Thread by @TAJackson20

It's October, and my profile has changed to reflect it. You know what's REALLY spooky, though? British Empiricism.

Joseph de Maistre's "Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon"
PART TWO CHAPTER THREE
Of the Origin of Spontaneous Motion and of Motion in General

Last time, we learned that the human mind and soul are physical things because the Bible said that God made us out of dust and not "God made man's BODY" out of dust. Cutting edge 17th century Science here. Today we apply this spirit of genius to physics.

It's remarkable how easily you can expose materialism as insanity just by substituting the 17th century's preferred jargon for ours.

Another thread, another reminder to read the book yourself because Maistre's footnotes are as good as the body text.

...For example: Maistre makes a very crucial point: Even the name "Materialism" is sophistry, because the so-called materialists redefined "matter" by removing formal causes in such a way as to create a nonsensical cosmology where knowledge is impossible. (see Part 2 Chapter 1)

Literally no one on Earth conceived of "matter" this way before Anglo protestants like Bacon bastardized the bible into these insane metaphysics.

But I'm getting sidetracked. Let's resume: Bacon has determined that your soul is a gas, How can this explain bodily and mental functions? Well, here's your answer. This is how the Baconian method operates.

Remember: we abolished scholasticism for this.

Now, after your "Wtf am I reading?" reaction passes, you're probably looking for some way to put this absurdity into words and understand intellectually just what Bacon did wrong here. Well, Maistre's got you covered with the single best description of 🇬🇧 "thought" ever written.

If you're not a philosopher, than that might be a tad confusing. Here's the tl;dr.

Maistre has needed to go on for three pages to explain everything that Bacon's SINGLE SENTENCE got wrong about Aristotelean philosophy. Amazing.

The reason Maistre is quoting Aristotle at length is because even in his day people didn't actually read the classics much. "Enlightenment." 😂

What follows is a crash-course in Aristotelean theology. Fairly straight forward even to moderns, except that Aritsotle's use of "Artistic power" is in the sense of "artisan," not fine art. E.g. a woodworker who is the efficient cause of furniture.

Here we get to one of the BIG stumbling blocks between ourselves and the classical tradition: a radically different assumed human psychology than "+pleasure/-pain."
Or, as best troll Nietzsche put it, "Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that."

(although, to be fair to the Anglos, THEY weren't the idiots who came up with the doctrine of Total Depravity which laid the foundations for this modernist anthropology)

Damn, it's been a while since I've seen anyone owned this hard.

I'm gonna try that, I think. Next time I see an Anglo or reddit-tier atheist on the TL, I'm just gonna tweet "You inspire pity." at them and disengage. Let's see how well the #MaistreMindset works.

And, as Giovanni Gentile later observed, Quantum Physics debunked the materialist's very conception of "matter" itself, so that none of them to this day can even agree on what matter actually is!

But even before that, materialists had a very large problem once Newton discovered gravity, and Maistre takes significant pleasure in watching them contort around it.

"Everything, even souls, is made of matter."
"Why would you think this?"
"My interpretation of the bible"

"There's this thing called gravity."
"Really? What causes it?
"God."

You know, I'm starting to think that this "Empiricism" stuff is just fideist nonsense. 🤔

You can sort of sympathize with atheists who think all theology is "God of the Gaps" arguments because that's basically the only thing Anglos actually use it for. Isn't science great?

We're done now. So, what did we learn from this?
Deism: not even once.

Next time, we get to the most important question: "What does this epistemological method, which gives primacy to sense data, concieve of the senses to be?" The answer may surprise you!