131 thoughts on “The Death Of Philosophy”

1. For the first time I disagree with The Zman. Even if “science” discovers — or thinks it discovers — the Why of the Universe, the knowledge will be so esoteric and divorced from human experience that it will be meaningless to everyone but a handful of astrophysicists. As Zman has pointed out many times, we desperately need a new morality, and if we ever create one, it will not be built solely on “science.” We absolutely need a system of moral philosophy which is in accord with what we know through the sciences but also takes into account the elusive, unquantifiable nature of human experience. Ergo, we still need people who think deeply and sensibly about the human condition. Call them philosophers for lack of a better term.

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   • I actually agree with you. Only a tiny number of people can think about the cutting idea stuff in physics, much less internalize it. Then again, how many people have any idea what Heidegger was trying to say?

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2. The entire corpus of modern philosophy was to find a substitute for the God of The Bible and replace Him with a different god, viz., man himself. That this has been going on since the first couple resided in Eden seems to indicate that it is a systemic (I hate that word now that it has been coopted by the Gramscian left) problem; something that is endemic to all humankind since The Fall. This effort to replace God with Man has never yet been successful, and to the contrary, has resulted in the immiseration of generations of humanity, not to mention outright death and destruction as has been clearly evidence by the outworking of the “philosophies” of Marx and Engels, to name the most prominent examples that come to mind right now. It is self-evident that when fallible man seeks to blaze a path through life independent of the one laid out for him by his Creator, that man is destined to get lost, with the resulting floundering around in the wilderness producing results that are self-defeating at best and socially disastrous at worst. Solomon pointed this out two thousand years ago in Ecclesiastes, a book that marvelously illustrates where man’s reliance on human “philosophy” ultimately leads, to wit: “vanity, all is vanity.” It seems we just never learn.

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3. This was very disappointing. The only charitable interpretation of this post is that Zman simply doesn’t know what philosophy is.

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   • Or do you not understand what philosophy isn’t?

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4. Meanwhile, closer to home, Mr Z,s home that is.

   Charm City might be dropping the “C”

   https://www.zerohedge.com/political/baltimore-mayor-calls-citywide-curfew-after-all-hell-breaks-out

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   • Those urban Amish youths at it again…

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5. Uh oh, despite claiming to wash his hands of Z, Mr. natural rights, Mike Anton, may not be able to resist…

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6. Here is an example of philosophical thinking. Science is concerned with the static, fixation. The human body is full of movement. Science will reduce it to parts and wholes which are further reduced to mathematical equations. Furthermore, science will view time as reduced phases of past, present and future each a whole when viewed separately but together they form a whole of time. The problem is time is continuous i.e. it is indivisible as life, but it is also discontinuous as phases which are a reflection of time or motion. So the human organism as being alive is not truly comprehended by abstract thinking which can only understand the immobile. i am afraid some readers will see this as all nonsense.

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7. Wow!!! Tremendously weighty !!!

   As one with BA in philosophy, and 30+ yrs svc in the empire’s legions on top of that, I echo the sentiment:

   Put modern philosophy to the sword …. All of it”

   But for God’s sake, spare literature, at least. We must pull that gasping survivor from the the rotting mass of the collapsed western academic edifice, and fully resuscitate it.

   But, please no giving over of humanity / western civilization to a “New Elite” charged up on pure science. As fallible as we’ve proved to be, it could only become the new human tragedy.

   If nothing else, we should be working non-stop,drumming up a vast Corps of Janissaries, charged with a MOOSLEM-like focus and fury, to remove the heads of any and all pursuing this new horror, always and everywhere, while a new-priesthood focuses on inculcating a healthy belief in and respect for … God.

   I think of lines from 2 movies:

   1st : You want the truth? You want the truth!!!??

   You can’t handle the truth.

   2nd: That way lies madness”

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   • Agree about literature. There is much worth restoring especially the classic novels and short stories. Lots of good sense and subtle wisdom conserved so it was no wonder that the ‘white male literary canon’ was the absolute first target of the rads, fembots, and other malevolent elements in the late Sixties (and thereafter) academy.

     They called their joyful little annihilation of the works of their betters ‘deconstruction’. Because ‘Spiteful Resentment by Inferiors’ was neither p.c. nor fancy.

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     • Yes, they were (are) an ugly bunch, those angry, hate-filled monsters. I got to see them up close every day during undergrad yrs. As one who took some “Great Books” coursework along with major and minor, I was exposed to the few WWII / Korean War vets still hanging on then. That band of relics was thoroughly despised and openly disrespected by the new, young pirates (as they saw themselves) then swinging over the railings ready to burn the old academy to the waterline.

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8. In our increasingly complex society, all the best minds are tied up in very narrow fields of inquiry. Consider the cell phone. There is not one person who could design and build it from scratch. The cell phone is the result of several highly expert disciplines, each necessarily focused on very minute details in order to complete the whole. This extreme specialization is repeated across all disciplines necessary to keep the modern world functioning. With most of the brightest people working on making stuff and ensuring the smooth functioning of an increasingly complex society, there is very little high functioning human capital available to consider the how’s and why’s of human action and how the increasingly complex systems effect human beings. These important questions are left to midwits. And it’s getting worse. Hence a population of “tech savvy” pooh slingers.

   Regards,
   Mike

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   • You need an IQ up around 150 to have any hope of gr0kking the mathematics necessary for attempting to describe the behaviors which appear to occur in Relativity Theory & Quantum Mechanics [and there’s effectively no one who has ever been a true master of both disciplines].

     Furthermore, a growing number of physicists are starting to suspect that the Future might influence the Past, and if that’s true, then it turns much of classical Philosophy upside down & inside out, with stratospheric IQs being necessary for creating the frameworks within which one might begin to philosophize about a tug of war between Future and Past.

     tl;dr == There will always be a need for Philosophy, but, as things stand right now, we very likely aren’t anywhere close to being smart enough to create the Philosophy which we will need.

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   • I’m not sure the sort of intelligence that makes sail foams work and philosophical intelligence are fungible. In other words, were Plato alive today I don’t think he’d be building his own digital server in Silicon Valley.

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9. “There is nothing more dangerous than a philosopher who wants to change the world.”

