(important piece on the form and content of philosophy)
Testimony vs Literature
Truth vs Experience
Criticism vs Free Association
Survival vs Creativity
Deflationary vs Conflationary
Clarify vs Obscure
Persuasion vs Suggestion
Decidability vs Opportunity
Decrease Cost vs Increase Cost
Save vs Spend
Action vs Consumption
Production vs Entertainment
Science vs Art
What is the difference between an action novel and a philosophical treatise? You are carried into the plot, vs the plot is carried into you.
But they are both literature.
That is all.
A recipe is different from a work of literature.
Science(Testimony) consists of the methods by which we create recipes and name them. Literature the methods by which we create experiences.
Communication, like violence, is a resource put to good or ill.
Whether we create fully informed, productive, warrantied voluntary exchanges free of externalities – meaning moral communication – or whether we create suggestion, unproductive or harmful, unwarranted, involuntary transfers full of externalities – meaning immoral communication.
And the fact remains that it is very difficult to communicate immorally with recipes, it is very easy to communicate immorally with literature.
Yet given that experience is our native language – one which evolved prior to reason – pedagogy is often best performed with loaded, framed, and repeated (overloaded) analogy.
There is a place for truth.
There is a place for pedagogy.
There is a place for creativity
The question we must ask of some philosophers is whether there is a place for immoral suggestion rather than moral communication.
And whether they transfer by moral or immoral means, immoral or moral ends.
The philosophy of the west is natural law, common law, testimony, jury, universal standing and rule of law (universal applicability). Science is the art of improving one’s testimony.
Everything else is merely literature.
The question is whether that literature conveys moral or immoral content, and does so morally or immorally.
And from that perspective, philosophers have a very checkered past.
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine