Soliloquiae

Two weeks ago the so-called European Court of Human Rights published a decision condemning Italy to remove all crucifixes from public schools classrooms. Meanwhile, a German court has ruled that a High School in Berlin must provide a special room for Muslim praying students which are mainly from a second generation immigration. Last but not least, the European Union is menacing a small country as Lithuania to be expelled on basis of “homophobia”.

If ever proof were needed that EU national governments may no longer legislate in accordance with their own cultural traditions, or enact laws which uphold the Christian understanding of the family, it is now evident.

Astonishingly (or perhaps not), the European Parliament has considered ‘Article 7’ action against Lithuania, which could have resulted in Lithuania’s suspension from the European Union. And all because they have dared to confront what they deem to be insidious homosexual propaganda.

In order to have a full idea of the actual European irrationality, please check this figures [PDF] and verify the total inconsistency and incoherence of an insane European political elite.

From Illuminism we have inherited an abusive rationalism that assumes that it can explain everything and imagines that alterity could always be reduced to a same predefined condition and without any residual differences.

The “great reason” of Lights should know better and recognize its own limits and stop when facing the unknown. Science is today a Babel Tower: every science field speaks its own language disregarding all the rest.

When quantum mechanics is strongly defying the macroscopic determinism, there’s a new and modern sort of ignorance in this article from Elizabeth Culotta ― but not the kind of De docta ignorantia (Of Learned Ignorance) that Nicholas of Cusa taught us about. It’s irrational ― and therefore stupid ― implicitly attribute the human religiosity and teleological judgment to some sort of brain’s epiphenomenal causal determinism.

Rather I would advise people to read two actual books: “Und wir sind es doch—die Krone der Evolution”, by the German Gerhard Neuweiler (“We Are It: The Crown of Evolution”), and “Does Our Existence Have a Sense?” by the French Jean Staune.

The “golden age” in which reason was reduced to objective causality is gone.

« Voegelin then concludes his argument with a mischievous sleight of hand, when he further attributes to this range of individuals the beliefs of just one, Comte, presumably on the basis that it is easier to fit Comte’s positivist views into Voegelin’s meretricious argument that all gnostics were driven by the need for immortality, by a need for personal salvation.

This argument must fail because Voegelin is ascribing religious sensibilities to people who are, in some cases at least, not religious. The idea of personal salvation cannot explain the actions of a scientist.»

I do not think that a scientist is an irrational animal, i.e., a person without “religiosity”. I would ask the guy who wrote the aforementioned stuff to be more concise and distinguish between “religion” A or B, and “human religiosity”.

Furthermore, it seems that the blogger does not know much about classical culture and politics ― namely those of Ancient Greece ― as Eric Voegelin knew so well. The same concept of “immortality” Voegelin argues belonging to modern gnostics existed before Christianity with the Roman concept of “tradition”, which was the influence and the remains of Greek culture.

“Immortality”, for the Greeks, was exactly the concept of outstanding and exceptional human acts ― being either in literature, arts, politics or in philosophy (which was considered as “science”, for the Greeks) fields. Eric Voegelin did not create any new concept; rather he just looked back in History before Christianity to verify how a similar concept of “immortality” could be transposed through History and assimilated in a so called “post-Christian” Era.

“Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” ― Ayn Rand

First of all, let me say that being a conservative, I have absolutely nothing against free enterprise and capitalism. However, obviously I am not a right wing libertarian as Ayn Rand was. Trotsky said once that “a right independent is a leftist and a left independent belongs to the right”. In many ways, the right libertarians unconsciously play the game of the left ― at least they play by the same rules.

The aforementioned citation allegedly quoted from Ayn Rand ― and I believe it is from her own property ― is exactly the opposite of Schopenhauer’s idea about civilization which was conceived as “prison” restraining the ferocious animal called “man”. As I do not sympathize much with Schopenhauer I will skip it.

Jean-Henri Fabre wrote that « Men will succumb victimized by the excesses caused by what is called “civilization” ». This quote implies a vision of History similar to Oswald Spengler’s ― or even to the Italian illuminist Mario Pagano before him. Also carries with it a strong apocalyptical view resulting from a belief that societies cannot regenerate themselves. So let’s skip Fabre.

Let’s try another one: “True barbarism is Dachau; true civilization is, in the first place, that special part of the human being that all concentrations camps intended to destroy.” The French Andre Malraux is the author of this one.

Does this citation coordinates itself with the above one of Ayn Rand? Well, being “free from oppression” is not the same as being “free from men” ― we could be “oppressed” by ourselves in the first place.
We simply cannot be totally free from our next door neighbors (unless we shoot them) and we cannot consider human interdependence and sociability as a sort of “oppression”. May be Ayn Rand considered “men” as a invariable symbol of “oppression”; however, we cannot rationally support this conception of “men”.

Furthermore, I do not see either History (or civilization) as a “process”. When we talk about History we’re talking about multi generations of human beings and not about any kind of “process” as making industrial hot-dogs. The word “process” was applied to History in the first place by Hegel with his tragic “dialectics of reason” followed by gnostics as Karl Marx that caused the Marxist gulags, Hitler and the Nazi concentration camps, more than 200 million victims only in 20th century — and even Ayn Rand is also part of all that “process” as per Franz Kafka.

The best way to understand the philosophy of Ayn Rand is trying to understand Eric Voegelin.

Finally, a quotation from Jean-Edern Hallier:

“Civilizations are mortal only because they become clairvoyant. As soon as they set reflecting about themselves, they blow up…”

“Everything is as it seems to be, although it is not. Simultaneously as it seems and as it seems not. Neither one nor another” — Nagarjuna

Hayek was a very good economist who made the mistake of contradictorily mixing, in his philosophical theory, Hume’s skepticism with Kant’s positivist criticism and religiosity. Ayn Rand was a good novelist who made the mistake of paradoxically mixing the common-sense with “reality”.

In her theory, Ayn Rand started from the “three axioms” ― existence, identity and consciousness. As we all know, as “principle” the axiom does not depend on anything else to exist as such. On the other hand, Ayn Rand refuses any transcendental spiritual dimension; and that is her main contradiction because in a exclusively classical material world, everything should be determined by causality laws and every effect would have a cause.

By definition, a “principle” as for example “the sum of the internal angles of any triangle is 180 degrees”, or that “no fact can be true or real, or no judgment can be correct without a sufficient reason”, both axioms do not depend on anything else to exist as they are― they simply always existed since the Big Bang occurred 120 billion of light-years ago. The truth about those axioms are atemporal, they exist in a atemporal spiritual dimension in which the human reason has its share and takes part of.

Ayn Rand’s biggest mistake was not to clearly distinguish between human reason which was created by evolution and its capacity of participating in the atemporal dimension of truths. There is nothing at all that could be deducted from experience (empiricism) and remain valid eternally, as the atemporal truths do.