Cure for Postmodern Nihilism Announced by Obscure Blogger

It seems to me that Thomism is the worst philosophy, except for all the others. Let's find out why.

Just to set the stage, yesterday a commenter who calls himself "Gagdad Bob" linked to an article called Epistemic Nihilism Leaves Only Brute Force. I just skimmed it, but this caught my attention:

The postmodern cynic makes a false epistemological claim indicating epistemological skepticism and nihilism.... If there is an objective reality, we have no access to it.... This means that there is no way to settle debates by appeal to the evidence. Whose point of view prevails will thus be a matter of violence and power since there is no legitimate way to judge between perspectives. In this way, epistemic nihilism leaves only brute force. 

This chain of reasoning contains a contradiction and is thus false. The postmodernist claims to know that epistemic nihilism is true and thus that all agreement about how to interpret the world seen as a text can only be a matter of one person or group imposing its will on to another. But, if epistemic nihilism is true, they cannot possibly know this and thus they can have no justification for their imposition of force.  

If we do know that epistemic nihilism is true, then it is in fact possible to distinguish fact from fiction, text from reality, and truth from lies, and thus epistemic nihilism must be incorrect. The person promoting it is throwing sand in people’s eyes, shutting down debate or differing points of view, and sees no reason to confine himself to reason and logic, nor to avoid contradiction. He is a power-hungry psychopath. Reason and logic can only hurt him, so he disparages them. Why limit yourself to what is rational and logical? If power is everything, then I will shut you up. That is how they have decided to win a debate. By not having one in the first place.

By the way, I've been experiencing a marked case of Baader-Meinhof focused on the word "nihilism." It keeps coming up in a variety of contexts. Must be a reason. Unless nihilism is true, in which case there can be no reason.

Meanwhile, I've been rereading Garrigou-Lagrange's Philosophizing in Faith: Essays on the Beginning and End of Wisdom, and the word also popped up there. We'll discuss the wider context below, but he says that "by denying the principle of non-contradiction," one arrives at a

complete nihilism in the order of being, as well as the order of becoming and in the orders of thought, truth, error, opinion, desire, and action.

AKA everything. All due to one tiny error. But you know what Thomas says about a small error in the beginning growing enormous at the end.

Well, we're living in a world of Ginormous Error. For example, "my truth" instantaneously reduces to no truth, period, for it violates the principle of non-contradiction just mentioned by G-L. If my truth is true, and your contradictory truth is true, then anything and everything is equally true and false, with no objective way to adjudicate between them.

Which, among other catastrophes, is the death of the intellect.

Which for the left is not a bug, for reasons alluded to in the passage above:

The person promoting it is throwing sand in people’s eyes, shutting down debate or differing points of view, and sees no reason to confine himself to reason and logic, nor to avoid contradiction. He is a power-hungry psychopath.

Is it going too far to say satanic? Or not far enough? At the very least they are doing Satan's heavy lifting, and journalism takes care of the rest.

The Thomistic view is at antipodes to the postmodern, affirming the thesis "that our intellect can, by its natural powers, come to have metaphysical certitude concerning extra-mental being and its immutable laws" -- in other words, valid and true knowledge of reality.

I know. Crazy! Contra Kant, "The Truth is not merely the conformity of our judgment with the subjective laws of our mind," but "conformity with extra-mental reality."

Either the intellect can conform itself to the real, or it can't; but if the latter were true, we could never know it -- any more than an animal can transcend the closed circle of instinct and neurology. To be perfectly accurate, the animal is open to a world restricted by instinct and neurology, whereas the

man who is endowed with intellectual knowledge is opened up on the intelligible world, and will be able to become, in some way, everything that is intelligible.

The Kantrary view actually goes back a long way, appearing "in Heraclitus and in the Sophists," and later in the Skeptics. "It can be found once more in various forms of modern subjectivism," according to which the cosmos is turned upside down and inside out, such that knowledge is a function of the knower or of other knowledge. Thus,

I can make only one kind of judgment concerning a thing, namely, whether my knowledge of the object is in agreement with my knowledge of the object. Therefore, man is enclosed within himself and cannot escape from the self-enclosed state. He knows only phenomena, all in accord with the subjective laws of the mind (emphasis mine).

The whole idea of the intellect as an open system -- open to intelligible being -- seems to me rather important, not just for its own sake, but for what it says about the human being per se. It's a very strange situation that is either assumed and taken for granted, or denied, mostly by people with too much education and too little common sense.

Nevertheless, there it is: "the first object known by our intellect is the intelligible being of sensible things." Look around at the range of objects that communicate their intelligibility to your intelligence. What do they have in common? Not to insult your intelligence, but that they are; and are intelligible. To the intellect.

"Just as sight naturally knows color and hearing sound, so too the intellect naturally knows being" -- which includes the real being of the first principles of thought, such as the principle of non-contradiction.

Importantly, this principle is not merely a rule of logic confined to our heads, but an ontological principle applying to the extra-mental world. Again, unless you are a postmodern relativist, in which case contradictions can truly exist: a thing and its opposite can be equally true.

Which is like saying that "is" and "is not" are equally the case.

But this question of isness is incredibly important -- in fact, it is everything. If something is true, then it is the case; if it's not true, then it is not the case. Thus, "is" is the very soul of judgment.

Now, what is is?

Just kidding. Or maybe not. But let's stay focused:

Man differs from the animals first of all because the object of his intellect is not limited to the mere sensible phenomenon but, rather, is intelligible being, because he knows the meaning of this little word, "is," and quickly grasps that the verb to be is the root of all the others.

Verb? Yes: be is not a static noun, but rather, always be-ing, and this at both ends. Not to jump ahead, but the intelligibility of being could not occur at our end unless it were first the manifestation of the divine Intellect (i.e., a creative act). Otherwise there would be no intelligibility -- no essences -- there for us to extract.

G-L speaks of "the ontological riches virtually contained in the verb to be," the larger point being that these are not merely epistemological riches confined to our heads; rather, to say that they are ontological is to say that these riches -- the conceptual cash -- are backed by the full faith and credit of the First Bank of Reality. They're not just funny money, or checks that bounce when, say, you compare models of the climate with the climate.  

Our ideas are fungible to reality. If not, then they are known as "false":

the first demonstrable principle is that we cannot simultaneously affirm and deny the same thing of the same subject in the same respect, which is founded on the notion of being and non-being...

For example, what is a woman? A woman. Or nowadays, a man. In which case, is is deprived of any extra-mental reality. If both are true then neither is true. For "The principle of identity affirms, 'That which is, is; that which is not, is not.'"

So, this little matter of men pretending to be women, or of two men pretending to be married, or of morality being relative, or of all cultures being equally valuable, is no small thing. Or rather, they're all rooted in that small error regarding the isness of extra-mental reality.

There are many more deadly consequences to the denial of the principle of non-contradiction, but let's save something for the next episode.