Thoughts on the Ten Commandments

The state of Louisiana now officially mandates displays of the Ten Commandments in both public and private schools. When I first heard about this, the thought that came to my mind was, "whose version of the commandments"?

The passage in Exodus 20 is somewhat different from that in Deuteronomy 5. And neither of them neatly breaks itself down into a list of ten bullet points.

The traditional Jewish understanding of the "ten commandments" involves a first commandment that demands monotheism. A second commandment that prohibits graven images. And so forth. In this version, there is only one commandment against "coveting".

The Roman Catholic Church has another take on it. The RC Church, after all, enthusiastically embraces icons (the Eastern Church even more so). The RC Church regards iconoclasm, the smashing of images of the sacred, and even of God Himself, as a heresy it has done well to overcome. So it soft-peddles the whole no-graven-images thing. (I say this without judgment -- its evasion of iconography is hardly one of the troubling pieces of the Church's long history -- think of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel!) Consistent with this, it lumps together those first two commandments from the older faith. To keep the number constant at ten, though, it then divides the ban on coveting into two parts. Coveting your neighbor's wife is something different from coveting his farm animals. (Here's a judgment, I do see a positive side to that change.)

Many Protestant churches have reverted to the older list, siding with the iconoclast heretics in early Christian history. Giving no-graven-images explicit treatment as a commandment of its own and combining the "covets" back into one. Some, though, (notably the Lutherans) have kept the RC wording. Yet others have made other changes than what I've mentioned here, concerning especially the ordering of the commandments.

The point, though: if the state of Louisiana is now ordering a specific "ten commandments" text, then it is taking sides in a sectarian dispute. It is most likely adopting the Catholic presentation because ... well ...it is Louisiana. That is the majority religion there. But that is the problem, isn't it? A majoritarian political process (or any other political process) deciding that the laws from God are this rather than that.

Whether you think it is constitutional or not, ... it is damned ugly.

I use the "whether you think" formulation not as a dodge, but simply because I understand there is an intellectually serious case to be made against "incorporation," that is, against the premise that Louisiana, as a state, is subject to the first amendment's establishment clause at all. I think that argument has little to be said for it other than its intellectual seriousness, though. The Roberts Court has shown no inclination to take that road, in establishment cases or in other areas where it might be invoked.

The point, regardless, is that the new Louisiana law is an ugly perverse piece of work, putting the state openly in the business of telling people -- especially young folk -- not just whether but how they ought to worship, down to what the right ordering of God's commandments must be.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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