Many eons ago, I stumbled upon this now defunct and probably inaccessible UNC article (http://www.unc.edu/~megw/WussyBadAss.html) about the differences between badass and wussy philosophical/ theological positions.
This article proposes three holy standards according to which a philosophy can be judged as badass or wussy:
1 ) Lack of Epistemic Safety: Epistemically safe, a badass philosophy is not. Eager it is, to conjure up entities or problems that cannot be proven or investigated with mere sense data- like Monads, Noumena, or the dreaded Platonic Form- and to bite metaphysical bullets without any injury.
2 ) Semantic Trickery: Damned the philosophy be that befuddles the mind with pesky lawyerisms! Just SAY you smoked pot instead of trying to hide behind this "Well, actually, I didn't exhale." Just SAY you're a racist rather than trying to weasel out of it with, "ACKTUALLY, I'm a race-realist," or "ACKTUALLY, ___ people can't be racist because (insert semantic trickery here)." None is more cowardly than he who uses semantic tricks in philosophical discussion.
3 ) Overly-Conciliatory: A philosopher that is too eager to please others or to reconcile enemies, badass he is not. As everyone knows, good philosophy is about aggressiveness, exclusion, and humiliating those who disagree, not making peace and singing Kumbaya.
However, there are two more points that I believe make one a wussy, rather than a badass philosopher:
4 ) Politically/ Ethically-Motivated: This means don't start with the ethical or political results that you want and work your way backwards, you filthy commie. I say this because 99% of commie philosophers- including Sartre, Zizek, and Rawls- have all done this. The bastards!
5 ) Selling Out Your Ontology/ Metaphysics For Political or Social Reasons: Pretty self explanatory. This automatically renders you an unlikable wuss. Philosophy isn't about making your friends happy- just the opposite! It's about questioning everything and everyone around you until you irreversibly alienate everyone you love because of how overpoweringly right you are.
This is regardless of course, of whether or not it is actually good philosophy. The philosophical position that all human actions are actually the result of demonic possession is a pretty badass philosophy despite the fact that it's clearly BS.
"Who are the badasses? What are the badass philosophies?" you say.
Well, without further adieu, allow me to present a handful of badass and wussy philosophies!
Irrationalism: (see Kierkegaard, Shestov, and Fondane) BADASS- Not epistemically safe at all, since it holds that not everything is reducible to rational laws or observation. Definitely isn't trying to make friends, since it started off as a big middle finger to Hegel and all the hyper-rationalists. And oh boy, does it love eating bullets.
Compatibilism: (see Hume, Dennett, and Hobbes) WUSSY- Relies heavily on semantic tricks over what constitutes "free will" and is absolutely BEGGING to make everyone happy. "See Hard Determinists! If you like your determinism, you can keep your determinism! See Free Will Libertarians! If you like your free will, you can keep it!*"
*only if by "free will" you mean predetermined desires that you have no power to control. Seriously, pick a side.Sartre (post- 1948): WUSSY- During WWII, when he was in a concentration camp for talking crap about the Nazis during the French occupation, he came up with all these ballsy-as-hell ideas about ontological freedom and how it is literally impossible to make a person unfree so long as he's alive...THEN, as soon as the war ends, Sartre sides with the commies and immediately starts backpedalling on all that "ontological freedom" so that he could argue Marxism was dandy because acktually, people are only free if they have a job and a 401k. If you looked up "selling out your ontology for politics" in the dictionary, Sartre's wall-eyed, Steve Buscemi-looking face would be the first thing you'd see.
("I'm don't always sell out to communism, but when I do, I also support white genocide in Africa and then write nasty book reviews of other existentialists who call out my hypocrisy.")Open Theism: (see Greg Boyd, John Sanders, William Hasker, and Richard Swinburne) BADASS- sure, some people think that it has some semantic trickery to it, depending on what flavor you buy into. But what people can't deny is that it more than makes up for that by taking a shot to the face of nearly all of mainstream Christian theology since St. Augustine and in doing so, it bites bullets for days. "God is not omniscient" is a pretty antagonistic position to hold in philosophy of religion, not to mention going to bat for some of the insane metaphysical implications of this theory; ("If God has free will, how can you be sure He's all-good? Wouldn't that mean it's possible for Him to do evil?"). No surprise that theologians are calling this the biggest controversy of the 21st Century.
