Monday, April 17, 2023

Pride Goeth Before a FAIL

If there's not an Absolute Subject, then gosh, "relative subjectivity would be neither possible nor conceivable," for it would be "like an effect without a cause" (Schuon).

Well, who said effects must have causes? Asked no sane person ever, until David Hume came along and said we can only know correlations between phenomena, not causality. 

But one frankly has to be in an advance state of tenure to imagine that such a view is possible or even conceivable. For one of the first certitudes of Cosmic Normality is that effects have causes and causes have effects. If they don't, then truly truly, We Are Done Here. No philosophy for you!

There is an illiteracy of the soul that no diploma cures.

Thaaaat's right, Nicolas. If effects can be uncaused, then unintelligibility is absolute, because intelligibility is knowledge of causes, precisely. 

And if contingency isn't contingent, then this violates another certitude of normality, the principle of non-contradiction. And if the latter isn't the case, then all philosophy is 'Nam, and the only rule is that there are no rules.

torrents of intelligence are wasted for the sake of conjuring away the essential and proving the absurd brilliantly (Schuon).

A reminder that

Great stupidities do not come from the people. They have seduced intelligent men first.  

Everything Humean is alien to me.

If a first principle of contemporary tenure is that boys can be girls and girls can be boys, then it is perfectly understandable that they'd want to chuck the the principles of causality and non-contradiction. 

This gratuitous limitation on what we can know has become an urgent necessity of contemporary intelligence, which means that its epistemology is anchored in the extra-intellectual passion known as pride:

Intelligence separated from its supra-individual source is accompanied by that lack of sense of proportions which one calls pride; conversely pride prevents intelligence, when it has become rationalism, from rising to its source; it can only deny Spirit and replace it with matter....

Rather than bow to the evidence of the Spirit, proud reason will deny its own nature which, nonetheless, enables it to think....

This is hardly the first time in history that thinking has had to bow to the necessities of the mob, -- to fashion, to the state, or in a word, to power. This is essentially a form of backward reasoning that searches for the principle to justify itself.

For example, if  "a black man has no rights which the white man is bound to respect," then rights are a function of the contingency of race and not in the nature of things

Likewise, if women have a natural right to abortion, then girls have a right to be murdered. It's all just nominalism by another name, which is in turn another name for absolute stupidity. But

Humility is the only secure refuge against stupidity. 

And

Intelligence is the capacity for discerning principles

Now, our fallenness is presented to us as an "event," but I think this event is actually a principle in the form of a narrative. 

Which is why

Men are divided into two camps: those who believe in original sin and those who are idiots.  

 Conversely, 

In order to corrupt the individual it is enough to teach him to call his personal desires rights and the rights of others abuses.

Which again goes to the "principle of nominalism" which confers not only a right to "transexualism," but the right to abuse those of us who are humble enough to believe in natural rights, because these rights are anchored in the fact that 1) the Absolute exists, and 2) we are not it. 

But of course, Genesis 3 didn't happen once upon a time, it happens every time: 

The radical error -- the deification of man -- does not have its origin in history. Fallen man is the permanent possibility of commiting the error.

14 comments:

julie said...

Great stupidities do not come from the people. They have seduced intelligent men first.

I'm reminded of the growing dichotomy between professional movie reviewers and regular people who just want to see something entertaining.

Gagdad Bob said...

Z Man comes at it from a very different angle, but his conclusions are similar:

To be woke is to dismiss reality as a trick by white people. You must substitute your own reality, your lived experience, as it were, for the false reality....

This strikes most people as insane, but there is a logic to it. The core assumptions of the people we call the Left are egalitarianism and the blank slate....

Primarily, Wokism provides a way to distinguish who is inside and who is outside the dominant social group.... They are often the most aggressive at enforcing the moral code because they connect it with their own standing inside their social class....

What Wokism does is fill the role of religion for the ruling elite. If you go back and examine the language of abolitionists or New Deal reformers, you will find that the language is not particularly different from the language of Wokism. The main difference is the overt references to God and Christian morality....

A new elite needed a new ideology, and the new radicalism was there to supply that need....

Many have noted that Wokism sounds like Gnosticism. That is because embedded in human experience is the desire to transcend this life. That sense becomes acute for those who rise to the top of society. If you possess God-like power over your fellow man, why not take the final step? Our managerial elite embraces Wokism because it promises to give them power over the human condition. When you can turn boys into girls, you have become a god.

julie said...

This gratuitous limitation on what we can know has become an urgent necessity of contemporary intelligence

That's an excellent point, since it is necessary to first claim a false limit on something that nobody doesn't know before declaring that since something might theoretically be vanishingly possible, we must believe all supposed instances of this phenomenon just in case one of them is really true.

It's the inversion of the idea of innocent until proven guilty; call it perhaps "real until proved fake." For instance: We can't ever truly know the state of mind of a male prisoner, presenting as male in all ways, who claims he is really a woman and thus should be housed with women, therefore since he might really feel like a girl he should be housed in the women's prison where he will be happier.

Gagdad Bob said...

Either the world is intelligible, or it isn't. And if it isn't, then we have an infinite amount of intelligibility to unexplain.

Gagdad Bob said...

https://twitter.com/EveKeneinan/status/1560379287999598600/photo/1

julie said...

Thanks for that, her Twitter feed is pretty good. She doesn't quite reach the level of insultainment, but she doesn't back down from an argument.

Anonymous said...

Let’s see if I’m getting this straight (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Conservative Christians are all in when it comes to the original definition of “woke”. At least they say they are. What they’re against (unspokely but which I’ll clearly speak of here), are corporate advertisers showing men kissing, mixed race upper middle couples occurring far more frequently then we see them out in meatspace, and uppity black politicians. It’s almost like they’re trying to push envelopes, instead of coercing some target audience. Amirite?

Daisy said...

Anon, you aren't even coherent.

Randy said...

Speaking of stupidities, here's a handy list from Eve.

https://lastedenblog.wordpress.com/2017/05/20/intellectually-dishonest-or-deficient-atheists/

Anonymous said...

Daisy or Randy,

Okay, I'll be clearer so you can understand. Why is "woke" wrong?

Petey said...

The secret protects itself.

Anonymous said...

I dunno Petey. In my experience (such as it is), evil usually operates in secret. It's the good guys who're usually fool enough to always want to reveal themselves, to actually want to discuss stuff.

Petey said...

That's a start. Now define evil and good.

Anonymous said...

I used to go to Wikipedia to get informed-sounding opinions, until somebody told me that Wikipedia was evil. So I go old school and refer to my Bible.


I noticed that there are no commandments against “driving another away from God”.

There’s one against coveting, hell, even gossip (bearing false witness against neighbors). But we’ve all known people who went to church, were even good at going to church, who then gave up going after some loud and proud Christian screwed them over in some material way.

Their reasoning was that if material life is but a speck of dust with spending an eternity with Christ Jesus being by comparison, equivalent to everything else one can see or imagine in this life, then ruining another’s speck of dust just to enhance one’s own speck of dust seems pretty stupid. And damaging. Be enough to warrant a commandment methinks.

Theme Song

Theme Song