Thread by @TAJackson20

Hey guys.
Guess what we're (finally) doing this morning?

Right, between dealing with vacation obligations, sickness, CalArts fans, and human beings, it took me a while to get to this.

Joseph de Maistre's "Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon"
PART TWO: METAPHYSICS
CHAPTER ONE
Of God and Intelligence

In case you're one of the 100 new followers I picked up in the last three days of stomping bugmen and ironycels (or you just forgot cause this took a month to get to😳) the subject is Francis Bacon, founder of British Empiricism, and he's a retarded megalomaniacal lunatic.

The many, MANY, faults of his scientific praxis are documented in part one (calling microscopes useless and being a literal hermetic animist, for starters) but today we're going to begin looking at his philosophy to see how he ended up so... Anglo.

[insert XKCD comic here]
Now, again for the newcomers: I don't take too much time posting the footnote citations for this book, it's on LibGen so you can verify this crazy for yourself.

...Unless, of course, Maistre himself has some relevant comments. Here, for instance, he shows how Bacon's materialism anticipates Hobbes and Spinoza's method, although they tried to derive materialist morality geometrically, not from physics.

So, why is scientism-or rather British Empiricism, which we now see for what it is-wrong? Well, it precludes not only philosophy itself (meaning the empiricism that undergirds its worldview) and if you take it honestly it means you conclude that things like "logic" are nonsense.

This literal disregard for logic leads to very strange places, like saying that metaphysics is posterior to science. (for non-philosophers who don't know why this is insane, here's one reason among many: the study of causality is a subset of metaphysics)

We thus see Bacon as the first positivist, the philosophy most infamous for self-owns in the history of civilization.

"OK, so this guy is a retard at philosophy. What practical effect does that have?" Well, God being the Truth, intellectual errors all lead inexorably to atheism, so there's that.

Reminder: literally every single thing that went wrong in Europe for the last 500 years is the fault of the Anglos.

Of course, it takes a while for the implications of this disaster to become apparent.

The method of transition between monotheism and atheism is called "fideism."

So, we can see that, contra ☦️, it was the REJECTION of rationalist theology that led to modernism in western Europe.

Nota Bene: this book was published in 1836, 15 years after Maistre's death. Maistre managed to predict the trajectory of the the next century, more or less.

This highlighted sentence is critical: the liberal ideology claims to be presuppositionless and metaphysically "neutral." THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE because INTELLECTUAL TRADITION IS CONSERVED.

This might actually be controversial for my audience: Maistre equates apophatic theology with atheism.

Reminder: Martin Luther called reason "the devil's whore." Liberal modernity is indeed a derivative of Protestantism as Weber would have it, but the ethic involved has nothing to do with work.

This, by the way, is the difference between Aristotelean/Scholastic Empiricism and British Empiricism: Bacon and his successors ultimately excise final and formal causes from Aristotle's causal tetrad, and the results were as Maistre observed and predicted.

We can already see the beginnings of radical skepticism here. "The more people believe a proposition, the MORE LIKELY it is to be wrong." This is self-refuting madness. (if people in general can't comprehend truth, what makes you think that YOU can?)

Again, there's no possible way to get from Baconian observation to any conception of God or any other thing, really, whatsoever. This ultimate gap between perception and essence will later give rise to a notion called "Idealism," which is the natural consequence of materialism.

Maistre's take is even more harsh: those concepts are identical and thus the Anglos bear responsibility for German Idealism. (I told you they literally did everything wrong!)

Speaking of doing everything wrong, next time we'll watch how a man who thinks the only real possible knowledge is physics explains how souls work. I'm getting ready for for some meme-worthy takes on this one.