   -Piero Scaruffi

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10. Zman is giving the moral philosophers way too much credit for shaping the arc of history. Ideology is post hoc rationalization of power, to quote Academic Agent “bs bs bs, therefore I rule”. If you erased Hegel and Marx from history, in all likelihood you’d step out of your time machine back into the present only to find that Russia had still been overthrown by a group of scheming Jewish intellectuals in the early 20th century, just calling themselves something else.

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    • There’s a lot to this in that any ideology is primarily about *who* questions, even though it purports to be about *what* or *how*. In other words you always start with a group of people, not an idea. They contrive the ideas to justify their access to money, power, and pussy. That’s from the male perspective. Women’s ideologies are always about gaining access to a “better” class of men than they’ve been able to get to so far.

      Basically, there are just times in history when certain societies get something like AIDS. Tsarist Russia at the turn of the 20th century was one. Striver elites then become the opportunistic infections that finish off the patient while elevating their own fortunes at the same time. This may also account for the ad hoc appearance of many of the ideologies that ultimately dominate the “reborn” society after the revolution. Sometimes there just isn’t time to create a custom ideological “product” in a society in crisis. It’s been pointed out many times that Marxism was a poor fit for Russia in 1917. None of the pre-conditions Marx laid out for Communist revolution (mature industrial society in particular) were there. Perhaps the Bolsheviks just grabbed the ideological option that looked the least bad and gave them a route to total power.

      There’s actually a parallel with this in technology projects. Sometimes the plan is to engineer a custom component (maybe a single board computer) but there’s no money or time to do this. So you grab a Raspberry Pi and say “we’ll use this for the prototype and make a special purpose CPU later after we get funds from the VC firm to make the actual product.”

      In this sense Z is probably correct in condemning modern philosophy. Hegelianism was a COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) product that served the purposes of the schemers undermining Western society in the 19th century and its offshoot Bolshevism was what was available in Russia. These philosophical “products” are never perfect but seem to serve the purpose of weakening a society’s resolve to resist subversion. You can see “woke” as one of these products as well. In this case, you’ve got people utilizing the philosophical debris of the mid 1960s Pomo movement and New Left – Adorno, Gramsci, Marcuse, Derrida. The product itself is never perfect but it serves the purposes of the people using it for personal and group advancement.

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      • It also explains the phenomenon of Jewish elites being behind both radical libertarianism and radical communism. Despite those ideologies being literal antonyms of each other, what they do have in common is under both systems rich Jews get the power and the shiksas.

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        • Radical libertarianism suggests a different and perhaps opposite utility value of modern philosophy than the above. Instead of a route to power it seems, for some, to be a route to what you might call anti-power, a route to total irrelevance and ineffectualality. In the case of the libertarians it’s often quite obvious that many clearly embrace what’s been called “implicit Whiteness”. What path might they have walked if they hadn’t received the Gospel According to St. Rand? I doubt this is any kind of deliberate conspiracy but for the ruling class it’s quite a happy accident that so many people who clearly reject the system get shunted off into unproductive ideologies.

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          • Nah, it’s just power. Communism argues that the State has the right to do whatever it wants to you, libertarianism says corporations can do whatever they want to you once they coerce you into signing a 100 page license agreement to get your cheeseburger. The government and corporations are run by the same colluding elites, so in practice communism and libertarianism are the same.

            The anti-power element is always there as well, as part of the ideology is always to tell the proles that the rulers are legitimate and that under no circumstance should a prole try to exercise any power beyond his station as a tax/rent cow.

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    • Biology trumps psychology, until you have a zookeeper government creating artificial habitats. Psychology influences the politicians to do perform this role.

      A society run by white men will inevitably progress toward prosperity, give or take. Affirmative action puts women and POCs in charge, creating an artificial habitat where white men are at a disadvantage in an environment they thrived in. Perhaps we adapt.

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11. I was talking to a friend a year or two ago and we agreed that with the advance of science we actually know less about “life, the universe, everything” than in the good old days.

    And we agreed that in due course another physics revolution will regard relativity / quantum mechanics as we regard astrology today.

    But of course gubmint-financed philosophy departments are worse than useless.

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    • Modern science has a problem with honesty and integrity. Faking results and outcomes is not good science.

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      • Neither is suppressing contrary findings. The very people who condemn the persecution of Galileo, practice the very same. But now it’s scientists rather than prelates who are doing the persecuting.

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12. I have to strongly disagree that philosophy is dead. To the contrary, it is needed now more than ever.

    The great contribution of Leo Strauss — once you get past all the nonsense about Jaffa and Lincoln and esoteric writing and all of that — was that he encouraged us to re-commit to the study of ancient and classical philosophy, originating with the Greeks, to help us understand our future.

    Ancient or classical philosophy regarded Man’s essential characteristics as fixed by Nature itself. The chief quality of man separating him from other animals was his ability to use reason to determine what “justice” is — in Aristotle’s formulation, man is by nature the only political animal.

    Because man is able to make political choices (in Christianity, “free will”) he is able to act in accordance with his nature, or contrary to it. The goal of the art of politics is to determine the best way to act according to Man’s essential nature — this will lead to (again in Aristotle’s words) “eudaimonia” or the good life. If man’s nature is fixed but his choices were not, the goal of political life was to alter Man’s behavior — to train men in virtuous habits, which would in turn lead to the “good life.”

    Classical philosophy was plagued by the problem articulated by Thucydides, Thrasymachus, and Christ: what if un-virtuous men are in power? What if “might makes right”? Some of us on this blog might sneer at the idea of an objective standard of “natural rights,” yet none of us want to live by the implications of that. None of us would agree that the Jews were right to crucify Christ because they were in power. None of us are willing to accept whatever Biden and Harris do as “right” because they are in power.

    Christianity is the culmination of classical philosophy because it declared this problem insoluble on Earth. Man is inherently morally defective (“original sin”); justice for virtuous men can only be obtained in the hereafter.

