The Death of White Philosophy
The current dismantling of academic Humanities subjects across the West was always going to target philosophy. The charge sheet is by now familiar and reducible to one piece of evidence; Western philosophy was written by White men. This is now all the requirement a discipline requires to be defenestrated.
Western philosophy, from the pre-Socratics to the 2oth century, was indeed an exclusively White affair (the north African St. Augustine possibly excepted). Accordingly, for the progressives who wish to cull all record of Caucasian achievement, philosophy’s pure ethnic heritage is emblematic of historical racism and White supremacy, and so must be consigned to history.
The far Left have an uneasy relationship with history. They need it as it is a rich crop of White evil which yields a harvest of Black and White Liberal grievance. But they also require a revisionist version, a pop-up edition of history in which Blacks and Muslims invented everything from the plough to the Large Hadron Collider, taking breaks only to invent movable type and the internet, while Whites beat their slaves and gloated over their cotton margins. A new history book is what the far Left want, also the dream of Jacobins, Bolsheviks and Maoists. Well, if the revised edition of history does not include White Western philosophy and intellectual history, then to tweak a famous phrase from the film Jaws, we’re going to need a smaller library.
Philosophy had fallen out of favour culturally long before the ‘woke’ assault of the last decade. The last time there was a series on philosophy on TV in the UK was probably Bryan Magee’s Men of Ideas in the early 1980s. Philosophy simply can’t function in the current intellectual atmosphere. As a pursuit, it was never intended for the masses and now if something cannot be sold to the public it has no value. You can’t dumb down philosophy.
Historically, the schism between Western philosophy and science/technology during the Enlightenment bequeathed to philosophy the abstractions remaining after natural philosophy went its own way. Philosophy was left with metaphysics, morality, language and history. It could build no bridges, invent no engines, discover no surgical techniques. Accordingly, philosophy retired from the consultative capacity it had held within society and retreated to the universities, insular and remote like the students of the fictional city Castalia in Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, and becoming a far more antiquarian affair. In the 20th century, despite the razzmatazz of existentialism, structuralism, post-modernism and other fashions, philosophy finally sickened and died, and now the legions of woke have arrived at the battlefield to bayonet the corpse.
For anyone of even a mildly conservative tendency, philosophy is a part of the old world, wise and challenging and worthy of respect. For the intellectually negligible ideologues who now effectively run Western academia, philosophy is also a part of the old world, but one to be swept away just as Mao’s Cultural Revolution was designed to destroy much of China’s cultural heritage in order to rid the empire of the ‘Four Olds’: old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas. In quite another context, Nietzsche writes in Schopenhauer as Educator: “I believe in all seriousness that it is to the state’s advantage to have nothing further to do with philosophy.”
There is also a vestigial trace of class enmity in the stripping of philosophy’s medals. Epictetus may have been a slave, Spinoza a lens-grinder, and Wittgenstein a hospital porter in London during WW2, but philosophers have generally come from the moneyed and even aristocratic class. At one time, Leftist cultural revolutionaries would have sniped at philosophy on behalf of the working class. But that working class is now too White, and progressives have found a new pet.
The banishing of philosophy has an additional benefit for the curricular revolutionaries; it saves actually reading it. So there is no need for a campus diversity officer to plow through, say, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, because Kant’s work has already been found racially guilty. From Kant’s Lectures on Physical Geography;
‘The White race possesses all incentives and talents in itself. … The race of Negroes can be educated, but only as slaves. The [indigenous] Americans cannot be educated, they care about nothing and are lazy’.
Philosophy and the current crop of grievance studies students are a poor fit, not least because traditional White Western philosophy is hard work. I remember at my alma mater, The University of Sussex in England, when English literature students would take a philosophy module for a few weeks before realizing that a feminist critique of Jane Austen was a good deal easier than 600 pages of Hume, and they would scurry back to their safe little box of leaves.
The universities, as the engine-room of philosophy after the 19th century, are now effectively run by the students. Plato warns, in a throwaway line from the Republic, about teachers who ‘flatter their students’, and it is rare now to see a faculty stand up to a newly enlightened student body. One among many examples of this power shift is from my own university.
Professor Kathleen Stock was hounded from Sussex by student objections to her comments about gender. A philosophy lecturer, Professor Stock’s position was made untenable. She was threatened and humiliated and the faculty did the bare minimum to help her, squeaking about freedom of speech but largely staying out of it. What an irony that one of the very first Western universities, at Bologna in the 12th century, was also run by the student body, but this was to ensure a high standard of teaching rather than adherence to a politico-cultural line.
A relatively early example of ‘decolonizing the curriculum’ is a manifesto of the same name from the University of California-Berkeley in 2015. Ironically, Berkeley was famously the scene of demonstrations against the suppression of free speech in the 1960s. Now, authors Rodrigo Kazuo and Meg Perret have the following to say about the curriculum their university offers:
We have major concerns about social theory courses in which White men are the only authors assigned. These courses pretend that a minuscule fraction of humanity — economically privileged White males from five imperial countries (England, France, Germany, Italy and the United States) — are the only people to produce valid knowledge about the world. This is absurd. The White male syllabus excludes all knowledge produced outside this standardised canon, silencing the perspectives of the other 99 per cent of humanity.
They provide specific examples of ‘colonisation’, some so gruelling that, ‘Sometimes, we were so uncomfortable that we had to leave the classroom in the middle of lectures.’ Philosophy is not, we discover, inclusive. ‘We were required to read Hegel on the “Oriental realm” and Marx on the “Asiatic mode of production”, but not a single author from Asia’. Even last night’s news was seen as a serious omission from a philosophy course:
The professor even failed to mention the Ferguson events, even though he lectured about prisons, normalizing discourse and the carceral archipelago in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish the day after the grand jury decision on the murder of Michael Brown.
It does not, cannot, occur to the authors that White Western thinking could be in any way superior, given any indicator you like, to that of non-Whites. There is no longer any permissible inter-cultural calculus you can read off and which will show the worth of one race’s intellectual endeavors set against another’s. For us, this explains why, for example, the architects of Britain’s Industrial Revolution were not brought up in the tradition of Ghanaian ontologists or Afghani empiricists. The British technological class’s ability to reason, deduce, experiment, improve and invent was honed on the rock of the British philosophical tradition, a White tradition. This is why Mogadishu is not Tokyo.
So much for decolonizing the curriculum, including philosophy. What are these revolutionary brigades actually doing philosophically? The answer is even more ominous. As well as removing philosophy from the syllabus, progressives are interfering with philosophy’s center of gravity: truth. Where the Renaissance was the response to a weakening Church, what is happening across the West — what we might call a ‘Denaissance’ — is the response to a weakening epistemology.
Epistemology is the study of what we can know to be true. It is also concerned with the different ways in which truth functions. For example, ‘2 + 2 = 4’ is true, as is the statement that ‘Japan is composed of four islands’. However, we recognize that, while both true, these statements are not true in the same way. Ultimately, however, the truth of either has an objective requirement, it needs to be validated from ‘somewhere’ other than the subjective perceiver. What the progressives are doing, under the jocular banner of ‘woke’, is to reverse this arrangement.
