About our "free thinking" friends who insist that "beliefs should not be formed on the basis of authority," and who adopt "their own ideas and opinions rather than accepting those of other people."
First of all, it is helpful to be informed of certain universal principles of thought before setting out to think, otherwise you can waste your life thinking thoughts that are not true and cannot possibly be true. For example, it's nice to know about the principle of non-contradiction, without which one arrives
at 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 (Garrigou-Lagrange).
For example, "Can Kant simultaneously be Kant and not be him?" No? Then you understand the principle of non-contradiction, not just as a rule of thought but as a rule of reality, of being. Which, it turns out, is no small thing, because it means that thought conforms to being after all -- that intelligence is relative to intelligible being, otherwise there is no bridge from inside to outside, subject to object.
Pff. To accept the "Kantian poison" is "to pour sulfuric acid into an excellent wine."
Back to the essay on Truth and Indifferentism. A "free thinker" affirms his right to think what he wants, but again, what about the rights of truth? Can there really be a right to deny it?
We would like to recall here the rights of truth, without which, obviously, there would be neither true freedom, nor a true human life worthy of the name...
Supposing freedom is higher than truth, then truth is ordered to freedom rather than vice versa, "as though yes and no could be true at the same time." Which leads directly to "my truth" and "your truth" because FREEDOM, or something.
Pff. "God cannot regard with equal benevolence two contradictory doctrines, the true and the false." The latter is permitted, but "the freedom of teaching error as well as truth is a freedom of perdition." Which is no exaggeration, considering the intellectual and spiritual hell of academia.
To speak of an "academic freedom" that is prior to, or detached from, academic responsibility -- i.e., our obligation to the truth -- is to speak like an ass: "Complete liberalism leads to complete tyranny." Supposing
one would like today to defend freedom of teaching without going on further to speak about the rights of truth, the defense of true liberty (as something distinct from license) will be deprived of its foundation.
"Colonization." Pff. Free minds have been colonized by ideology, and truth deprived of its proper rights:
The modernists denied the traditional definition of truth [the conformity of judgment with being], as well as the ontological and transcendent value of the first notions and first principles of our intellect.
No longer (so they say) does the mind reach being -- AKA reality -- but rather, only the ever-changing appearances. Likewise, as a consequence of being plunged into subjectivism and relativism, "Truth is no more immutable than man himself, since it evolved with him, in him, and through him." Pff. Everything evolves except the theory of evolution.
Which denies the principle of non-contradiction alluded to above, for it is to simultaneously affirm absolute mutability and immutability. But the first principles of thought "are absolute, immutable truths and not only truths that are relative to the mentality of a given age."
These principles are primordial certitudes of our natural intelligence, diamond-like certitudes that resist... all the sophisms of ancient skepticism or of modern relativism.
Which is why the truth sets you free. Otherwise you're conflating freedom with just being lost in the bewilderness. To be continued...
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"We know many individual things now through various sciences and technologies, even know some moral principles, but we’ve lost the One Thing that holds the Many together..."
For example, "Can Kant simultaneously be Kant and not be him?" No? Then you understand the principle of non-contradiction, not just as a rule of thought but as a rule of reality, of being.
In a similar way, as the kids learned today, one cannot divide by zero because it violates the principles of non-contradiction and essentially breaks reality. Any philosophy which throws objective truth out the window as a first act is simply dividing by zero to make anything seem possible.
The principle of causation is another good one. If things don't have reasons, then we're done here. On the other hand, everyone gets to be the uncaused cause, AKA God.
Interesting little study: business and STEM professors condemn Hamas, whereas most humanities & social science faculty support Hamas.
On the one hand entirely predictable, but why? No doubt because business and STEM can't function with an epistemology that precludes contact with reality.
Did somebody say "Outside epistemology there is no salvation"?
"Which is why the truth sets you free. Otherwise you're conflating freedom with just being lost in the bewilderness."
Yup. The point I've been making in this series of posts, is that Epistemology as a distinct '4th Branch of philosophy', kant work, as it takes everything into its power and remakes it as its latest misosophers see fit - as Kant designed it too, once Hume gave him the casual faux-opening of a careless hole in causality.
OTOH, consistently subjecting our premises to an epistemological method of metaphysics (what is), logic (what follows), and ethics (what, if anything, should be done about it), is the only path to understanding the true nature of those premises.
Which kant help but entail the destruction of modern pro-regressive 'philosophy'.
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