    Classical moral philosophy was subsequently replaced by Modern philosophy. Modern philosophy is based on the Scientific Method, which evolved from the Socratic method. Modern philosophy argues that we should seek to understand Nature, not to make virtuous political choices, but in order to use technology to manipulate Nature for the purpose of creating artificial means to address our inherent human defects. The good life is defined by materialism, wealth, technology and by labor-saving innovations. “Virtue” is redefined a commitment to industry and to the Scientific Method. Modernity assumes that creating the correct economic, political, and industrial social structures will create “the good life” without the need for moral virtue. (Not only Marx’s “scientific socialism” but also Democracy and Fascism claimed to objectively know the One True Way to do this).

    Modernity led to the Industrial Revolution, which in turn produced the industrialized wars of the 20th century and the industrialized, fratricidal killing of tens of millions of Modern European whites by other Modern European whites.

    It is for this reason that Strauss asked us to re-commit to the study of classical moral philosophy to see if and where the West made a “wrong turn.” (As a friend of mine once said in grad school, “Modernity is heresy.”)

    As dystopian writers like Orwell and Huxley predicted, Modernity culminated in a grotesque warping of human nature. “The science” now tells us that anal intercourse is normal, gender is a social construct, men and women are equal, blacks and whites are equal, the fetus is merely tissue, and televised sportsball will create happiness.

    I don’t have the answer, but like Socrates, I know that those who tell me that transgenderism, anal sex, abortion, miscegenation, weed and sportsball constitute “the good life” do not have the answer, either.

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    • Aristotle, and his thoughts about philosophy, were a product of his environment in ancient Greece, particularly Athens. The dominant and persistent wisdom of that time and place were the product of the experiences of their local ancestors, and therefore “appeared to be” an ideal formulation because it “worked” so well for them. But would it have “worked” equally as well for the natives of subSaharan Africa who resided in a much different environment than that of Mediterranean Greece? Europe has now been invaded by many African and Middle Eastern migrants, and it does not appear that they are assimilating very well into European culture or traditions. If Aristotle was correct in his thinking about human nature, why are these foreigners not flourishing in Europe instead of burning in down?

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      • Aristotle also said some men are born to be slaves. Socrates said virtue cant be learned, its a gift from the gods. Sounds like two hereditarians to me.

        Or is that your point?

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    • As smart a guy as Strauss was purported to be, you’d think he would have noticed that modernity didn’t invent war, it just industrialized it.

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      • Well, yes. Certainly the ancients engaged in war.

        But none of them had the hubris of Woodrow Wilson, who claimed that we we going to fight “a war to end all wars.”

        Modernity claims that it can use technology and social structures to fundamentally alter human nature, ostensibly to correct its defects — e.g. Marx’s “species being” (or, as Nietzsche argued to the contrary, “maggot man, swarming over Europe.”)

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    • None of us would agree that the Jews were right to crucify Christ because they were in power.

      Christ had a particular mission to fulfill, so His is a special case and not really the best example for arguing against “might makes right.”

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13. Excellent post today. I have been contemplating a similar piece of writing about the death of economics, which has seemingly been subsumed or eliminated entirely by politics.

    I am in the same age cohort as the Zman. Throughout most of my life there was vigorous debate between economists about the economic impact of government policies, e.g., tax rates, regulations, etc. Who of our age doesn’t remember the Laffer curve?

    Over the course of the past ten years this debate has all but disappeared. I can’t remember the last time I saw an editorial or article about tax policy, or heard political candidates discuss tax policy in a debate. Ditto for government spending, regulations, etc. Today the EPA is going to announce new limitations on tailpipe emissions that will require the fleet of vehicles in the US to be approximately 70% electric by 2032. If implemented, this regulation will lay waste to entire industries, eliminate millions and millions of jobs, and will utterly destroy rural communities. I have not seen a peep about it from economists. What the hell happened?

    One of my theories is that debates about high-level matters such as economics is no longer possible because in a diverse society the public debate space is now consumed by low-level matters such as whether there are 38 genders or 57 genders. Economics debate is a luxury. When we can’t agree on fundamental issues, there’s no room for debate on luxury matters.

    Another theory is that the Marxists which comprise the modern Democratic party have now so completely marched through the institutions that there’s nobody left to debate. Maybe they are all Robert Reich now. And the few remaining who are not Robert Reich clones are so thoroughly intimidated they won’t speak out anymore.

    Whatever the reasons, economics appears to be dead too.

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    • Speaking out against climate change, and/or the policies that arise from the belief in it, leads to the cancellation of one’s career. Everybody knows this. The economists are all leashed now. Kind of like the doctors.

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    • Its probably both. Im watching women ruin formerly successful businesses with absurd ideas and POC staff picks. Women and POCs cant stand economics nor philosophy. Affirmative action was like demon possession of every institution. Debate means nothing when the men have 85 IQ and the women have such high levels of empathy that they cry on the job weekly.

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14. You do not understand metaphysics. It does question many of your issues addressed in the post. Examples: there is no mention of life and its meaning.Science cannot answer that problem because it is concerned with limits, the finite.Value is not purpose. No one has a satisfactory grasp of this problem. Modern ethics is relative and that is causing major problems for the world and not just America. Everything I have read on the Comments about how to move forward is being blocked by not recognizing the importance of philosophy and metaphysics. One must understand that the goal of Modernism was to destroy conceptual thought, the basis of humanism which reaches back to the renaissance. Frankly we are faced with a larger mess than one can imagine.

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    • “Science” reminds me of the saying “he knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing.”

15. There was always going to be a Hegel in the post Napoleonic world. Some of the worst ideas in humanity are taken up directly after great wars, when society is off its bearings and searching for answers as to what happened, ending with the wrong answers. We’re all just sort of carried along by fate and events, even the greatest men in history. After 200 years of domestication, would today’s Napoleon be a LcCrosse coach somewhere in France? The most hopeful thing I can cling to, after all the science of philosophy has reached its logical conclusions and dead end, probably after WW3, with its casualty rate of half a billion or so, is the quote from T.S. Elliot:

    “We shall not cease from exploration
    And the end of all our exploring
    Will be to arrive where we started
    And know the place for the first time.
    Through the unknown, remembered gate
    When the last of earth left to discover
    Is that which was the beginning;
    At the source of the longest river
    The voice of the hidden waterfall
    And the children in the apple-tree
    Not known, because not looked for
    But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
    Between two waves of the sea.”

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    • His “Four Quartets” are an incitement to spiritual reflection, and great poetry as well. Thanks for dropping these conclusory lines into this thread.