The epistemological difference between Left and Right revolves around a philosophical decision concerning knowledge and truth. For the Right, knowledge concerning the world should stay firmly on the side of the objective, which enables it to be open to shared consensus or dispute and thus partake in the communitarian.
For those on the Left, however, the subjective is everything. Opinion is equally as valid as objective knowledge (doxa and episteme in Ancient Greek, the first travelling to today’s English as ‘dogma’). And whereas for the Right, emoting is seen as wholly subsidiary to the acquisition of knowledge, incidental and — if anything — a hindrance on the path to wisdom, for the Left, it is the key functional state. This is the rematch between Hume’s reason and the passions. But if emotio is held to be more methodologically vital than ratio, then a whole apparatus of reasoned thought is made obsolete, and we begin to hear talk of ‘my truth’ and ‘your truth’.
A radical subjectivity, devoted to itself and its attributes and solipsistic in outlook, is given the right to arbitrate concerning reality. It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie, but this is what is happening at the epistemological level.
The Left have also commandeered language and meaning. As they do not have the mental apparatus required to debate, progressives have instead produced a lexicon of words of command engineered to prevent discussion, designed to have a quasi-magical effect on others. Terms such as ‘racist’, ‘White supremacy’, ‘micro-aggression’ are not concepts, they are statements ex cathedra, backed as in medieval times by a new form of papal infallibility. These terms are what the political philosopher J L Austin would have called ‘perlocutionary’, statements intended to produce an effect but not to provide reasons for that statement. Plato presciently describes the tactic in the Theaetetus:
‘If you ask any of them a question, he will produce, as from a quiver, sayings brief and dark, and shoot them at you; and if you inquire the reason of what he has said, you will be hit by some other new-fangled word, and will make no way with any of them…’
Why should we read philosophy? Because it is a repository of White culture, a race-based resource which we know to be valuable simply by noting the progressive wish to destroy it. Philosophy teaches the student how to reason, how to construct an argument, how to spot logical inconsistencies, how to debate. It teaches how to tread carefully with an argument or concept, not to rush in two-fisted with your opinions foremost. These things are all heretical practices to modern academia, which is the source of ideas that filter down into culture and society in general, and thus philosophy is heresy.
It is not necessary to approach philosophy by way of the latest publications and writers. In fact, quite the opposite. Classical philosophy has much to say to us. Reading Plato, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca’s letters to Lucilius will be of more use to the modern student than the ideologically crafted candy-floss currently on offer. My university supplied me, on request, with a photograph of the philosophy syllabus the year I began my first philosophy degree, 1981. The courses were specific, based around source texts and carrying requirements for certain modules. Today’s prospectus alludes vaguely to a few philosophers, but the rhetoric is much more about learning how to phrase questions and make sense of the world, vague, woolly incentives that offer no hard core of White Western philosophy. And, finally, if you still require persuasion to read your tradition’s finest intellectual output, consider the remarks of Mark Zuckerberg’s sister, Donna.
Donna Zuckerberg wrote a book in 2018 entitled Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age. With a doctorate in Classics, Ms. Zuckerberg is very much on her appropriate territory but, like most woke academics, she is not concerned with the glories of the classical world, but preoccupied with the color and gender of the writers who produced them, and who might be reading the classics:
The Alt. Right is hungry to learn more about the ancient world. It believes that the classics are integral to education. It is utterly convinced that classical antiquity is relevant to the world we live in today, a comfort to classicists who have spent decades worrying that the field may be sliding into irrelevance in the eyes of the public.
It is fine and it is good that an interest is taken in your field, provided you let the right ones in or, rather, not the Right ones. She continues:
Classics, supported by the worst men on the internet, could experience a renaissance and be propelled to a position of ultimate prestige among the humanities during the Trump administration, as it was in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Classics made great again.
So, not only do those who Nietzsche called ‘we philosophers’ have the benefit of two and a half thousand years of wisdom, we can also enjoy being referred to as ‘the worst men on the internet’. Philosophy is beginning to look rather enjoyable. As Cicero writes to M. Portius Cato in the first century before Christ:
I have only one last resource – philosophy: and to make her plead for me, as though I doubted the efficacy of a mere request: philosophy, the best ever friend I had in all my life, the greatest gift which has been bestowed by the gods upon mankind.
Well, I just turned in my university dissertation uniting Greek philosophy with East Asian (-ish) philosophy against Freud, post-Freud anti-traditionalism/deconstructionism and globalism. Academics still exist and they want to see the rise of a Counter-Intersectionality of World Traditions against the Orcs and Js. Nobody worth their salt really respects what a Zuckerberg or a Kazuo says about Western Tradition. They just don’t signify where our Tradition is concerned. But we have to work at pushing back.
Well if it is all “your truth” and “my truth”, then simple; we keep and present our truth. The people who now control universities have made it impossible for those with a pro-European view of history to continue working in them. Those of a traditional view of Western philosophy will either have to start their own educational institutions regardless of how small, or simply give up. The battle for the established universities is over, the left has absolutely won that battle, and we will have to work out other methods to keep Western culture alive. Ironically, it might be easier to present Western philosophy in some Asian countries, so there is one avenue.
Also, why can’t we start teaching about the most entitled people on earth, who are the very ones behind presenting Western Culture in the negative light it is now shown?
Westernworld White philosophy has an irrefutable positive claim on the survivability of humanity beyond
{{ The Solar TOTAL Extinction Event }}
since computers and
all computerized technologies worldwide ,
which are ALL based on
White Aristotelian logic circuits ,
are now indispensable for
the creation , the development , and the employment of
the sciences , the technologies , and the arts
that are and will be needed
for humanity to continue to survive beyond any Extinction Event .
“Terms such as ‘racist’, ‘White supremacy’, ‘micro-aggression’ are not concepts, they are statements ex cathedra, backed as in medieval times by a new form of papal infallibility.”
Or to quote a truly profound man of genius, living legend Jesse Lee Peterson: ‘There’s no such thing as racism. No such thing as white supremacy-ism, sexism, homaphobia-ism, antisemita-ism, allahu-ahkbar-ism. They don’t exist. There’s just right verses wrong, good or bad. It’s a spiritual battle folks, and we’re all involved.’
He’s so right. The rest is all just Jewish razzel-dazzel, to bamboozle the goyim. We’re just as bad as all the hypnotised sheep for even entertaining this gibberish.
There’s right or wrong, good or bad. That’s it.
“Jewish razzel-dazzel, to bamboozle the Goyim” well put. We must not buy into their phrases because if you listen to any of it, you get sucked into all of it!
Certainly these kinda made up fake terms are often introduced en masse by racemixed socalled jews in media and academia.
But to be truthful, the terms as such are often by non jews of the PC anti white kind.
Also other minorities, people of colour as they call themselves quite often are not hesitant to jump the bandwagon if they think it helps their group i.e. race.
