Insults to Unintelligence

As mentioned yesterday, Schopenhauer sought the sufficient reason for things, i.e., a reasons proportionate to the phenomena. Of course he failed miserably, and was famously miserable besides, but this isn't to say that he achieved nothing.

Rather, Schopenhauer's greatest achievement was the fine insultainment he spewed at philosophers whose reasons he considered insufficient, for example, Hegel, whom he described as an "impudent and cocky gasbag,"  

a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. 

Harsh but fair. Moreover, Hegel's misgeisted followers   

mistake the hollowest verbiage for philosophical ideas, the most miserable sophisms for sagacity, childish absurdities for dialectic, and their heads have been muddled by absorbing crazed word-combinations which torture and exhaust the mind that tries in vain to extract some meaning from them.

What would he have said about Foucault or Derrida? Kant also got the needle: he is like 

a man who at a masked ball flirts the whole evening with a masked beauty under the illusion of making a conquest, until at the end she unmasks and reveals herself -- as his wife.

Remind me, what is our subject? 

Oh yes: reasons, in particular, sufficient ones. Put conversely, I suppose the great majority of reasons we are given for things -- both visible and especially invisible -- are ridiculously insufficient. They are ultimately as rooted in authority, custom, and tradition as any religious dogma.   

I well remember the drudgery of school five days a week, broken up by the drudgery of Sunday School once as week. Not only could the reasons given in the former not be reconciled with the latter, nor were they even sufficient on their own terms. 

First of all, it is illogical in the extreme to posit two "ultimate explanations," but in both cases a simple Why? was sufficient to render the grown-ups either silent or irritated.     

The Aphorist has a number of sharp objects that go to just this point, so there's no need for me to reinvent the needle:

In philosophy a single naïve question is sometimes enough to make an entire system come tumbling down.

In the end there is only one Because that is impervious to every Why: necessary being, AKA the Absolute, or what most folks just call God.

Ultimately, 

Natural laws are irreducible to explanation, like any mystery.

Bearing in mind that "mystery" is not synonymous with absurdity, ignorance, or unknowability, but rather, is a palpable and fruitful presence. I'm touching it right now!

A fool is he who thinks that what he knows is without mystery.

You know the type: intelligent enough to obtain an advanced college degree but not smart enough to be ashamed of it.  

Being only falsifiable, a scientific thesis is never certain but is merely current.

To not know this is to practice a primitive religion called Scientism.

The definitive scientific sum will never be anything more than the prejudice existing at the moment when humanity becomes extinct.

In other words, science necessarily and literally goes on forever, while never in principle being capable of arriving at its object. This is so because the universe is created. If it weren't created, then this asymptotic convergence would be strictly impossible. Besides, Gödel. 

Philosophy gives up when one stops asking simple questions.

Simple questions such as, If consciousness is just a meaningless epiphenomenon, why do you believe that, or anything else?

Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow us to make fun of the rest.

Such as? Oh, the principles of identity (AKA non-contradiction), of causation, of the correspondence of intelligence and intelligibility. Come to think of it, 

All truths converge upon one truth, but the routes have been barricaded.

What's on the other side of the barricade? I don't know about you, but my trinoculars see intelligible being enshrouded by Beyond-Being. After that, Nothing. Or All-Possibility.

Nearly every idea is an overdrawn check that circulates until it is presented for payment.

For example, try demanding a Real World from the equations of physics. It's like the old joke about the atheist who bets God he can explain the world without him. The atheist starts by picking up a handful of dirt, and God says, "not so fast -- get your own dirt!" Likewise, get your own math!

The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.

This metaphysical scientism constitutes Begging the Question on steroids. It is hardly worthy of a serious insult.

Philosophy ultimately fails because one has to speak of the whole in the terms of its parts.

True, but it succeeds when it gives equal timelessness to the Whole, AKA, the ground of being. This ground is not God, rather, his first fruit, i.e., the Logosphere. It's a little mysterious, but to be perfectly honest,

The honest philosophy does not pretend to explain but to circumscribe the mystery.

That's our excuse and we're sticking to it. At least we're not like those deadbrained abracadavers, for

The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician’s rule book.

Aren't we leaving something out? Yes, we can't end this post without some gratuitous political insultainment:

The theses of the left are rationalizations that are carefully suspended before reaching the argument that dissolves them.

Insufficient persons necessarily have insufficient reasons, the most sufficient reason of all being the category Person, all three of them.