      RTWT. Repeatedly, both in the little eddies of discrete sections, or carried along by the sweep.

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    • I have loved “The Four Quartets” for more than half of my life. I remember telling my ex-wife how much I loved it and she asked what it was about. I was embarrassed to discover that I couldn’t answer her question. I took some solace in Eliot’s quote that “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

      After that, I spent years trying to summarize the piece. My best attempt is that it is about the exasperation with God of a devout Christian, his feelings of frustration with his failures to practice the faith and his abandonment by God, but also the persistence of his faith, and his attempts to describe the mystical patterns that he has observed in history.

      “From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
      Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
      Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.”

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      • I picked up the copy of the Four Quartets that lies on the table next to my bed, and opened it to Section IV of East Coker. I think that this was not merely fortuitous, given that Good Friday was just past.

        I am of a mystical turn of mind; to me the ancient saying from the book of Hermes Trismagistos, “As above, so below’, intuitively makes good sense. So too that the stillness and the dance are one. Richard Wagner characterized Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony as “The Apotheosis of the Dance”, and having had the privilege of performing this work as principal oboe, I can make no argument with this; truly, the stillness and the dance are one. Listen to a masterful performance with full focus, and see if you, too, may intuit this.

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16. It could be eye opening if somebody did a study on the prevalence of astrology belief in white women, especially single cat owning shitlib white women who claim to value “science.” My anecdotal is it’s the majority of them.

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    • Women’s brains operate differently from men’s, using a kind of inductive reasoning that allows them to make “short cuts” based on synthesizing empirical observations. This is probably selected for, as it helps them intuit or anticipate the needs of children who often cannot articulate their needs rationally.

      On the downside, it causes women to make unjustified logical “leaps”, or even mental paralysis when sufficient empirical cues are not present. In such cases women often look for confirmation from non-germane external phenomena, like tarot and astrology.

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17. “ Training young people in philosophy is no different than teaching them alchemy or offering them astrology as a science option. ”

    Not sure I completely agree. You argue persuasively on the failure of the “how” and “why” wrt to the world. But what about the mind, or rather the “strengthening of thought”? I remember fondly my intro philosophy classes as a freshman. One of the first was “Introduction to Logic”. You know—“All men are mortal. Socrates was a man. Socrates was mortal” stuff.

    Seems we are surrounded with folk these days—including *scientists* that could use a refresher course is such structured thinking. It is so common in the media for discussion to lead to false argument that naming the particular false argument has become boring. For example, I challenge anyone to listen to any “conservative” radio show for 15 minutes and not hear a “straw man” argument presented.

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18. “war is the father and king of us all”
    End of philosophy lesson.

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19. OT, or maybe not.

    James Kunstler’s site looks as if it may be under a DDOS attack. Shows he has been consistently over the target. Shut up, shut up, shut up!

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    • Site is now back up. Was this merely a technical snafu with his server, or the spastic flailing of the wounded beast, Leviathan? Difficult to know.

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      • The only sites I ever see that happen to are dissident sites.

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20. “Moral philosophy, in contrast, is still with us. It has been an unequivocal disaster for Western civilization. Primarily concerned with conjuring an authority not named God, moral philosophy has been responsible for the terrifying and monstrous ideologies that made the 20th century a bloodbath. Given the direction of liberal democracy, it looks as if the quest to replace God as the ultimate authority could very well end in a series of mushroom clouds, erasing humanity from the planet.”

    It is a religion, though. And, yes, a death cult.

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21. If I’m reading this correctly, it gets down to Hegel (idealism), and science (materialism).

    If you look at the quality of things today, it’s apparent to me something is missing. Woke is obviously out of touch with reality, but on the other hand, you’ve also got phone-gazers.

    My opinion, like I said the other day: men are between God and animals. Or ideal and material, if you like. I think there are different kinds of knowledge, valid on their own terms, but incomplete. Reality is a comprehensive thing, but I’m not sure it’s reducible. Smarter people than me have tried forever and failed. Even the vaunted science has failed to produce a working theory of everything, afaik.

    Metaphysics is “mostly jargon-filled pedantry and gainsaying that leads to nothing”, huh? Metaphysics, or M-theory, lol.

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    • From Wikipedia (I know, but it’s cited and the article doesn’t seem like garbage. FWIW):

      “According to Witten, M should stand for ‘magic’, ‘mystery’ or ‘membrane’ according to taste, and the true meaning of the title should be decided when a more fundamental formulation of the theory is known.”

      Even science starts as conjecture, is substantiated or not. That’s significant.

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      • For that matter, how is the idea of scientific progress different from the idea of historical progress, other than the fact that the present descent into dystopia makes it easy to doubt historical progress? I imagine if the technocrats keep having their way, doubting science will soon be easy, too.

        Honestly I’m not trying to be a dick, it’s that I we need reset before we get one imposed on us. Too many dead ends and too much certainty driving us into them.

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22. science may very well be on the cusp of explaining the why of it all.

    Science has also been on the cusp of immortality, AI, and any number of things for a long time now. Color me skeptical. I can upload your “consciousness” to a computer for immortality – for a (comparatively) small fee of course.

    I know you poopoo metaphysics, but it is really nothing more than the examination of underlying assumptions that must be made in order for anything to “work”, including science. Such as the law of non-contradiction. The problem is most metaphysics has probably been settled for centuries and therefore leaves little for the Ph.D. student to ruminate on to meet his candidacy requirements or a professor to publish his works, so you get 200 pages of gibberish. Busy work, essentially. Can’t remember who said it, but Western Philosophy is just a footnote to Plato pretty much sums up the sentiment. Even Dostoyevsky’s “without God, everything is permissible” is a spin on “man is the measure of all things.”

    Science has its purpose, but the “why” of things (maybe other than why something works, but that is just another way of saying “how”) is not one. In other words, science does not measure meaning – it really can’t. It can measure and quantify physical attributes, and make predictions of physical characteristics based upon those measurements and calculations. That’s it. That’s science.

    To be fair, philosophy also has its limitations. It can work to uncover some metaphysical assumptions, and even concepts (such as infinity) but it cannot give a full account or understanding of everything. It is no different than a one dimensional object (say, a dot) trying to understand four dimensional existence (if “science” is to be believed that at least 10 dimensions are required for our universe to be stable). Philosophy, like science, can go off into wild speculations well beyond its capabilities.