Hence we often see subsaharian africans in the USA senate go on and on about white supremacy and those horrible white supremacist white people storming the capital and hey thos subsaharians are expressing it like they know these white supremacists are just as bad as those horrible white supremacist kkk memebers who lynched blacks just for fun because it never had like anything to do with RAPE that africans of the subsaharian kind, just like muslims are 8 TIMES OVERREPRESENTED in, in the Scandinavian region…
So just like the vaccine is both jews and arabs wanna change the genetics of white people and drug them. And the vaccines are made in China I read so they probably in on it.
AND
the election fraud was jews in the media, together with chinese and latinamerican commies (ONE VOTING MACHINE WAS INITIALLY MADE by latinamerican commie regime, another was bought, in Switzerland by a China company), the afros in the USA counting votes because they occupied the cities where most counting of votes is done…
So what we see inmost cases these days is ALL OTHER RACES teaming up on whites.
Them often being led by jews.
Especially Schaw of WEF is interesting here he might even be a nazi jew (i.e. related to top nazis and top jews). Is he a leader of an anti white sect? Probably YES. Probably the illumskishateeeeez or similar.
Travellers of light (traveller = gypsie), triangels, persian princes, pyramids, one eye (hinduism), are you also a travelling man, is your dogs name (some syrian name)… Only one man left on planet, a beggar or king he choosese (beggars most often gypsies).
Askenazis, askhe & nazis put together.
You a slave or a free man HWAT WHAT WHAT!!!!
“But to be truthful, the terms as such are often by non jews of the PC anti white kind.
Also other minorities, people of colour as they call themselves quite often are not hesitant to jump the bandwagon if they think it helps their group i.e. race.”
Sure they do this, but so what? We can hardly expect a tiny proportion of these types to get in on this scam. Blaming these guys is like blaming the bullets that killed you and not the Jew who fired the gun. Plus, the proportion of masochistic whites who get involved in this dwarfs BIPODs that do.
“Them often being led by jews.”
Not often, always. How any sentient being could imagine blacks could shake down corporate America is beyond me. Only Jews have this power.
“” “Them often being led by jews.”
Not often, always. How any sentient being could imagine blacks could shake down corporate America is beyond me. Only Jews have this power.””
Superb observation .
EMICHO–
Elsewhere you rhetorically ask whether there’s any genius that isn’t European; now here you characterize the black JL Peterson as a “truly profound man of genius, living legend.” And for saying there’s lol no such thing as racism?! Wilt thou say next that there’s no such thing as the ethno-religious bigotry which Jews have harbored toward White non-Jews–a bias BASED ON our non-Jewish lineage, certainly and obviously an “ism”? No? Time to look into the Talmud.
Of course there’s racism. Racism is nothing other than discrimination based on race. It’s valuing and/or treating people differently based on their race. Nor is it always unfavorable to its objects, because there’s often favorable discrimination.
I certainly harbor and practice racism, because I favor one general demographic over all the others; I deeply PREFER it. I do discriminate. If I weren’t a racist, all people would be the same in my eyes, but they surely ain’t.
It’s one thing to say that “racism” (as usually and incompletely conceived) isn’t what normally characterizes Whites’ attitudes toward blacks (it doesn’t–a pity!), and another thing to say that racism doesn’t exist lol. If Peterson actually asserts the latter–well, blacks aren’t well known for their astuteness, are they.
Should you ever begin thinking race important, none of this will seem so mysterious…..
“Elsewhere you rhetorically ask whether there’s any genius that isn’t European; now here you characterize the black JL Peterson as a “truly profound man of genius, living legend.”
Yes brother, that was meant to be, er, taken with a pinch of salt. If you were a Jesse fan you’d get it.
“Wilt thou say next that there’s no such thing as the ethno-religious bigotry which Jews have harbored toward White non-Jews–a bias BASED ON our non-Jewish lineage, certainly and obviously an “ism”? No? Time to look into the Talmud.”
No.
Look, I’ve never said you lacked spirit, but you are misguided and don’t know how to argue. Don’t be too offended by that. We are all misguided to an extent and there’s nothing especially brilliant about knowing how to argue. But to not have spirit is a catastrophe. And epidemic among whites. You know this. I’m giving you a massive compliment.
But when arguing, you’ve got to attack what people say, not some hypothetical interpretation of what you think they think.
You need learn this or you’re going to keep getting wasted by crueler types than me.
-The rest of your comment, I basically agree. To people who claim not to ‘racist’, I liken them to parents who prefer the neighbours’ kids to their own. It’s not just wrong, it’s deeply phyco-masochistic, it’s bizarre. A product of a frighteningly degenerate mind.
As for Peterson saying racism doesn’t exist, he’s right. Racism is a Jewish word, and like all Jewish mid-century linguistic inventions, is gibberish.
The original was ‘racialist’, a better, more accurate word. But it didn’t have the phonetic power of ‘racist’, as a dumb slogan for dummies.
Left unsaid in this short essay is the fact that “the classics” included the most coherent and usable critique of the classics: I refer especially to the tradition of classical skepticism, which by the time of Sextus Empiricus (second century, AD) could be presented in Outlines of Pyrrhonism as a comprehensive mode of assessment of truth claims. In short, “the classics” is already a body of work both contentious and serene.
The skeptic taught that when presented with a truth claim, one must examine its premises and chain of reasoning, and when these are found to be inadequate to establish it either as certainly true or certainly false, one must “suspend judgement” (epoche). This is utterly unlike “cancel culture”, which merrily throws its ideologically-determined enemies into the trash. But it is a great mental discipline.
This great classic tradition was renewed notably in modern philosophy by Hume and the Hegel (who termed his Phenomenology a “self-completing skepticism”). Cancel culture, by contrast, stinks of the murderous miasma of Marxism.
My own “philosophical project” isn’t really my own, and may be a forlorn hope at best, but I’m attempting to de-babblize what might be thought of as “white” philosophy. Keep in mind that one of the main strengths Jews enjoy is multilingualism arising from being international. I’m asking folks to help create a Rosetta Stone containing all, top down “theories of everything”* rooted in their minimum description lengths reducible to the vernacular. Thus far, I’ve identified only 4 TOEs that qualify as “top down”:
Chris Langan’s Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)
Burkhard Heim’s Extended Quantum Field Theory, reducible the extreme-minimalist G. Spencer Brown’s “Laws of Form”
Thomas Campbell’s “My Big Toe”
Michael Manthey’s Roots of Unity, which results from the development of The Alternative Natural Philosophy Association’s origin in the Combinatorial Heirarchy ansatz.
All 4 have their proponents (only Heim is no longer with us) but thus far, none seem willing to talk to each other. This is understandable to some extent as more than mere divisive egoism. It is very hard to come up with a parsimonious philosophical vocabulary (including mathematical definitions) with enough internal consistency to be remotely considered a “Theory” of any kind, let alone one that covers Being itself. Moreover, it is very easy to get lost in another’s slightly different definitions of the same words — differences that make a difference — as one is attempting to keep one’s moorings in the ever shifting sand beneath one’s feet that seems the fate of all philosophers. All such attempts are, of course, viewed with profound hostility by the academic establishment that occupies its position as theocratic monopoly by obfuscating the obvious so no one can get anywhere without becoming a zombie regurgitating some specialized argot.
*These are sometimes referred to as “Theories of Reality” although if I had my druthers I think I’d prefer the phrase “Theories of Being” ala Heidegger’s “Being and Time”. Lord knows, Heidegger’s “Being and Time” could do with a reduction to its minimum description!
“The Ontology Project” by one “GW” at MajorityRights is worth a look* as it is an explicit attempt to complete Heidegger’s work toward a philosophy of ethnic identity with emphasis on white identity.
*I don’t include it in the ToE Rosetta Stone as it isn’t, yet, purported to be complete.
While I’m largely in agreement with the points made in this essay, I believe it should have recognized the philosophical contributions made by the Chinese, Indian and Japanese cultures. My Ivy League university major was Asian Studies and I believe that there exists a major misunderstanding with respect to philosophical Taosim and Buddhism (particularly Zen Buddhism) being thought of as “religions” rather than philosophy. Close study of them would likely dispell that misunderstanding, but there is little interest in it. When I was a student (class of ’68), the Asian Studies major had fewer students than any other humanities major. Today, I imagine, that has changed, but today nearly all humanities majors at any US college or university seem unworthy of study due to political considerations and non-objective faculty.
Never formally studied but I agree. Eastern religion is more philosophy rather than the western definition of religion. I was going to mention that this racist view doesn’t exist in proper study. Westerners study Sun Tzu, which can be very correctly viewed as philosophy. Yet we don’t poop all over him just because he’s not White.
The war against philosophy is worse than anti white. It’s anti truth no matter where it comes from.
I’ve never heard anyone whining about Confucius says.
Unless they actually read Confucius. Then he’s probably a horrible person. But then again China probably pays their rent.
Which I actually don’t blame China for. I blame those who sell their souls.
Truth is truth. Wisdom can be found in the strangest of places.
Whites have no problem finding truth and Wisdom in alien cultures. Yes we’re good at it but we don’t claim a monopoly. And if you look at it. Neither do Buddhist, Shinto, Hindu or Confucius.
It’s the woke who claim ownership of Truth
No, Western philosophy, inclusive of Augustine, IS a wholly White affair. That native of Hippo Regius was of Berber heritage, which is typified by Riffians and Amazigh (Taureg are relatively recent, and outliers) and whose earliest depicted type were the Themehu of Libya, pictured in the Egyptian “Book of Gates.” And all the known luminaries of Mediterranean Africa, from Aristippus to Theon of Alexandria, have been Caucasians.
See the “Four Races of Mankind” in the Book of Gates, with Themehu on the extreme left: https://ancientegyptonline.co.UK/bookgates.html
To suppose that “African” is a synonym of “black” reveals a sorry lack of learning. See two photos of White Africans, both Berber, here:
https://theeuropeanfamily.com/f/caucasian-cousins-worldwide
Why people who should be well versed in “race” have such trouble classifying Caucasoids outside Europe, I find very interesting. Though it needs some qualifications, the definition of CAUCASIAN in my late 20th-Century MERRIAM-WEBSTER COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY–“Of or relating to the white race as defined by law specifically as composed of persons of European, North African and southwestern Asian ancestry”–bears more truth than does most White-Nationalist anthropology.
The revisionism part of this article reminded me of a recent occurrence. I was working with a nice group of people who were raving about a play called, “Hamilton”. Not being up on any popular culture, I was intrigued and looked it up. It was a play about the Founding Fathers where ALL of the actors are minorities and the music was hip hop. I was floored. This is the slow and insidious process the Left uses to embed in naive minds a history which never happened. I chuckled to myself thinking of another possible scenario for a play…
Imagine a play called, “King” about the civil rights era where ALL of the players are white and the music being classical operatic. It is equally absurd, but the howls of indignation and outrage from the Left would be deafening.
How we extricate ourselves from this insane asylum of a world is the greatest task before us.
I do not know how I ran into this- a discussion about modernizing the B52 engines. Well written! http://www.airpowerstrategy.com/2016/11/22/old-dog-new-engines/
Great article! I had to look up sum-dem words!
Anti-westerners: They’re doing it with music too. “Do you read music”? Is apparently a form of white supremacy, now.
Western orchestral symphony A-440 tuning is under a similar indictment by woke greenhorn academics who sincerely believe they’re doing a noble thing when in reality they are being used to support our being oppressed while “they” sell off byproducts of our cultures and customs as end results, instead of means for negotiating reality with a heightened sense of awareness and enlightenment and to be able to see that beauty, awe and wonder is without limits other than our own mortality.
Like the chips of a sculpture being sold to morons that can’t see the sculpture and why it’s better to be able to appreciate it -instead of owning the chips.
The fallacy of “subjective truth” always requires an audience or at least a third party otherwise it means dick, falls like a brick and promotes retardation, ultimately.
Egoistic Motive’s are never too far behind the subjective truthers. There really can’t be any question whatsoever about truth’s objectiveness without the very question collapsing in on itself.
Chimpanzees are more honest than the post menopausal liberal progressive leftist “professors” in our universities.
Thanks for the inspiring read.
In the struggle for life the first and most important thing is that we as a folk/ as a race reach the next day alive, the next year also and our children and grand children the next 100 years. That line is so simple and true that there is no need to explain it.
Now look: We have more or less foreign competitors for life within our own countries and they do not behave according to things like “fair play” or “objective reasons” or “generally accepted rules of behaviour” in the sense that we understand these words.
We should accept that they will work/fight with all the means and methods that they have at hand in order to grow and improve their role within our counry.
We should understand that they will seek the easy victory by just changing the sense of the words and playing the minority card and the victim card.
We should accept the old saying. “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”.
We have been fooled a million times and it is time to wake up.
In case that we are called “racist”, “white supremacey”, “micro-aggression” we should not defend but accept these words. For example in Germany, when I go along the street, I will be automatically “micro-agression”, because the bystanding negroes or arabs will dislike the view of an European face. Vice versa. The bad thing is that negroes, arabs, Europeans are in closest neighourhood within our own white countries. No need to say that we are better or they are better. They are foreigners in our continent Europe.
About our own race: See the films with figure skater Камила Валиева Kamila Valieva.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbOFKcvpejg
She is one of the many hundred million girls and women of the white race whose life and place an earth we are going to preserve.
” In the struggle for life the first and most important thing is that we as a folk/ as a race reach the next day alive, the next year also and our children and grand children the next 100 years. That line is so simple and true that there is no need to explain it.”
Superb observation .
The implication is obvious that since it would be true for all progeny , it aims for “everlasting life” for humanity as a whole ( collectively ) but not yet for individual persons .
