concept of the Individual in general than catering to any nebulous group-identity. It is the natural rights of individuals that we codify in law, since only an individual can take responsibility for their actions and exercise agency, whereas it would be unjust to demand that an individual take responsibility for the deeds or misdeeds of a group they are part of, or to demand that a group must take responsibility for the actions of one of its members, be the group in question gender, race, class, etc. Preserving the sphere of natural rights at the level of the Individual is the only way to ensure the long-term stability of a free society. The moment you begin introducing legislation that caters to the interests of the group over and at the expense of individuals, is the moment you introduce potentially irreparable damage to the underlying moral and political fabric: damage that will breed civil unrest eventually,- just as our populace is now experiencing in the recent catastrophic fracturing of the demos into an endless contest of identity politics, after having been leveled in continuous misjudgments of exactly this nature. [/size]
With all this in mind, your defense of the woman’s “right” to kill her own child due to a need to establish gender equality really just amounts to forcing the unborn child to take responsibility for his mother’s impregnation- by dying, which is illogical and therefor unjust.
“Abortion then is a human tragedy in my view precisely because, like so many other moral conflagrations, it necessarily involves a conflict of legitimate rights.”
Our rights reflect what the Socratic-Platonic thesis speaks of as the “Unity of Intelligibles”, just as God’s virtues are all perfectly harmonious and interchangeable, in keeping with Ramon Llull’s ars magna. In the terminology of symbolic logic, such metaphysical abstracts are commutative in their functionality. Truth is the aesthetic unity of the Intelligible; Beauty is the Intelligible unity of Truth. That is not meant to be mrely a poetic line, and I will explain exactly what that means. It means that ours rights cannot contradict one another, just as our Ideas cannot: as argumentation proceeds only after our having defined a set of axioms and definitions, so the sole issue for whose solution the entirety of our politikeia was conceived arises in the fact that, with as careful a geometry as they may have practiced, the branches of our Government were not successfully invested by our Founders with that same level of harmony as is invested to the soul, nor could they be: a harmony grounded, as is the moral project of the West, on a metaphysical capacity which humans alone, out of the total stock of nature, possess. It saddens me to read things like this, which you quote: "Christianity attempted to recuperate the suffering of history by projecting a divine plan that assigns it a reason in the here and now and a recompense later … " Really, that’s what you got out of the Abrahamic texts?
We can take physical reality and isolate elements within it based on whatever arbitrary parameters we wish (a process I call heuresis) in order to extract from it: patterns. There is a potentially infinite number of these patterns, and more to the point: we can then take a few of those patterns and repeat the process- abstracting data from this new set of elements on a secondary level of analysis, using an entirely different set of parameters. And then we can repeat this process again, in this way generating still more wide-ranging and broader patterns, and by a continuous derivation of the ‘alien third’ against whose Universe the stammered dyad of our sequential logic is abrupted, that is,- by means of a new set of parameters for further levels of reflection, we reach the concept of the “ontos” (meant to suggest the errant bifurcation of the ontic and ontological) as an application of Pierce’s triadic universe of symbolic logic and the Bataillean auton of transcendental reflection to what I call the process of Reification, that is,- the Negative as preserved in the face of the leveling synthesis of Hegelian totalization: the philosophical Negativity involved in the Platonic vocal plurality or aporia of Truth. That aporia, that silence,- that Negation firmly beyond all capitulation, deliverance, or subsumption, represents a kind of metaphysical capacity for transcendental self-reflection and recursive scaling, constitutive of the homoficans or daemon through which anthropos or the human-being is grounded in that which is not human, the poesis constitutive of his vital element or Becoming and ultimately, that power through which the reshaping of Nature in the image of God is accomplished,- the animating principle of our moral instinct: ethos; ethos anthropos daemon, following Heraclitus. The idea at the center of the Republic, as well as Plato more broadly considered, ie. the anabasis or act of ascending to reunite with our soul,- the doctrine of anamnesis and the escape from the Cave of Shadows toward Gnosis,- to become one of the bearers of light,- is a mythic narrative meant to provide a model for organizing these different levels of recursive, embedded abstraction, approaching their transcendental object ad infinitum like the infinite series of PI- for it is a difficult thing to manage and to get through them, endless as they are. This ascent is an ascent toward the Good. Toward true selfhood, and toward Beauty,- things which, to go back to the notion of intelligible unity, are at this height of Thought all one and the same thing.
" The day before yesterday the Founding Fathers kept black slaves."
And you keep brown ones, to make your iphone and clothes and food. But that is irrelevant. I would just ask if the writer have preferred Jefferson to free all his slaves, shove them out the door and wait for all the elderly ones to starve to death after being unable to find any work, or the young to starve as well, after failing to secure work due to a lack of any technical skills? Old slaves, or those without any skills, cannot find work: therefor they cannot eat, therefor starve. If you are going to free slaves, then you need more than revolutionary optimism, you actually need a well thought out plan and some kind of peremptory social infrastructure to aid in easing the mass transition of a large number of them into free society. No, better still: I would ask the writer what she would do if she was Jefferson at the time? How would she have gone about freeing the slaves without inadvertently causing them as much suffering due to political negligence as they had experienced due simply to the malevolence of other men.