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    • I think, in Z’s essay and also in the comments there some confusion as to philosophy and philosophers and the teaching and/or study thereof.

      A bunch of horses of many different colors.

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23. Pingback: The Death of Philosophy | American Freedom News

24. The failing of science and engineering is our failing infrastructure. The signs of the failure are all around us and happening with increasing frequency.

    The failing philosophy is why we worship trannies and African Americans. The collapse of society.

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25. “Then there is metaphysics, which is mostly jargon-filled pedantry and gainsaying that leads to nothing.”

    My worst experience in college was being forced to read “Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals” by Immanuel Kant. Almost 100 pages of esoteric jargon that boiled down to following the golden rule.

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26. Ninety-eight percent of philosophy is men who, to quote my dad, love to hear the sound of their own voice. Castle-building. Lots of bloviation and vanity that leads to nothing except more philosophers.

    Go do something in the world. You can cogitate endlessly when you’re dead.

    Moral philosophy and metaphysics? That’s what Scripture and relationship with Christ are for.

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27. “Equity is Good” – Emil Faber they/them/theirs

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28. This is simply ignorant twaddle. I wonder what set off this rant.

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    • We found the philosopher.

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    • Faith is difficult for people who are above average in intelligence (like our host).

      Philosophy is the bridge between science and faith. Like physics and biochemistry, however, you must be REALLY intelligent to understand the links. Personally, I just fake it: the religion, the science and the philosophy.

      Boethius sat in the same seat as our host while the Roman Empire disintegrated. Hopefully an angel swings by and gives him similar consolation (absent the execution).

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29. >Further, as Hawking explained and as Donald Hoffman has discussed, science may very well be on the cusp of explaining the why of it all. Even if moral philosophy had not murdered itself in the search for a new God, science appears to be heading for an empirical replacement for the why we needed God in the first place.

    LOL I’ll believe that when I see it.

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    • My thought as well. An atheist (Hawking) is telling us science will prove God doesn’t exist. Yeah, okay. The more likely explanation for “why we needed God in the first place” is because God is real, and he has placed himself beyond our ability prove it.

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    • Agreed. Z’s uncritical worship of science strikes me as naive. If there is a single characteristic at the core of dissidence, it is skepticism. And if the crackpot use of science with relation to the Covid farce–not to mention science’s reluctance to accept genetic reality regarding sex and race–doesn’t engender skepticism about contemporary science, I don’t know what will.

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      • It may go without saying but you could certainly have also added Climate “science”

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30. Time for Back to Aquinas.

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31. What is wisdom? Simply put, it is a description of beliefs (and associated practices) that have proven beneficial over a long period of time for a particular people in a particular place. It is the descendant concepts of successful local evolutionary adaption.

    Why is wisdom important? Because it advances the survive and thrive imperatives of all the various cohorts of Homo sapiens living in different environments on the planet. And most of this wisdom is location specific, but there can be some aspects which are more universal (i.e. they work in most places most of the time). Patriarchy is an example of the latter.

    Given the diversity of local wisdom associated with unique environments, and the existence of some broadly applicable wisdom across many environments, the study of philosophy is an attempt to differentiate between these two categories and help others avoid misunderstandings or mismatches that can ultimately be detrimental.

    What works in the arctic is not the same as what works at the equator! This should be a blindingly obvious observation, but the weak and stupid among us have hijacked and corrupted philosophy as a means of sustaining their parasitic lifestyle. In the natural world, the weak and stupid die off young and their genes are thereby disposed as ineffective. But in this time of “high civilization,” we elevate these parasites into public office and name them “politicians.”

    How far we have fallen.

    23

    • You would think we could look back at the Chinese and see what happens when you think everything “old” is bad. One of the “Four Olds” was old thinking. IOW, wisdom. “Old thinking” is old for a reason. It’s evolution for reasoning. Bad ideas produce bad results and hopefull die. Good ideas become embedded and take on the role of “tradition”

      24

32. This is a disappointing post. You already had this conclusion in mind, and work backwards with a series of tendentious assertions that — quite frankly — also sound somewhat ignorant of the history of the philosophy. Just to take one example, the flippant dismissal of metaphysics leads me to believe you have no appreciation or understanding of Aristotle. You sound a bit like a man who’s wandered into a modern art exhibition and is using the occasion to denounce art altogether.

    16

    1

    • I once called Aristotle history’s greatest monster. https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=29113

      And yes, I know the Greeks wore a himation, but few would understand what I meant, so I went with toga.

      7

      • But yet you wrote “decided to immanentize the eschaton”. Ingish plz

        1

33. A few weeks back you posted a interview with a University professor, Stanford I think, concerning the subject of reality that was very intriguing.
    I thought when I listened to the interview even though much of it was over my head that this potentially opens up an entire new realm for mankind.
    I would be interested if any significant part of what we call modern science is accepting this concept and exploring it?
    Perhaps studying the subject of reality brings us closer to the subject of God?
    Just a thought that hit my mind around this essay.

    3

    • This is something Hawking touched on in his book I mentioned. Once you accept that maybe we are not evolved to perceive reality accurately, it opens the door for a lot of things, including the existence of a creator or a set of creators. maybe what we think of the universe is just a terrarium on a child’s dresser he made for science class.

      5

      2

      • I think of just perhaps a half century ago, or less, the concept of creating a virtual reality was not known by the general public.
        Now jr. high kids play around in this world using electronic devices throwing around atoms.
        If what Donald Hoffman and others say about reality is true we could actually be living in a creation of something far different than man has conceived of in the past using his tools of science.

        2

      • A terrarium on a child’s dresser…. Hm. So, this is where almighty science leads us, huh? Pass. I’ll take Plotinus over Hawking.

      • Well if it is God playing The Sims, at least he’s moved past that phase of walling people in until they pee their pants.

        1

34. Isn’t logic a branch of philosophy? Isn’t everything, including science, based on some sort of metaphysical assumption?

    19

35. I will be on the Paul Ramsey show this Wednesday. Because I am such a terrifying figure, I am not permitted on YouTube

    This is unpossible. I am reliably informed that the people who run YouTube are passionate about including diverse viewpoints!