It should be understood that humanity cannot at present ascertain that it will survive forever . However , the potential for eternal life exists as long as humanity maintains net y-o-y progress in
a synergistic combination of { sciences / technologies / arts } ;
and so long as it cannot be proven that humanity has passed a point in time when there would be no possibility of having the
{ sciences / technologies / arts } needed to survive beyond the very next Extinction Event wherever humanity may be in the universe .
It should furthermore be understood that the sheeple way-of-life is a NONstarter for any serious contemplation of a very real potential for an everlasting life of humanity as a whole .
Moreover , Westernworld Whites can expect Far East Orientals to continue their ascent to global hegemony of real world enterprises of survival as long as too many Whites insist on clinging to Christian retribution fantasies for slaughtering unbelievers or to Christian salvation fantasies in opposition/detriment/resistance to maintaining real potentialities and to pursuing real possibilities for humanity to thrive-n-survive in this world in this life and beyond .
It would be interesting to see what the alternative is. A class about the humanity of Genrikh Yagoda? The wisdom of Sitting Bull? (google “ghost shirts”). The philosophy of Emperor Bokassa? The logic of Idi Amin Dada? The aphorisms of Montezuma?
Thank you Mark. I enjoyed reading this piece.
I have brought up your point on epistemology here more than a few times and how important it is;
“Ultimately, however, the truth of either has an objective requirement, it needs to be validated from ‘somewhere’ other than the subjective perceiver. What the progressives are doing, under the jocular banner of ‘woke’, is to reverse this arrangement.” Exactly. To the left, especially Jews, 2+2=5, or 6, or whatever they want it to equal whenever they want it to equal, or to be.
Emicho’s comment here is spot on;
“He’s so right. The rest is all just Jewish razzel-dazzel, to bamboozle the goyim. We’re just as bad as all the hypnotised sheep for even entertaining this gibberish.”
Not 2 + 2 = 5; but 6 – 3 = 6. As in Auschwitzian mathematics.
(((Spinoza))) and (((Wittgenstein))) both came from wealthy families. Wittgenstein’s family was unimaginably wealthy, in fact.
I was about to say the same thing before seeing your comment.
I don’t have much use for Miles Mathis’ “everyone is spy from a handful of families in the peerage” obsession, but his dissection of Wittgenstein (and Russell) is right on, both in philosophical analysis and historical revisionism. As the Leader would say, “Epic!” The whole Wittgenstein story is a fraud; he was a “hospital porter” only in order to pick up boys. Anyone who believes he “gave away his fortune” is a fool. As you say, his family were among the 2 or 3 richest families in Europe, and get this: “The Wittgensteins were granted mischling status by Hitler, though it is admitted they had three Jewish grandparents (and they actually had four). Only 12 people were granted this status in 1939, and six of them were Wittgensteins.”
Oh, and while pretending to be a penniless schoolteacher, he beat a student to death… and got away. scot free. A real man of the people.
http://mileswmathis.com/russ.pdf
Thanks for your comment. As a philosophy grad student, I never could understand the appeal of Wittgenstein. His last book was a big deal at the time I was a grad student but I thought it was trivial. I recall that he was seen as a true philosopher who published a book and then went up into the mountains to live like a hermit. During the 1960s there was a huge influx of Jews into philosophy, including my department at the U of Wisconsin. Now it all makes sense. It’s almost like he is a Jewish icon erected to a god-like status–much like the extreme idolization of Spinoza as shown in Andrew Joyce’s work. https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2019/05/05/pariah-to-messiah-the-engineered-apotheosis-of-baruch-spinoza-part-1-of-3/
Or Freud. Or Einstein…..
When Wittgenstein presented his doctoral thesis to his supervisor, Bertrand Russell , then Master of Trinity College , Cambridge, it was accompanied by the words ,” Here it is but I doubt if you will understand it.”
Not much has changed in Academe, I suppose.
As an aside , when Wittgenstein dined at Trinity’s High Table , in the company of his sworn enemy AE Housman and an observant , recently elected Fellow , Enoch Powell , the Jewish genius was offered a dessert the colour of a peach .
LW prodded it tentatively until a College servant gently suggested , ” If you delve a little further , Sir , you may find a peach.”
LW later said that these were the kindest words ever uttered to him at Cambridge.
Philosophical considerations -evolution – for Me Kevin MacDonald- from
the book The Case against Darwin by James Perloff
Evidence from Molecular Biology
According to Darwinism, fish evolved into amphibians, which then evolved into reptiles, which then evolved into mammals, Australian molecular biologist Michael Denton studied these different animals on a molecular level, and found no evidence for the sequence. In his book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Denton analyses various molecular structures, such as that of cytochrome C, a protein involved in producing cellular energy. It is found in organisms ranging from bacteria to man. Based on cytochrome C, amphibians are just as distant from fish as people are. In other words, on a molecular level, amphibians are not close cousins of fish. Denton writes:
Instead of revealing a multitude of transitional forms through which the evolution of a cell might have occnred, molecular biology has served only to enphasize the enormity of the gap . . . . No living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth.
The system of nature conforms fundamentally to a highly ordered hierarchic scheme from which all direct evidence for evolution is emphatically absent.31
Evidence from Biochemistry
Dr. Michael Behe, biochemist at Lehigh University, has written Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. In this 1996 book, Behe describes how complex certain biochemical systems are. If any component was missing, the system would have no function. Therefore it could not have evolved step-by-step. Behe calls this “irreducible complexity. ” For example, blood clotting swings into action when we get a cut. A clot may look simple to the naked eye. However, through a microscope, it is a very complex process involving more than a dozen steps. A person with hemophilia is missing just one clotting factor and is at high risk for bleeding.
Someone missing several components would have no chance for survival at all. To paraphrase Dr.
Behe very simply, if blood clotting had evolved step-by-step over eons, creatures would have bled to death before it was ever perfected-and its incremental stages never passed on to subsequent generations. The system is irreducibly complex.22
Another example Behe gives: the immune sys tem. When infections occur, it must distinguish invading bacterial cells from the body’s own cells-otherwise the latter will be attacked (which is the case in “autoimmune” diseases). An anti body identifies the bacterium by attaching to it. In a complex biochemical process, a variety of white blood cells-“killer cells”-are notified of the bacterium’s presence. These travel to the site, and, using the identifying antibody, attack the enemy.
Like blood clotting, this system is irreducibly complex. The parts are interdependent. What evolved first? The killer cells? Without the identifyng antibody, they wouldn’t know where to attack. But why would the identifier develop first, without killer cells to notify? And if the network evolved gradually, disease would have wiped crea tures out long before it could have been perfected.
Behe demonstrates that other biochemical systems, such as human vision, are also irreducibly complex-they cannot have evolved step-by step-giving clear evidence that they resulted from intelligent design.
Evidence from Genetics
Darwin’s theory says fish evolved, through many intermediate steps, into human beings. The ques tion thus arises: How did fish acquire the genes to become humans? A creature cannot be anything physically its genes won’t allow. A zebra cannot give birth to a baby kangaroo-it only has zebra genes. A woman can’t even be born blonde with out genes for blonde hair-otherwise, she has to use Miss Clairol.
