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Philosophy
May. 16th, 2021 01:01 amIt is sometimes pretentious to speak of philosophy when referring merely to someone’s opinion or outlook, but I believe that there are real philosophical differences underlying current political quarrels. On the one hand, there are those who, whatever their disagreements with each other, believe in a correspondence theory of truth, and an Enlightenment approach to discovering the truth: A statement is true if it corresponds to objective reality, and false if it contradicts reality; and everyone, in principle, may observe reality and may engage in reasoning to attempt to discover the truth. A corollary is the rejection of polylogy; what is true is true for everyone.
On the other side are those who reject the notion of objective truth accessible to all. They may have an egotistical conception of truth, and regard their personal opinions as being no less valid than the view of those who report on the facts. Others have a groupthink or obsequious view of truth; to them, what the members of their tribe, or the tribe’s glorious leader, proclaim to be true is true, and it is a sin to engage in independent thought, or to compare the fearless leader’s pronouncements to the historical record or other facts.
I fear for the future of constitutional government in the United States if the believers in objective truth do not prevail over the postmodernists and the Trumpublicans. I do not assert that there a straight line between 19th century German philosophy and the Nazi regime, but neither do I believe connections to be absent. As I understand it, post-Hegelian thought claimed special higher insights into the world, rejected old-fashioned logic, and denied that people had the right to think for themselves. Military defeat and economic crisis might have have led to Nazism or something like it in any case, but what passed for higher intellectual achievement in Germany at the time did not assist the forces of sanity and decency.
On the other side are those who reject the notion of objective truth accessible to all. They may have an egotistical conception of truth, and regard their personal opinions as being no less valid than the view of those who report on the facts. Others have a groupthink or obsequious view of truth; to them, what the members of their tribe, or the tribe’s glorious leader, proclaim to be true is true, and it is a sin to engage in independent thought, or to compare the fearless leader’s pronouncements to the historical record or other facts.
I fear for the future of constitutional government in the United States if the believers in objective truth do not prevail over the postmodernists and the Trumpublicans. I do not assert that there a straight line between 19th century German philosophy and the Nazi regime, but neither do I believe connections to be absent. As I understand it, post-Hegelian thought claimed special higher insights into the world, rejected old-fashioned logic, and denied that people had the right to think for themselves. Military defeat and economic crisis might have have led to Nazism or something like it in any case, but what passed for higher intellectual achievement in Germany at the time did not assist the forces of sanity and decency.
