(FB 1542552724 Timestamp)
THE OUTSTANDING QUESTION: CAN IT BE DONE?
—“I do not think German philosophy was a reaction to empiricism.”—Aaron Kahland
—“Thinking Kant’s love affair with Rousseau being a German reaction to Anglo liberalism – secular Christian apologetics”—Bill Joslin
I mean, british empiricism begins back in the 1090’s and within two hundred years becomes explicit under roger bacon. and by the 1600’s under Francis bacon all but complete. leading to hobbes, lock, hume, smith, et al. The bacons were jurists applying law to modern thought.
Instead, Germans less so with leibnitz but certainly with wolff and kant continued the scholastic tradition of apriorism independent of empiricism, and when that failed moved to experientialism, and finally to the nonsense of marx and heidegger. These people were theologians applying theology to modern thought.
The great questions, which dogs my work, are:
(a) is this internal world of the germans and external world of the anglos genetic or cultural (linguistic, traditional, normative, literary, institution) or a mixture of both?
(b) Given the difference between british (shallow), american (constitutional) and the german (metaphysical) moral depth be TAUGHT by design, and by what methods can it be taught. Because it appears to require both an institutional method of teaching AND sufficient immersion in the culture to produce the general disposition, and;
(c) how can we teach as such while also training the opposite (sun tzu, machiavelli, grand strategy) that this “piety” or ‘moralism’ is a utility and a choice not a truth?
Because it is the LATTER PROBLEM that seems to be the issue, not the former. In other words, today you talk to germans and they are convinced of this ‘nonsense’ that they have a special history rather than did the logical thing as all other peoples in history have done. (and arguably were in the right in both wars).
Brits are in a virtue spiral of death for the same reason.
Americans are incrementally defeated by their women for the same reason.
And as far as I can tell it is christianity underneath that causes these failures – because it is ideal and unlimited, rather than limited and real (limits of tolerance and forgiveness)