Genetics was not developed as a science in Dar win’s day, and he assumed animals essentially had an unlimited capacity to adapt to environments.
He wrote: “By this process long continued . . . it seems to me almost certain that an ordinary hoofed quadruped might be converted into a giraffe. ” 13 In other words, Darwin believed you could take, say, donkeys, and if you put them in the right environment, they could, given enough time, become giraffes. This simply is not true.
Even after millions of years in the jungle, donkeys would still be donkeys, because they only have donkey genes. (…)
Dr. Lee Spetner, who taught information theory for a decade at Johns Hopkins University and the Weizman Institute, spent years studying muta tions. He has written an important new book, Not by Chance: Shattering the Modem Theory of Evolu tion. In it, he writes: “In all the reading I’ve done in the life-sciences literature, I’ve never found a mutation that added information . . . . All point mutations that have been studied on the molecular level turn out to reduce the genetic information and not increase it. “14
Mutations delete information from the genetic code.
Mutations delete information from the genetic code. They never create higher, more complex information. What are they actually observed to cause in human beings? Death. Sterility. Hemophilia. Sickle cell anemia. Cystic fibrosis. Down’s syndrome. And over 4,000 other diseases. The genetic code is designed to run an organism per fectly-mutations delete information from the code, causing birth defects.(…)
Why is this a problem for evolution? Because if Darwin’s thesis is correct, and all life began as a single cell, then chance mutations must have designed and engineered nearly every biological feature on Earth, from dolphins’ remarkable sonar system (which is the envy of the u.s. Navy) to the human heart. The latter is an ingenious structure.
Blood is pumped from the right side of the heart to the lungs, where it receives oxygen; back to the heart’s left side, which propels it to the rest of the body through more than 60,000 miles of vessels.
The heart has four chambers; a system of valves prevents backflow into any of these; electrical impulses from a natural pacemaker control the heart’s rhythm.
Rarely, mutations cause babies to be born with congenital heart disorders, making blood shunt to the wrong place. There is no known case of mutations improving circulation. Hemoglobin-the blood’s oxygen-carrying component-has over forty mutant variants. Not one transports oxygen better than normal hemoglobin.l5
To accept evolution, we must believe that human blood circulation-a wonder of engineering-was constructed by chance mutations, when actual observation demonstrates they damage it.
Ernst Chain, who shared a Nobel Prize for his work in developing penicillin, knew much about bacteria and antibiotics. Dr. Chain stated: “To postulate that the development and survival of the fittest is entirely a consequence of chance mutations, or even that nature carries out experiments by trial and error through mutations in order to create living systems better fitted to survive, seems to me a hypothesis based on no evidence and irreconcilable with the facts.” 16
Mutations are often inheritable, they do create changes, but the changes are inevitably downward, or at best neutral. Mutations have never been observed to originate a new hormone, organ, or other functional structure. They reduce, but do not generate, biologic technology. This is not to say it is impossible that a random mutation could create higher genetic information-only that it is not observed in science. And Darwin’s theory could die on this alone. But instead, we’ll just call this “strike one” on Darwin. (…)
Evidence from Origins Science
To believe in evolution, we must believe that, by pure chance, the genetic code was created, and also by pure chance, translation devices arose which took this meaningless code and transformed it into something with meaning.
Evolutionists cannot argue that “natural selection would have improved the odds.” Natural selection operates in living things-here we are discussing dead chemicals that preceded life’s beginning.
How could anything as complex as a cell arise by chance? A famous evolutionary argument dates to 1860, the year after publication of The Origin of Species. At Oxford University, “Darwin’s bull dog” Thomas Huxley (whom we quoted earlier) engaged in a creation-evolution debate with the ologian Samuel Wilberforce. There is no tran script, but reportedly Huxley, in making his case for chance origins, said that six monkeys, poking randomly at typewriters, and given enough millions of years, could write all the books in the British Museum. More than a century later, as a public school student, I heard a variation on that theme: “If a roomful of monkeys were to ran domly clack at typewriters long enough, they would eventually recreate the complete works of Shakespeare. And if monkeys could recreate the complete works of Shakespeare by chance, then obviously a cell’s information content could also arise by chance, if only given enough time.”
However, anyone who believes these projections hasn’t figured the math. What are the odds of a monkey typing one predetermined nine-letter word, such as “evolution”? We’ll give Huxley a CASE break, and assume a typewriter with only letters, no other symbols. Obviously, the first letter, “e,” would be a piece of cake. But to get “evolution,” since the alphabet has 26 letters, one must multiply 26 by itself eight times. We find the monkey would need, on average, more than five trillion attempts just to write “evolution” once correctly.
Typing ten letters per minute, this would take over a million years. To get two consecutive predeter mined nine-letter words-such as “evolution commenced”-would take more than a billion billion years, taking us much further back than the Big Bang, which supposedly occurred some 15 billion years ago. In other words, if a monkey started typing at the time of the Big Bang and continued until now, he couldn’t even produce two consecutive preselected 9-letter words-let alone “the works of Shakespeare.” (…)
Even if the correct chemicals did come together by chance, would that create a living cell? Throw ing sugar, flour, oil and eggs on the floor doesn’t give you a cake. Tossing together steel, rubber, glass and plastic doesn’t give you a car. These end products require skillful engineering. How much more so, then, a living organism? Indeed, suppose we put a frog in a blender and turn it into puree?
All the ingredients for life would be there-but nothing living arises from it. Even scientists in a lab can’t produce a living creature from chemicals.
How, then, could blind chance?
But let’s say that somehow, by chance, a cell really formed in a primeval ocean, complete with all the necessary proteins, amino acids, genetic code, translation devices, a cell membrane, etc.
Presumably this first little cell would have been rather fragile and short-lived. But it must have been quite a cell-because within the span of its lifetime, it must have evolved the complete process of cellular reproduction. Otherwise, there never would have been another cell.
And where did sexual reproduction come from?
Male and female reproductive systems are quite different. Why would nature evolve a male reproductive system? Until it was fully functional, it would serve no purpose-and would still serve no purpose unless there was, conveniently available, a female reproductive system-which must also have arisen by chance. (…)
Evidence from Fossils
Cambrian rock is the low geologic layer containing most of the oldest known invertebrate fossils. In it, we find literally billions of fossils of invertebrates: clams, snails, worms, sponges, jelly fish, sea urchins, swimming crustaceans, etc. But there are no fossils demonstrating how these creatures evolved, or that they developed from a common ancestor. (For this reason, we hear of the Cambrian “explosion.”) The late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard acknowledged that “our more extensive labor has still failed to identify any creature that might serve as a plausible immediate ancestor for the Cambrian faunas [animals] .”23
In other words, the bottom of Darwin’s great “tree of life” is merely a speculation unsupported by fossil evidence.
