Note: There was no Sunday Thoughts this week, as it was Easter, but you can get two hours of my soothing tones here in this interview. Around the two hour mark is when I enter the show. There is some written content behind the Green Door. You can sign up for an account at SubscribeStar or Substack.
I will be on the Paul Ramsey show this Wednesday. Because I am such a terrifying figure, I am not permitted on YouTube, but Paul does his show on Rumble for the second hour, which is when I will join.
The word philosophy comes to us from Greek, meaning “love of wisdom” but as a practical matter it is the study of knowledge. The great philosopher Emil Faber said that knowledge is good, so it may be tempting to look upon the death of philosophy as another sign that the West is in decline. Ours is no longer a culture that can produce great philosophers or even properly understand those of the past. Philosophy is just another victim of cultural decline.
On the other hand, the West got along for a long time without philosophy. In fact, the West was able to rediscover philosophy due to advances in material life prior to the rebirth of philosophy. We used to call the period after the fall of Rome the “dark ages”, but we now know it was not particularly dark. A new order was rising and eventually it would provide the human capital and resources to rediscover the Greeks and then build on what they had left to the world.
In other words, there is something else going on here. Alchemy is no longer practiced because it was replaced with something better. Astrology is still around, but it is for the stupid and superstitious. Perhaps like those things, philosophy has simply served its purpose and is no longer useful. It is often assumed that philosophy is a good in itself, knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but humans are still tool makers, so maybe philosophy is not an especially useful tool anymore.
Modern philosophers claim that they seek to understand fundamental truths about the human condition, the natural world, man’s relation to other men, and his relationship to the natural world. They break it down into metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, logic, and the history of philosophy. In order, these are the big questions of philosophy. Is there a god? What is knowledge? What is good? What is good reasoning? What is the history of these questions and who said what about them?
A more compact way of describing philosophy, however, is that it is composed of three main branches of inquiry. There is natural philosophy, which is the study of the natural world, including the nature of man. Then there is moral philosophy, which is the study of how men ought to act. Then there is metaphysics, which is mostly jargon-filled pedantry and gainsaying that leads to nothing. The last branch has come to dominate the philosophy departments of Western universities.
There are two reasons for the death of philosophy. One is that natural philosophy was overtaken by science. This is a point that Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow make in the book, The Grand Design. Hawking observed that philosophy had failed to keep up with science, so it had nothing useful to offer about nature. More important, the development of ideas like M-Theory meant that science offered the promise of explaining the why questions, as well as the how questions.
The truth is, philosophy has nothing useful to say about the workings of the natural world, including the workings of the human animal. For a while, they tried to draft on science with things like the philosophy of science, but it was nothing more than academic appropriation. One can argue that early philosophy laid the groundwork for science, but science has no need for that groundwork today. It is an entirely separate field with its own internal dynamics.
More importantly, modern science requires mathematical aptitude that is not present in moral philosophy. In order to understand the diversity of the human animal, you must understand genetics and evolution. While a philosophy student can dabble in those areas, his primary field of study operates outside of the domains of math and science, which is why philosophy is no longer relevant to the human sciences. This gap becomes much larger when you move to physics.
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.
Would the world have been better off if Hegel had never lived? Without Hegel, we do not get the young Hegelians, which is where Marx got his crackpot ideas about historical materialism. Tens of millions have been butchered in an effort to get on the right side of history. Imagine if we had the good sense to shutter the philosophy departments after Locke. Maybe the world would have been spared the terrors of man’s new god, the right side of history.
The aphorism, “If God is dead, then everything is permitted” is attributed to Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. It is a pithy truth, but Dostoyevsky had much more to say on the subject. If there is God, then he is the ultimate authority for both how and why of the world. If not, then what is the authority? Philosophy has no answers for how the world works. That has been taken up by science. As to why why the world works as it seems, philosophy has no answers.
The point here is that philosophy has nothing to say about how the world works and its efforts to explain why it works have been a disaster. 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.
What is left for philosophy is metaphysics, but even here, science is slowly stripping it of its intellectual legitimacy. Questions like do people have minds? and do people have free wills? are now in the domain of science. This is why philosophy is now left with jargon and onanism. It has nothing to contribute to the stock of human knowledge, other than the ongoing process of cataloging the history of philosophy, which increasing reads like a suicide note written by Western civilization.
Training young people in philosophy is no different than teaching them alchemy or offering them astrology as a science option. Tarot card reading is less destructive, as the person claiming to see the future remains within the possible. It is the philosophy departments that have perpetuated the lunacy of perfecting the human animal and creating an earthly utopia. No one ever decided to immanentize the eschaton because their fortune teller had a vision of the future.
That last bit is why philosophy is dead. As a replacement for religion, particularly Christianity, it offered up a vision of a post human condition that turned out to be worse than the human condition. It amplified the worst aspects of the human animal in pursuit of fantastical visions of the future. Christianity staggers on, because it still can offer hope, regardless of conditions. Philosophy has run out of hope to offer and is largely to blame for the present crisis.
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