for many years, was Lena Andersson, someone I read with great interest, regardless if I thought she was right or not. I admired her intellect, her focus, her unequivocal confidence in its own rationality. Then came the #metoo, and because of what I can only guess that vänskapslojalitet betrayal she has in several texts to the defense of, above all, Horace Engdahl and Jean-Claude Arnault is not only the readers but also their own expressed ideals. The latter is much, much worse, and it made me disappointed.
Myself, I try, however, to live up to a anderssonsk yardstick of reason and thinking, and reads her new book ”If false and true liberalism” solely on the basis of the text, solely on the basis of the thoughts she hears and bones out. To my great joy, she is here also as in the past again, interesting and thought-provoking and sharp, and as in the past, I often think that she is wrong.
until a ”genuine” liberalism in Plato’s and Aristotle’s footsteps and contrasting it against the ”fake” liberalism, which, inter alia, been influenced by Popper, Locke, and Hume. She has said pretensions, and I love it, despite the fact that she is wrong.
What she means is that liberalism must be deleted from the analytical sense, rather than from empiricism, and that freedom is good because it is objectively right, not because it is better than the alternatives. She believes that freedom is true because it is human nature, and for that, if not the man himself so if someone else would take her, which would be unreasonable.
For a mature neo-liberal, this is nothing new, even if you become a little fnissig to the statement that Andersson, the first of 2012 came in contact with Nozick. Itself read the ”Anarchy, state, utopia” in high school, and terrorized, therefore, the surroundings then, with approximately the same grandiose certainties that Andersson doing now. However, I was 18, it is still an excuse. I also had at the time an asymmetrical page, something which, according to Andersson seems to be an infallible sign of skenliberalism, so in this I know, neither out or in.
not the thesis, the man might as well be owned by no one. It is also a värderingsfråga if you think that it is better that she owns herself than for example the one that has the greatest need of her power and work should have the right to it. I agree personally with Andersson that it is better with empowerment and freedom, but both her and my views are opinions rather than facts. This is a general problem with Andersson’s philosophical model: she tends to mix up what she calls common sense with it she happens to find itself.
Large parts of the book devoted to arguing against the idea that humans, through language, affects and creates the world. If we replace the concept of an object, we not thought about it, ” she says, and my simple answer is: yes, we do. Quite often, in all cases, and not least with regard to fundamental freedoms.
When the sex with potentially unwilling wife in 1965 began to be called and legally seen as rape, we changed the idea of what it means to be with an unwilling wife. The change, of course, had begun even before the amendments, but the amendments and begreppsändringen fortified and strengthened innehållsförändringen. In a completely different field studies show that the more words for different shades of one knows, the better also to see the difference between these shades. You can not the words petrol, teal, turquoise, mint green, becomes all blue. Or green.
the analysis of empirin will also be extra strange when empirin speak against even common sense. For example, she writes critically about this that neuroscientists studied the brain make decisions for us long before we are aware of it, something which has been used as an argument against the idea of free will. Andersson glumly: ”I also suspect that there actually is something wrong in how the matter is presented”. It is the. Who is postmodernisten now?
It may sound as if I dislike this book, but on the contrary, it is deeply satisfying to be forced to think as much as you have to when you have with Andersson to do. In some pieces, she has also spot on points, as when she writes about how högerradikaler suddenly embracing of postmodernism and tries to bring up the Holocaust as a social construction. She has of course also right that there is a difference between trying to deconstruct the lies and prejudices in order to then be able to see more clearly, or to do it in order to increase confusion and uncertainty. I hope that I generally devote myself to the last.
that liberalism needs a aristoteliskt foundation to exist, it is just as good to defend freedom on the basis of the empirical conclusion that all other systems are worse and leads to more suffering and cruelty. According to Lena Andersson it makes me to the false-liberal, but it may I well to simply stand out.
Read more: Lena Andersson DN–columns