Supposedly, invertebrates evolved into the first fish. But despite billions of fossils from both groups, transitional fossils linking them are missing.
All through the evolutionary tree, the “missing links” are still missing. Insects, rodents, pterodactyls, palm trees and other life forms appear in the fossil record with no trace of how they evolved. Gareth J. Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History stated: “It is a mistake to believe that even one fossil species or fossil ‘group’ can be demonstrated to have been ances tral to another. “24 (…)
Darwin stated that “the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great. But assuredly, if this theory be true, such have lived upon the earth.”28 He admitted these creatures’ fossils had not been found in his day, but hoped future excavations would turn them up.
They haven’t.
If evolutionary theory is true, the geologic record should reveal the innumerable transitional 44 E forms Darwin spoke of . We shouldn’t find just a handful of questionable fossils, but billions of intermediates validating his theory. Instead, the fossil record shows animals complete-not in developmental stages-the very first time they are seen.
Evidence from Taxonomy
Little has changed since 1930, when Austin H. Clark, the Smithsonian Insitution’s eminent zoologist, declared:
The complete absence of any intermediate forms between the major groups of animals, which is one of the most striking and most significant phenomena brought out by the study of zoology, has hitherto been overlooked, or at least ignored . . . .
No matter how far back we go in the fossil record of previous animl l life upon the earth we find no trace of any animals forms which are intermediate between the various major groups or phyla. (…)
That’s such a great comment. Lot’s of people, myself included, just haven’t the interest or the time to read even popular science books, never mind the heavier stuff.
But we are still capable of understanding arguments, especially when people like yoursel simplify them for us. If something is true, in my experience it will always be simplifiable.
The evolutionists obviously get the funding & promotion for their theory because it’s anti-God, that’s why the average punter in the street can give you a basic definition of it. He wouldn’t intelligent design.
“Even after millions of years in the jungle, donkeys would still be donkeys, because they only have donkey genes. (…)”
This sort of thing isn’t my interest, but even I could understand in my teens men had been messing with dog breeds for centuries, but they stayed dogs.
” Philosophy teaches the student how to reason, how to construct an argument, how to spot logical inconsistencies, how to debate. It teaches how to tread carefully with an argument or concept, not to rush in two-fisted with your opinions foremost. ”
Exactly .
Another major if not the fundamental reason for the prevailing Westernworld marginalization , decline and even outright rejection of the White philosophical tradition is nonetheless than the prevailing Westernworld religion of Christianity which warned against philosophy in this holy verse ___
“” Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit , after the tradition of men , after the rudiments of the world , and not after Christ .””
( verbatim quote from : The Christian NT / KJV /
Book of Colossians / 2 : 8 ) .
This slightly toxic and indiscriminate warning became established religiously ordained wisdom for pious Christians after about eighteen centuries of exposure to it . A salient example of how the spiritual religious fantasy of Christ ultimately cancels virtually all valid philosophical traditions for discerning real world enlightenment among the faithful . Many religious zealots to this day employ the good old fashioned psychological operation of fear mongering in warning of the eternal torment that awaits unbelievers in the Christ fantasy . This religious subordination or cancellation of the search for substantive real world knowledge and empirical truth is furthermore clinched by this holy verse __
“”… Behold , the fear of the Lord , that is wisdom ; …””
( verbatim quote except ellipses from : The OT / KJV / Book of Job / 28 : 28 )
where both the secular and religious histories of slaughters ( in the name of the Lord God ) of humanity , whom were not sufficiently fearful , provides abundant evidence of the validity of this particular holy scripture .
Apparently , the essential life-sustaining philosophical discipline of White men in the search for real world enlightenment has been defeated by the predominantly feminist requirements for the life-sustaining social securities promised by adherence to religious cults . A separation of the sexes ( let the women have their religion and let the men have their philosophy ) may resolve this predicament that otherwise will surely end in the doom of all .
I strongly believe in evolution, but disbelieve in Darwinism. RANDOMNESS IS NOT CREATIVE. Indeed it is destructive. Evolution and creation are the same thing. Darwinism is a fairy tale for grown ups. The formula is: Consciousness plus raw materials equals evolution. Does tech evolve? Yes. Was it created? Yes. Same for biology. Evolution is creation. See Maxwell’s Demon about how entropy can be reversed without violating the 2nd law [of thermodynamics] as no work would be done.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS PASSIVE BIOLOGY.. The randomness bulloney claims that there is.
You Took the word’s right out of my head.
Evolution is obvious, Not the goofy “Darwin” stuff however especially the part about being mutually exclusive with creation. No one ever believed that crap as much as was propagandized the case.It appealed to young impressionable minds more because they couldn’t live up to the impossibility of the reaching sainthood supposed expectations crammed into their minds from church. The less religious or atheist types went along for the obvious evolution evident patterns – eg the several different Bird Orchid bearing uncanny and obvious evolutionary interventions to an extremely vulnerable species of plant life and the obvious selection of changing the plant and not taking away the beaks of the predatory birds that otherwise race to eat the seeds prematurely essentially causing sterilization of the species. What’s the story there? Something incredible is obviously at work.
Religion has become, (to align on moneytalks above comment) if not always and deliberately foisted upon us, separation of the natural guardian of balance and western populations. The aim is to make both religious and evolutionists look stupid from the outside without themselves noticing while their self expression and determination is in detention and they’re being wonderful consumers.
Nanavira Thera on Russell mentioned above.
Russell’s influence (in the English-speaking world, that is to say) is very great, and it is almost wholly pernicious.
He accepts ‘scientific common sense’ as the basis for his thought, and this is precisely the thing I am at pains to combat in the Notes. Russell’s philosophy is rather like the gaudy cover to his book— patchy and specious. The best things about him are his repeated admissions of failure, often just at the point where he seems about to recant his former views and make a real advance. But his roots are too firmly embedded in ‘scientific common sense’.
Consider his argument. On p. 13 he says Physics assures us that the occurrences which we call ‘perceiving objects’ are at the end of a long causal chain which starts from the objects, and are not likely to resemble the objects except, at best, in certain very abstract ways.
(…) Then Russell says We all start from ‘naive realism’, i.e., the doctrine that things are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow, are not the greenness, hardness, and coldness that we know in our own experience, but something very different. …Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false…. These considerations induce doubt….
Certainly they induce doubt; but Russell is either unable or unwilling to see that what is doubtful is the truth of physics. Why can he not see that, in the process of deriving physics from naive realism, something odd has happened—something unjustified put in, or something essential dropped out—that might account for the disagreement? (…) Assuming the truth of physics (in spite of the accumulated experimental evidence that physics is sometimes false), he constructs a paradox, that ‘naive realism, if true, is false’, and then proceeds to write three hundred pages of self-mystification.
On p. 303 he tells us ‘I do not, it is true, regard things as the object of inquiry, since I hold them to be a metaphysical delusion.’ A metaphysical delusion? Nonsense! Things are given in immediate experience, and as soon as we enter upon reflexion we are directly aware that ‘There are things’. (…) ‘The net result’ claims Russell ‘is to substitute articulate hesitation for inarticulate certainty.’ If he had claimed to replace articulate certainty by inarticulate hesitation, I should feel more inclined to agree with him.