    22

    1

    • They are. Trannies are gods, or trannies are angels. It doesn’t get much more diverse than that.

      4

36. Ironically, Philosophy Departments at universities are in crisis for wont of students. When my eldest graduated a few years back (Ivy League school, where you’d expect to find some egghead Phil. majors), there were maybe 9 Philosophy majors in a class of over 1500. My old classmate, a Philosophy professor at a huge State flagship university, told me she doesn’t have enough students in her classes. So the main impact of philosophy now on campus is seen in the adjacent Gender/Race-Grievance/Sociology/PoliSci programs. In these areas, the Frankfurt School line has taken over.

    The funny part is that the these DIE-type professors are too stupid actually to have studied philosophy. You have to be pretty smart to get through Hegel, Kant or even Marcuse. They can’t do it, so they just regurgitate warmed-over BS about “white power structures”, bundle it with the Democrat Party line and present it as absolute Truth.

    Most epically, we have Soros-funded DAs, presumable steeped in Soros’ philosophical hero – Karl Popper – and his “falsification” theory. If anything in the last 25 years has been “falsified”, it’s that leniency on crime leads to a better society. So perhaps philosophy is a just a fig leaf for the old-fashioned playbook – in the end, it’s all just about power.

    33

    1

    • What you see is the rise of the NPC degree. Critical theories don’t include reasoning, so devolve into nonsense. Not before casualties, and wasted time.

      13

    • The Philosophy is settled–as a discipline it is racist. Eventually philosophers of color will come along and the grievance studies will be rebranded as “philosophy.” Tell your friend she just came too late or too early, depending on her Whiteness.

      7

    • Michel Foucault is the most often cited academic philosopher—still, after all these years. Among people who don’t know his work, half take his referential dominance to prove that he invented or at least endorsed present-day “white power structures” type garbage. (He didn’t.) The other half cite him.

      Foucault had already become unread by the time I went to college circa 1990, but millennials are the generation that rejected philosophy in full. What that means is rejecting reading anything but Harry Potter. The only notable philosophical work they’ve produced is [drumroll] “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality,” a from-the-ground-up reinvention of Philosophy 101 by an illiterate sperg.

      Similarly, what Hawking spent his career doing wasn’t science. It was non-verbal metaphysics. He didn’t know that, because he too was an illiterate sperg. The only prediction he made that’s human-testable—otherwise inexplicable energy bursts signaling the death-by-radiation of primordial black holes—isn’t happening. He did literally nothing.

      5

      1

    • Philosophy doesn’t pay. And in AINO’s transactional higher ed environment, that means obsolescence. Philosophy is hardly the only field suffering this malaise, either. English and art, among other soc sci/humanities fields, are on the rocks. On the surface, this might appear a hopeful development, but deep down inside I can’t help but think it’s actually bad news. There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in the STEM fields.

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37. What is the endgame of The Science explaining it all? Wouldn’t that be something like the transhumanist techno-utopia promised by WEF?

    How would the science-answers be relayed to the double-digit IQ masses?

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    • TikTok videos, naturally.

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38. AA lot of the problem is not that philosophy is useless so much as they aren’t allowed to ask the interesting questions.

    How do you create good governance for distinct peoples?
    What sorts of eugenics are allowable given the differences in human abilities?
    What are the moral limitations in the use of propaganda?
    Is there a moral obligation to sustain human genetic diversity? How far does it go?

    For Universities, these questions make assumptions about the natural world that are true but anathema to speak, which is why they are so useless. If you can’t even ask the right questions, all your thinking is going to be fruitless.

    As to science having the answers, it will always run into Hume’s problem of induction, which essentially states just because you observe the sun rising 10 million times doesn’t mean it will rise again.

    16

    1

    • Karl Popper had a lot to say about Hume and induction. I’m not sure I understood it all. But I think his critique of Hume was that science isn’t about induction, it’s about falsifying hypotheses.

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    • One encouraging sign is the rediscovery of the neo-Machiavellians: Mosca, Pareto, Roberts, and above all Carl Schmitt. Burnham was never lost, probably because tribal privilege. Throw in Heidegger if you need a metaphysics. Taken together, they are particularly good at describing the function of elites, and represent the only real philosophical advance since Locke’s Second Treatise.

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39. As for philosophy, does anybody here understand why Slavoj Žižek is so popular in the West? He is an utterly disgusting human being. A fat drooling slob and a rambling idiot. Just looking at him tells me that he shouldn’t be an authority on anything at all. If you are fat and disgusting swine like him, anything you say is worthless.

    11

    • Zizek is a “pop philosopher”, a “rock star philosopher.” He has a background in academic philosophy. Some of his earlier books were good. His 700-page book on Hegel — one of his later ones — is worth a glance though difficult reading. But “peak Zizek” was probably around 20 years ago. Few people mention his name today and it’s considered passe to do so. Al least he wasn’t a complete fraud like Derrida.

      4

40. What is The Science is corrupt, politicized and full of midwits, all flowing in the same direction that gives them predictable career path?

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    • It is my most humble opinion that “The Science” has fallen for these reasons:

      First, the big push to get everyone into STEM. There’s a couple problems with this. Most people just aren’t smart enough to be a scientist or engineer, yet we push them (especially non-whites and women) into STEM anyway. Then, like any AA program, it has to be dumbed down so that they can pass, and the various science and engineering programs have to start tolerating the AA and other dumb folks who bring in their SJW ideas.

      Second, even smart people find difficulty getting decent-paying jobs with just a classical science Bachelor’s Degree. Even though physics is an extremely tough college major (ask me how I know), good luck getting a good paying job with just a BS. An advanced degree is necessary to work in the field at a living wage. A BS in Biology will get you a job counting fish or running field surveys for near-minimum wage.

      Most science programs are entirely focused on getting students ready for grad school, not jobs. Consequently, all those science majors need make-work jobs in the university. The departments grow, but not in a good way. Just like all the various humanities departments have grown to accommodate their own otherwise unemployable graduates.

      Engineering programs are still run more like trade schools, which is why they are much more employable. In my current area, the Medical Lab, the college programs are essentially tarted up trade schools. These type of “applied science” programs are where we should be concentrating our efforts, and scale back the classical science programs to better reflect the actual need.

