Thread by @TAJackson20

Hi, I'm T. A. Jackson, & you might remember me for my suggestion that hunting actors for sport should both be legal and subsidised by the national government. Today we're going to be abusing a human who, as hard as it is to believe, was even more contemptible than Meryl Streep.

Finally, after a month, we're going to begin

Joseph de Maistre's
"Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon"

PART ONE CHAPTER ONE
Novum Organum, or New Instrument
Induction and Syllogism

(As you can tell, there's two books to this, logic/science, and metaphysics, but don't worry, it's only about 400 pages long. (and 70 of them are just the introduction with historical context and translator's notes))

For those absolutely new to this, we're dealing with Francis Bacon, not Roger Bacon. (Sorry, Shadow Hearts fans)

Francis Bacon founded British Empiricism and, infamously, claimed to be smarter than all the Greeks and Aristotle. It is Maistre's intention to show, more or less, that he was not only WRONG, but that he was, in modern terms, acting like Wallace Shawn in "The Princess Bride."

Bacon's self-described goal was essentially to rescue humanity from the dark ages. Hes, the Anglo was the innovator of this stupid meme, one that Maistre spends considerable wordcount demolishing.

Empires rise and fall, but the Anglo is eternal.
(h/t: @mr_scientism )

Okay, Bacon was a very ungrateful and unpleasant person. But what about his method? What's wrong with it, you ask? Maistre provides us with a straightforward answer:

"Luciferianism."

LAMO, Transhumanism is literally just outdated sentimental Renaissance humanism. How can [insert]/ACC ever recover from this?

It's remarkable how Maistre essentially refuted all of modern philosophy in just three paragraphs. You can read entire books without the value of a single one of his pages.

HE TRIED TO WARN US

WARNING: we gonna get semantic here for a minute.

Maistre digs deep here, which is just as well because (as we'll see in a minute) the Baconites didn't really examine the concept of "induction" at all.

This was how Bacon and his followers pitched it: (British) Empiricism was supposed to use induction to save us from the tyranny of syllogism and allow real science™.

Well,
guess
what?

(As an aside, get the book yourself. The footnotes are great)

What's basically going on here is that Bacon was attempting to create an autonomous device to replace human virtues and judgement with positivist formulae. It failed, because you cannot actually remove human cognition from the operation of human beings.

(cf. C. S. Lewis' "The Abolition of Man"

Or, as Maistre puts it:

We're hitting Nietzsche levels of Anglo disrespecting right now and I love it.

Anglos: If we just reduce everything to mechanistic numerology then we can finally be free of the hated reason that forces us to think!
Maistre: lol, get rekt.

He's taking no prisoners. Not a single "Enlightenment thinker" is going to get out of here alive.

This is why it's weird seeing the Thermidor crowd complain that Aristotle/reason were the downfall of western Christendom: (this isn't a subtweet, Carlo's blocked me) said downfall was predicated on the REJECTION of Aristoteleanism, but Aristotle himself was an empiricist!

"Scientism" is not a mistake. Scientism is not an accident. Scientism is what the so-called "scientific method" was the from the beginning. It's a feature, not a bug.

Here Maistre makes a point that was later echoed by Alasdair MAcIntyre: there is NO SUCH THING as a "self-evident" truth. EVERYTHING is reasoned from the conceptual scheme and cognitive tools inherited from your intellectual tradition, through the use of trained judgement.

(This is called "virtue epistemology," and it is the antithesis of the bugman mindset. plato.stanford.edu/entries/episte… )

The absolute state of materialism.

*disdain for plebs intensifies*

And now that's the ONLY kind of thing we'd even call "science" at all. The triumph of the Anglo weltanschauung cannot ever be exaggerated.

Shades of Feyerabend here, very good. Maistre BTFO of verificationism before it even formally existed!

I wonder if Neil deGrasse Tyson would explode if placed in contact with this book? That's some science I'D be interested in.

I love this book so much.

There's a reason that the English language isn't overseen by an academy like any proper tongue, and that reason is RADICAL NOMINALIST TERRORISM.

I'll need to look this up, but I think Maistre just accused every British Empiricist of being an opium addict. The @neoabsolutism of his time, I suppose.

In case you thought any of Maistre's characterisation of Baconites was hyperbolic sarcasm, Maistre here quotes some sickening lickspittles right here.

Progs: "You reactionaries hate SCIENCE!™ You want us back in the dark ages!"
Reactionaries:

Here, Maistre says that Francis Bacon's ideas are so confused that there must've been intent to deceive. I remain less convinced, I've seen the depths of positivist stupidity.

So, now that Maistre's debunked the literally confused logic of Bacon, it's time to explain how things really work, which means it's time to get SCHOLASTIC.

To put it in contemporary terms, British Empiricism is parasitic on human mental faculties, even as it denies their reliability and elevates the senses. (not that this distinction is ALSO arbitrary)

Fun fact regarding that last sentence: you can get banned on /r/philosophy for being an Aristotelean.

Maistre may not have had the words for it in his time, but today we can see this very clearly: The Baconian spirit is weaponised autism.

But hey, at least it's decent poetry.

So, that chapter's done, and it seems like we've got it all covered. What other errors could a single man have possibly made? How many more pages could Maistre possibly need?

"287 pages" is the answer.

Tune in next time, as we continue to refute the 16th century's Time Cube.