The Suicide of Thought (Part Ten)
Part Ten: The Suicide of Thought
Thus philosophy ends. Without any ability to justify or explain itself, its goals, or man’s place in the cosmos, philosophical inquiry ceases as a rigorous discipline.
Nihilism is a halt state. Once the philosophy is adopted which, as a matter of doctrine, holds that no philosophical truths can ever be discovered or debated, that reality is optional, that ethics are a matter of the will of the stronger, there is no way to reason oneself out of this posture. Anything presented as true, real, or virtuous is dismissed before it is presented.
Hence we have the nameless philosophy of the modern mind.
The nameless credo is sometimes called postmodernism, but an aversion to naming, labeling and identifying things cuts against the modern mindset itself, and so no unambiguous term has come into common parlance.
The one metaphysical postulate of the credo is that there are no metaphysical postulates: all ultimate truths are ultimately subjective either to the culture or to the individual, and any attempt to judge between cultures and individuals are ruled out beforehand as impermissible, if not unthinkable.
The one rule of logic is that logic does not apply in any cases. Illogic, a wiliness to overlook and ignore inconsistencies, self-contradictions, and rank hypocrisy is, for reasons never made clear, regarded as being more practical and pragmatic, hence always to be preferred. Anyone insisting on using logic is to be denounced as a heretic, and accused of the one crime the system admits, the crime of certainty.
The one rule of epistemology is that there is no knowledge and no certainty. Questioning how, if this is the case, we come to know this is the case is the thought crime of using logic. Logic is no longer welcome.
The one rule of ethics, likewise, is that there is no rule of ethics. This rule has the strangest possible mechanism of propagation: it is held, on the one hand, that skeptical inquiry is enlightened and open-minded, but also held, on the other, that the certainty of any given belief, not the content of the belief, is what causes danger to the public peace, therefore ideas cannot be criticized for being illogical or evil, but the believer can and is criticized for being certain in his belief. Certainty is the one thoughtcrime that is unforgiveable. The moderns are certain of that.
Of politics, the less said the better. All the difficult lessons of history, and the vast and rich legacy of legal and judicial reasoning to which the English speaking world is heir, is undermined. Everything from trial by jury to individual rights is vanishing.
Finally, and most ironically, having killed off philosophy, the worshippers of science find that science itself cannot exist. Science cannot and does not use the scientific method to justify the intuitive axiomatic assumptions on which the scientific method is based. The regularity of matter in motion, which we call laws of nature, and the universality of those laws, and, much more problematically, the axiom that the simpler and more robust model is the more accurate and truthful one, cannot be justified by any application of the scientific method itself. These foundations of science are not part of science, but are the conclusions of axiomatic deductions from epistemology, logic, and ontology, which is a branch of metaphysics.
This fact shocks no one but the uprooted, simplistic, easily angered and easily confused modern. Sober students who haply avoided the poison of modern indoctrination in the cult credo of anti-intellectualism realize that no rigorous system of thinking proves itself. Every proof has a starting point, a common notion or principle which is either granted by the student or is self-evident, and these starting points are the end points, the conclusions, of higher and more abstract branches of philosophy, springing from metaphysics or theology.
The uprooted, simplistic, easily angered and easily confused modern finds all this thoughts to be rootless, merely a series of arbitrary assertions delivered by teachers and taken on faith. Questioning the roots of the thinking is heretical and dangerous, and runs afoul of the strict prohibition against certainty, which is the modern stand-in for original sin.
Thinking and reasoning is no longer taught in schools, but actively discouraged. Students are told they are bright and wise when and only when they utter not the correct answer but the politically correct one. Parroting back indoctrinated recitals is rewarded, original thought discouraged, free speech punished, free thought unthinkable.
The modern student is also taught to be proud. The other common factor I met in my conversations with educated men mentioned above (common, at least, to four out of the five) is that they speak without listening. Dialog was not possible: their only mode of addressing the other was the condescending lecture. None had any ability to answer questions or to respond to what someone of contrary opinion said.
They reacted to questions as if to question was back-talk, not honest inquiry. As if questioning was insolence.
(This jarringly inappropriate yet hostile condescension to honest philosophical questions was amusing at first, but grew to be wearisome, considering the topics being discussed where ones I had studied while they had not, and in which I had learning both wide and deep, while they had difficulty even grasping what the difficulty was. The toddler in the wading pool lecturing the professional pearl diver.)
Now, no one thinks he knows more about how to tune a piano than a piano tuner, or knows more about plumbing than a plumber, but everyone seems to think that being trained in physics or computer science makes you as skilled at analyzing philosophical issues as a someone who read Aristotle in Greek, and has a degree in the field.
In reality, a physicist knows as much or little about which washer or widget will fix a leaky toilet as would a phrenologist, a pneumologist, or a philatelist or a psephologist.
Studying Newton, Einstein and Heisenberg tells you no more about how to drain a U-trap via a standpipe, than does the study of skull measurement, lung diseases, stamp collecting or voting patterns.
Likewise, if the question is one of philosophy (that is, a question of metaphysics, logic, epistemology, ethics, politics, aesthetics, or theology) a physicist would be as lost at sea as any other amateur. You would be just as likely to get a clear answer from a psephologist.
I doubt this is deliberate. No one utters pure, self-contradictory nonsense on purpose. Or, to be specific, the purpose is unrelated to the content of the words, as when a man is boasting or joking or saying something else where his words are not meant literally.
For the modern, none of his words are actually uttered with the purpose of conveying the meaning of the words from one mind to another. The purpose is to count coup, to spread the peacock tail of vanity, to show intellectual superiority or moral supremacy, or to show loyalty to the postmodern creed, or, most often, to halt criticism, attack the questioner, hinder the reasoning process, and abolish human nature.
I speak here of the human purposes served by adopting this nameless modern philosophy of nihilism and irrationalism. The temptation to pride, and the sense of liberation that comes of holding oneself free to commit any act of immorality, lust or greed or avarice or wrath, without any social opprobrium is the true driving force here.
There are beings greater than human, once angelic in dignity, now wretched, who for reasons of undying malice, seek the destruction of the human soul and our eternal exile of man from heaven. It is hence part of their tireless work to blind and dim the mind of man, and convince him so tenaciously to adhere to the irrational and deadly nonsense I have described above.
Did someone tell you the Christian religion was irrational? It is the only bulwark against unreason.
Unreason is the philosophy of Hell. There is no language there, only an endless screaming of sounds without sense ringing in the darkness.
Reason is called Logos in Greek, and is another name for the only intercessor able to bridge the gap between God and Man. Reason is light.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
