Turtles All the Way Down

 

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Influencers

 

Ramakrishna

I challenged a Chinese student to reflect on the influences on his thinking: whom did he trust? Whom did he accept as an authority?

It is a useful exercise in these times, when authorities seem untrustworthy. It is time to reestablish our bedrock.

So I propose to outline my own influences.

I cannot trust the government. I cannot trust the priests, bishops, cardinals, or even the pope. I cannot trust the legal system. I cannot trust the academy. I cannot trust “the science.” I cannot trust the professions. I cannot trust my doctor. I cannot trust artists.

But there are still the older authorities, who, although dead, can speak to us. There are the great minds of the past.

First is Plato’s concept of the ideal forms. I believe it is absolutely true, vitally important, and generally suppressed. As Blake said, the mind must enter this world as a garden fully planted. I do not trust Plato on politics. Politics and metaphysics take a different kind of thinking; a philosopher who is good on one seems inevitably bad on the other. 

On politics, I trust John Locke. I’d add John Stuart Mill on freedom of speech, and Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Everything good in government can be extrapolated from these.

But I think Locke’s ontology and epistemology is absurd.

George Orwell is also an influence in politics. Milton Friedman is an influence in economics.

Probably my main influence among philosophers is Descartes. I think his conclusions in the Meditations are the foundation of all possible knowledge, and definitive on the nature of the human soul. I then accept Berkeley’s resolution of Descartes’ “mind-body” conundrum: that is, how these categorically different spheres of being, mind and body, can interact. Simple: there is no body. I do not believe anyone can refute this. Blake: “the body is that portion of the soul perceptible to the five senses.”

William Blake has also been a profound influence on me. He was really my door into philosophy, and into monotheism. He is usually thought of as a poet, or if not that, an engraver. But he was a universal genius.

I believe Anselm’s ontological proof of the existence of God is irrefutable. But it is only one of many; I also find Craig’s Kalam cosmological argument irrefutable.

The Greek myths, Aesop’s fables, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and the fairy tales are authoritative on human psychology. Accept no substitutes.

Then there is the Bible. Even if you do not consider it the revealed word of God, you must accept it as all the vital information our ancestors gathered over the millennia, which they wanted to convey to us. If you are going against the Bible, you know you are wrong.

Confucius’s Analects are also authoritative. They have kept China in good order for millennia. Alarms bells should go off if you are clearly going against anything there.

I cannot point to any one other specific source in Eastern thought. I have learned much from Buddhism, and from Hinduism, but in the end it all pointed back to ethical monotheism. As Ramakrishna put it, “I want to taste sugar; I don’t want to BE sugar.”

Elon Musk on Ultimate Reality

Elon Musk is right, except for his arbitrary identification of physical reality with “base reality.” Take that away, and there is no real philosophical problem. It does not matter whether what we perceive is mental or physical in origin. Ask Bishop Berkeley. Material reality is an unnecessary assumption, and in the end, as Musk points out, an untenable one.

All that really matters is whether God exists. If he does, we can be confident that our experience is ultimately meaningful. If he does not, it equally does not matter whether we perceive “base reality” or some computer simulation: either way, nothing means anything.

Berkeley

The Distinguished Bishop of Cloyne Wearing a Silly Hat.

It is incredibly cheeky of me to say so, but I really think Western philosophy has been in a funk since Berkeley. It seems to me Berkeley resolved everything and has never been successfully challenged. Nevertheless, his conclusions have been so difficult for many to swallow that ever since, philosophers have turned on philosophy itself, seeking to deny it in order to deny Berkeley.

As my first-year philosophy professor said, “but we know there are no unicorns.” Struck me as special pleading at the time, and it still does. The real problem with Berkeley, I think, is that he leaves God too prominent. That is intrinsically frightening to anyone with something to hide. 

Hume Wearing an Even Sillier Hat and Playing the Clown.

Therefore, philosophers since Hume have gone after the fundamental premise that reason can lead us to truth. This is the essence of Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche; of the entire Romantic movement, from the 19th century until now; Marx and Freud and Modernism and Post-Modernism too. It gets quite tedious. It has also been an axe hacking sat the root of Western civilization ever since—rejecting reason means rejecting all established order. We have seen great bloodbaths since. 

Kant, Seen from
Above.

But it is all also, surely, self-contradictory. As we mentioned earlier with regard to Hume, to use a rational argument to show that reason cannot be trusted is to show that this argument, too, cannot be trusted. It is self-contradictory.

It is therefore necessary to conclude that reason can be trusted. The basic operations of reason must be understood as essential, eternal elements of the universe as it truly is—the eternal Logos. 

Hegel, on a Good Day.

Which slams us right into the imaginary stone wall of Berkeley. Since then, there has been nothing in the field of ontology, although there have been good social and natural philosophers.

Berkeley says only perceptions exist; there is no independently existing material world to which they refer. Everything subsists in the mind of God. We are all avatars in a cosmic video game. 

Nietzsche in the Old Philosophers' Home, Dying of Syphilis.

Deal with it, already.