QUESTION: “Curt, Would you consider yourself a continental philosopher?”
ANSWER:
No. Propertarianism is an analytic argument based upon empirical evidence independent of and explicitly contrary to, if not hostile to, continental rationalism.
Continental philosophers reject natural science as the exclusive means of knowledge, whereas, I argue a sort of synthesis, where the methodology of science is merely what is necessary for us to speak the truth about what we sense, perceive, and reason – not any particular vehicle for obtaining knowledge.
Then I demonstrate, fairly frequently, that rationalism without these tests of truth-telling, has proved to be a vehicle for lies, deceptions and frauds – Marx, Freud, Cantor, Russell, the Frankfurt School, Mises’ failure at producing praxeology, Rothbard’s immoral libertinism, and dozens more.
So the struggle to tell the truth, rather than the assumption that there is a superior means of knowledge to merely struggling to tell the truth, is what separates Propertarianism, (which includes operationalism and testimonial truth) from Praxeology. With Propertarianism we can achieve what Praxeology promised, but we do so not by depending upon rationalism which is an exceptionally good vehicle for error and deception, but by relying upon making observations of phenomenon, attempting to construct them operationally (praxeologically), and speaking truthfully about what we have done.
I am in the camp of thinkers that suggests Kant was with Zoroaster and Abraham in constructing one of the worst sets of ideas in history – and the continent has absorbed it. The evolution of complex lies: Zoroaster->Abraham->Kant->Marx->Postmoderns had only physical science, and the strong, as competitors to contain them. I have tried to make it nearly impossible to construct such rational deceptions and errors, and I think succeeded.
Now, just to flip it around, the Analytic tradition in English speaking countries has spent a century of wasted effort attempting to construct a science of itself. And it was a complete failure. They were trying to use language to determine truth, but this isn’t possible – and some of them know it finally.
Propertarianism and operationalism and testimonial truth take the opposite approach – we must demonstrate, describe, only what is extant – because that is the only information that can be known to exist – and as such not constitute justification, deception, imagination, projection. The purpose is to make sure we speak the truth – that we DO NO HARM.
Why? Because it turns out that rationalism can be used as the most successful form of lying and human misery since the invention of scriptural monotheism. IN that sense, Continental rationalism is just christianity 3.0 – mysticism in secular obscurant language.
Curt Doolittle,
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev Ukraine