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      • “Even though physics is an extremely tough college major (ask me how I know), good luck getting a good paying job with just a BS. An advanced degree is necessary to work in the field at a living wage.”

        I hear you, but not everyone—perhaps even few—get jobs directly in their field of study. Which is why I don’t belittle a field of study in a sparsely employed, but rigorous discipline. Physics majors take a lot of math. Heck, even in Computer Science our majors could take *more* classes in the Math dept than ours and graduate with a degree in Computer Science.

        Math for example carries over into many fields and of course, most of our current crop of college student abhor math. A smart physics major will gear his resume and job search accordingly for positions elsewhere.

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        • Compsci, yes those are good points. Anyone who can complete a physics degree can probably do many other things. But if all they have is a BS, they probably won’t be working in physics. I consider that to be part of the STEM scam. Don’t get me wrong, I respect people who take a STEM major rather than something easier, but you’re still about as likely to work in your field of study as that philosophy major is.

          4

          • But that’s exactly my point—STEM is not a scam. Now college itself may be a scam, that I freely admit. But to go to college and successfully take a rigorous set of classes in a STEM field, leading to a degree completion, is to prove yourself a cut above all the others—at least 80% of attendees. There is certainly room in the job market for such people even if not directly in your field of study.

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      • If a person’s goal is to do interesting, meaningful and decently compensated work perhaps they should reevaluate whether spending 4 years of their life and $100K + at a university is their best option. Where I work a kid can come out of high school take a 1 year certificate program at the local community college and start at $65k as technician with no experience. In one year they can advance to $85k after passing an oral board. With three years experience senior technicians currently make $95 + . There is usually a lot of overtime available which allows earnings potential of over $100k.

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41. Reading this article is like walking into a tornado. She’s probably right. Mushroom clouds indeed

    https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/07/human-destiny-in-ukraine/

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    • The lunatics running the GAE have no reverse gear.

      Anyone that does not now understand that is in total denial.

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      • I would settle for neutral.

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      • It apparently has not brake, either.

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    • Thanks, that’s a clear-eyed assessment and one I generally have made: as the United States grows economically weaker, it will become more aggressive abroad (and despotic at home, to paraphrase a great man). Those of us in the GAE face two great dangers. The first is obvious nuclear annihilation because of the sociopathy laid out in that piece, the second is even more horrific domestic oppression if the GAE does not resort to nukes and loses the proxy war. Heads they win, tails we lose.

      I once had thought that the oligarchy’s fear of destruction would foreclose at least the first option, but the insanity is so rampant that may no longer be the case. Even self-interest has been consumed by madness. There may be a faction that is not suicidal, but so far that has not been evinced.

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42. Too much to disagree with in today’s essay. A couple of points in passing (it’s too much to point out all the places I think you’re mistaken). Alchemy remains alive and kicking. I know at least one quantum field theorist who considers himself an alchemist first and foremost. Secondly, natural philosophy wasn’t “replaced” by science; it was *renamed* science.

    What distinguishes today’s physics — perhaps the ur-science — from earlier attempts is its reliance on advanced mathematics simply not known earlier — differential equations, differential geometry, group representations, linear and multilinear algebra, fiber bundles and Lie groups, algebraic topology, and even some algebraic geometry. What is also interesting is how little theoretical physics is now advancing: the low-lying fruit has all been picked and the field is now in its baroque stage.

    Philosophy has not become irrelevant despite what nincompoops like Hawking say. It provides the overarching conceptual structures within which physics constitutes itself as a discipline. This is why there is an area of scholarly endeavor called “philosophy of physics.” Every physicist — unless he’s a lab technician — has some kind of philosophical structure in mind, without which he would find it difficult to understand and do physics.

    What Hawking was pimping was the cult of scientism, utterly divorced from broader cultural endeavors such as philosophy and hermeticism. Yet our understanding is that today’s science is an outgrowth of these fields and remains connected to them through an umbilical cord. Without that connection it degenerates to sterile rationality.

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    • “What is also interesting is how little theoretical physics is now advancing: the low-lying fruit has all been picked and the field is now in its baroque stage.”

      When they cannot conduct experiments on the theories, it runs out of gas. I was listening to a podcast with a bunch of physicists a few months ago – including Donald Hoffman – and they didn’t agree on much, but they agreed with you that there was little advancing in physics. I’m not sure I understood it all though…

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      • I remember going to a lecture of String Theory by Brian Greene. Smart guy and phenomenal speaker, but couldn’t help but think he was stuck in the theory being beautiful, and therefore true, regardless of the mathematical contortions involved.

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        • Aesthetics plays a key role in formulating theories. It played a role for Copernicus, for Maxwell, for Einstein, and for today’s physicists. The conviction is that if something is aesthetically satisfying, then by golly, it must be true. Of course this can’t be defended rationally but often it seems to work. The “eightfold way” in particle physics comes to mind

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          • I think there is some confusion here. When I say I have written an elegant solution to some problem, I do not mean that it is beautiful as in a work of art. I mean that it is beautiful in its simplicity. It is following the law of parsimony. One could argue that simplicity lies at the heart of artistic beauty, but that is debatable.

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            3

          • ” They break it down into metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, logic, and the history of philosophy.”

            The missing branch of philosophy in this list is aesthetics, which answers the question, “What is beauty?” And, yes, this has played a key role in the development of natural philosophy. The neglect of aesthetics resulted in the ugliness of modernity. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

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          • I think Jordan Peterson started talking the same way about around the same age. You looking to start a cult, Z?

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          • “I think Jordan Peterson started talking the same way about around the same age.”

            If Z writes an earnest article about the Chinese Communist Penis Milking Facilities I swear I’ll start donating.

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          • Feng shui and the art of washing your penis.

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      • You’re quite right. It;s the interplay of theory and experiment that’s crucial. A lot of the elaborate mathematical structures that have been created by modern theoretical physicists simply don’t allow experimental corroboration of even the most tenuous kind. Modern theoretical physics is not so much the union of mathematics and experiment as the union of mathematics and mysticism. A representative of such work is Ed Witten. We require experiments to not only allow some corroboration but to remain “grounded”, to not engage in the wild flights of fancy that mathematics makes possible.