*
I have finished Russell’s Nightmares and must confess that they did not come up to expectation. No doubt it was my fault for expecting too much, knowing how unsatisfactory I find his philosophical views; but I had hoped that, at least, when he was not writing normal
philosophy, he would be entertaining. Alas! I found his wit insipid, and his serious passages almost intolerable—there was something of the embarrassment of meeting a Great Man for the first time, and finding him even more preoccupied with trivialities than oneself.
In his Introduction, Russell says ‘Every isolated passion is, in isolation, insane; sanity may be defined as a synthesis of insanities’, and then he proceeds to give us examples of isolated insanities—the Queen of Sheba as Female Vanity, Bowdler as Prudery, the Psycho-Analyst as Social Conformity, and so on. Amongst these, as you noted, is the Existentialist as Ontological Scepticism. Here, Russell’s satire is directed partly against what Sartre has called ‘a literature of extreme situations’; and this, for an Englishman, is no doubt a legitimate target, since the English do not admit that there are such things—though, of course, this makes the English a target for the satire of the rest of Europe, particularly the French.
But what Russell is not entitled to do is to group the insanity of doubting one’s existence along with the other insanities, and this for the simple reason that it precedes them. One may be vain or modest; one may be prudish or broadminded; one may be a social conformist or an eccentric; but in order to be any of these things, one must at least be. The question of one’s existence must be settled first—one cannot be insanely vain if one doubts whether one exists at all and, precisely, Russell’s existentialist does not even succeed in suffering— except when his philosophy is impugned (but this merely indicates that he has failed to apply his philosophy to itself, and not, as Russell would have us believe, because he has failed to regard his philosophy in the light of his other insanities). The trouble really is, that Russell does not, or rather will not, admit that existence poses a problem at all; and, since he omits this category from all his thinking, nothing he says concerns anybody in particular.
It is noteworthy that the one nightmare that did amuse me, that of the Metaphysician, does in fact represent Russell’s own personal nightmare—a fear of discovering existence (for existence and the negative—‘not’—go hand in hand). But Russell has long ago firmly repressed this fear by harsh logical measures, and it only shows its head when he is off his logical guard. Once upon a time, Russell said ‘Whatever A may be, it certainly is’; but that was in 1903. Since then Russell has learned sanity (his own brand), and has declared (in 1919) ‘It is of propositional functions that you can assert or deny existence’. In other words, Russell holds that you can assert ‘lions exist’, and that this means ‘“X is a lion” is sometimes true’, but that if you say ‘this lion exists’ you have said something meaningless. From this it follows that Russell regards the assertion ‘I exist’ as a meaningless utterance, and this allows him to regard the existentialist as a lunatic.
It is no doubt true that the assertions, ‘I exist’, ‘I do not exist’, and so on, are meaningless, but only in the eyes of one who is no longer a puthujjana. And, even then, they are not meaningless in Russell’s sense.
(…)
Together with existence, Russell has removed the word ‘not’ from Logic (even if he does not go so far as his metaphysician Brumblowski, who has expelled it from his ordinary language).
Russell came to the conclusion (I speak from memory) that to say ‘A is not B’, where A and B are individual things, is illegitimate; what one should say is ‘“A is B” is false’. Thus, instead of exists and not, Russell has true and false; but whereas the first pair applies to things, the second pair applies to facts—it is only of propositions that you can assert the truth or the falsity. (For the significance of this replacement of things by facts—it is the foundation of positivism—I would refer you to note (f) of the Preface to the Notes.)* I may say that I enjoyed Russell’s idea of a special department of Hell for those philosophers who have refuted Hume—this is one of the few points about which I agree with Russell (but does it not make nonsense of Russell’s whole philosophy of the acceptance of ‘scientific common sense’? Russell would be only too happy to be able to refute Hume).
*The scholar or scientist, with his objective method, cannot even ask such questions, [questions about self and the world] since on principle he knows and wishes to know nothing of self, and nothing, therefore, of its inseparable correlative, the world. (The world, we must understand, is determined as such only with reference to self; for it is essentially ‘what belongs to self’, being that in which self is situated and implicated. My world, as Heidegger notes, is the world of my preoccupations and concerns, that is to say an organized perspective of things all significant to me and signifying me. The collection of independent public facts produced by the scientific method is inherently incapable of constituting a world, since it altogether lacks any unifying personal determinant— which, indeed, it is the business of science to eliminate. Things, not facts, pace Wittgenstein, make up my world.)
***
Perhaps I overlooked it but I haven’t seen anyone who was able to resolve Zeno paradox, here Nanavira on it:
The starting-point of any discussion of motion must always be Zeno’s Eleatic arrow. Some account of this celebrated paradox is given by Bertrand Russell—M&L, pp. 79-83— but the problem is not so easily solved as Russell likes to think.) The solution described by Russell solves the problem by leaving it out.
The problem is: What is time? (…)
As to Achilles and the tortoise, the problem as stated by Russell on p. 88 makes the assumption that all ‘places’ are the same size. But if Achilles is going faster than the tortoise each ‘place’ that he goes to must be correspondingly larger (i.e. longer) than the tortoise’s ‘places’.
There is thus no paradox. But there is also the assumption that one can be in a ‘place’ in a ‘point-instant’ of time—i.e. no time at all. This is really the root of the trouble, both for Zeno and for Russell—they assume that time (or being, or existence) is made up of instants of no time, which is a misunderstanding. However many instants of no time you add together (or put contiguously) you still get no time. So Russell, seeing this, says (p. 82) ‘there is no such thing as the next moment’, which means that though his moments are ‘in time’ they are not ‘part of time’. But he does not go on to explain what ‘time’ is.
The fact is, that one cannot use the word ‘be’ in connexion with a point-instant of time, and one cannot say that Achilles, or the Arrow, ‘is’ in a particular place at each ‘moment’ (understood as a point-instant).
(The solution to the problem of time, as I suggest in Fundamental Structure, lies in a hierarchy of ‘moments’, each understood as a ‘unit of time’, and each with a sub-structure of a plurality of similar moments but of a lesser order.) But as to the problem of Achilles and the tortoise, all we need to say is that during each second of time both Achilles and the tortoise are within the boundaries of a certain extent or strip of ground, but since Achilles is moving faster than the tortoise his successive strips of ground (each occupied for one second) are longer than the tortoise’s.
So Achilles catches the tortoise. But note that since we decide upon one second of time (or whatever it may actually be) as the limit to the fineness of our perception, we are unable to find out what Achilles or the tortoise is doing within each second. We know that during any given second Achilles is occupying a certain strip of ground (he is in that strip), but we are not entitled to say whether he is moving or stationary. (This does not say what movement is—which needs a more elaborate discussion—, but it does solve Zeno’s problem, or at least indicates the solution.)