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    • It’s funny this topic comes up this morning for me as I happen be reading Imperium again. The work addresses this topic in some depth and my understanding of the thrust of the author’s assertions on the subject argue that European culture-man has simply lived through that stage of life where civilizational energy is invested in philosophical inquiry. Science as well appears to have reached certain boundaries that leave its most advanced frontiersmen back where man started , struggling with the Prime Mover question and conceding the question is unknowable according to their own scientific / mathematical framework.
      More broadly, a work like this one seem to offer a great foundation for a political movement that offers something solid and attractive to the despairing young white population. It is exactly the thing our enemies most fear and they tell us so every day in word and deed. Further more , the more pressure they apply to suppress European identity and its political self-assertion the more they prove its legitimacy, necessity and moral justification. As we endure the injustices and moral abominations of the 2nd Obama regime it is uplifting to recognize that it is a necessary ordeal to free our minds of attachment to the corpse of the concept of liberal democracy.

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      • The square root of -1 is a cope.

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        • A useful one though. If it didn’t exist European culture-man would have been compelled to invent it haha. reminds me of another bad math joke … Aleph-Null bottles of beer on the wall , Aleph-Null bottles of beer, take one down, pass it around, ….

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        • The square root of -1 is more than a cope. It’s the foundation of one of the most beautiful areas of mathematics: complex variable theory. And it is a key part of our worldview and helps explain phenomena both in mathematics and the outside physical world. The intriguing thing about mathematics is that concepts designed as copes, as ad hoc conveniences, often turn out to be helpful in understanding the outside world.

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        • The mistake was referring to complex numbers as “imaginary”, implying that they only exist for the sake of mathematical masturbation. Quantum computing does indeed require complex numbers as a quantum bit is a complex probability.

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    • Also, medieval alchemy never was about pure chemistry, although there was a strong chemical component to retorts and experiments, from which modern chemistry is partly derived.

      Alchemy provided the literary and graphic super-structure for understanding and manipulating mass human psyche and behavior. It was a proto-manual for mass control of human organization and systems. Jung’s ‘Psychology and Alchemy’ and ‘Mysterium Conuinctionis’ are good guides to this subject.

      Particularly effective in medieval alchemy was the manipulation of the planetary base duality, that of collective male and collective female, and developing methods for effecting mass alterations of humanity and the human condition. As only one example, Western men and women lurched from a mass mindset of Romanticism to one of nihilistic antagonism and feminism in the course of a handful of decades. Not accidental, very much managed. That is REAL alchemy and by no means it is defunct.

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      • Yes, Jung explained “psychological alchemy” very well, though of course this does not exhaust what alchemy is about. Partly because there are different kinds of alchemy and it’s not a simple monolithic structure.

        If today mathematics has become the bridge between inner and outer, between intuition and imagination on the one hand and the experimental world on the other, then various esoteric fields such as alchemy, astrology, and various flavors of hermeticism did so previously. And not ineffectively. Nor are these fields divorced from mathematics. As Frances Amelia Yates argues, mathematics was one of the master keys to the cosmos the medieval alchemists and hermeticists stumbled across.

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        • There were many schools and cultural sources of alchemy, as for example there were many sects of gnosticism. And yes alchemy was and is one of the hermetic disciplines. Not that I’m for it.

43. …”Philosophy has run out of hope to offer and is largely to blame for the present crisis”…
    My immediate thought went to Yuval Harari and his enabler Soros as personifications.

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44. Without ‘Science!’ there wouldn’t be a new pharma ad on TV every five minutes, with some name, duly focus-grouped to sound original, yet nonsensical.

    Philosophy can’t keep up with that.

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45. Excellent piece. As a historical note, the abolitionists and the other progressive meddlers that began to rise in the early 19th century, were more informed by Hegel and the notion of the world-spirit operating in history (“the arc of the universe bends toward justice”) than the Puritanism of their forefathers, which certainly recognized limits to human aspirations.

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    1

46. wait a minute, aren’t you tarring all philosophies due to the bad ones? the argument can be made that there is a fair amount of overlap between religion and philosophy (at least the moral branch). hasn’t religion lost “territory” to science, as well? and finally, religion – including christianity – has been the motive force behind plenty of slaughter and mayhem. maybe philosophy should be re-titled meta-religion? [and be concerned with teaching people how to evaluate a religion]

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    10

    • “religion – including christianity – has been the motive force behind plenty of slaughter and mayhem”

      Can you be more specific? I hear this a lot, but have a hard time matching the 100 million or so deaths that atheism claimed over just a few decades of the last century. The Crusades claimed about 1-3 million over a century. But what else? And I don’t think it’s fair to count when kings would claim God is on their side as they go to war for power and land.

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      • One needs to “normalize” the numbers for the population of the time and perhaps the technology available for implementation.

        For example. Genghis Khan had a habit of wiping out whole city states that piss’d him off. Others he took their surrender and garrisoned them and moved on. He never approached a city the size of New York, nor had he the men and means to implement such a slaughter if he had. But nevertheless, he certainly had the will to do so.

        Modern slaughters are confounded by technological advancement, but I’m not sure are morally distinguished from older slaughters.

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        • Fair enough, but I don’t think we can put Genghis Khan under the religious war category, though I know he is just one example to make your point about scale. But a death is a death, regardless of the size of the population at the time. If we adjust Cain killing Abel for population, it would be a large massacre by today’s standards, but it is still just one death.

          But even if we multiply the Crusades by 20 to account for population, it is still is less deaths over two centuries than Mao accomplished in two decades. And he didn’t use much in the way of modern technology, nor did Stalin for that matter. Simple starvation accounted for most of the deaths.

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      • Thirty Years’ War: 4-12 million deaths. Justification for the conflict was whether Protestantism or Catholicism had the biggest pee pee.

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        • this is exactly what i was thinking of. plus the Huguenot troubles in France. not sure if that is part of Thirty Years war or not.

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          • No idea, a lot of European history blurs together to me. I was just reading about Jan Zizek thinking he was part of the Thirty Years War but he was leader of the Hussite rebellion like 200 years earlier.

          • ^ I meant Zizka. Ugh, someone mentioned that slob earlier and now my wires are crossed.

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