Category: Epistemology and Method

[I] don’t think I understood Hegel until now. I can’t tolerate continental philosophy. Everything german (Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel) reads as a desperate attempt at recreating the monopoly frame of the church in secular prose (a mental pseudoscience to replace a supernatural pseudoscience) and everything french a suppression of the protestant, english, and german with some weird authoritarian feminist version of roman imperialism. Of course I can look backward through evolution, economics, neurological science, computer science, and subatomic physics, with a luxury of hindsight and see that the British were right, but that without the driving force of the materialism in aristocracy, military, and heroic excellence, the common man would feel more drawn to the explanation of experience and harmony than the development of agency historic in the more or north sea instead of continental peoples. So my early critics that P “isn’t enough” were of course right. P is a purely via-negativa system of thought – a completion of our judicial priesthood so to speak. It’s only over the past year or two I’ve been able to see a path through to the via-positiva (religion) of european man’s future restoring the judicial-scientific-material ‘priesthood’ and the aspirational-emotional-social ‘priesthood’. This is because I don’t set out to ‘do’ anything so much as solve one problem at a time as I discover the need for a solution to that problem, because I’ve discovered something false or ‘uncomputable and undecidable’ – a meaning which will be lost on others, but that is how I determine what problem to work on next. So I ignore the continent, and in general I ignore philosophy. I don’t consider Aristotle a philosopher but a scientist. I don’t consider bacon, Locke/Hobbes, Smith, Hume, Darwin philosophers. I don’t read even Nietzsche as a philosopher – just a social scientist who discovered the greek tragedy as a religious system, and applied that thought. So you notice the rather obvious that we use calculus(newton), electromagnetism( Maxwell ), evolution(Darwin ), economics (marginalism), computer science (Turing), and now “Natural Law of Reciprocity and Testimony) but we use idealism for platonism, Kantian, schopenhauer’s phenomenalism, Hegelian, and other ‘arbitrary’ (incommensurable) thought. In my understanding of the history of thought, I see P as completing Aristotle’s project, and I organized it as such after criticism by Hoppe – I was working directly from algorithmic structure and he didn’t Grokk that, and I didn’t explain it, and so he told me to avoid idiosyncratic writing and use the traditional vocabulary and form. So I shifted to combining all the disciplines under the Aristotelian structure, and replacing set logic with algorithmic logic instead of bypassing the philosophical tradition. This turned out to be effective at not only organizing the body of work, making it more comprehensible as a system, but in uniting math, science, logic, economics, law, philosophy, fiction, and fictionalisms, into a single system ‘the grammars’: language as systems of measurement given different permissible dimensions. But until reading this thread I don’t think I understood Hegel ‘charitably’ – as engaged in an honest attempt at complete philosophy. So I’ll have to say this discussion helped me a bit lose a very uncharitable disposition toward the continentals. === “Is Propertarianism a completion of the Hegelian project?” by Ryan Drummond I often see P as a…completion, almost, of Hegel’s work, without the room for logical error (and the dirty path to Marxism opening as a result). His model, as you’ll see, touches on many truths. Only it is nowhere near as advanced as P, grammatically or scientifically. Basically, Hegel made an effort to come to what might be considered a “total” understanding of philosophy and existence – much like yourself. Only he wrote using all resources available to him in the late 1700’s/early 1800’s. So a lot of his understandings are premature, not scientifically accurate, and lie in the realm of honest speculation etc. He had the concept that through logic, nature and human consciousness, God could be considered real but not definable. That we could know of it, but not know It. So he called God, or the universal absolute, “The Idea”. This “Idea”, he said, could be realised through dialectic…and as dialectic occurs both in the natural realm and within the human psyche, it would be our inevitable path to eventually reach it. This is where the problems come in – because he wrote of dialectic in such wishy-washy prose, and used language that hardly anyone could decipher accurately enough to take consistent meaning from, there were basically two schools born from his ideas, both offering an “Idea” that could be seemingly supported by varying ‘interpretations’ of his work, whereby an ideal could be theoretically reached. One path was through what we would now call Marxism, I suppose, where equality reigns supreme…dysgenia through eugenic ideals (The false, yet morally appeasing way at odds with natural law but not at odds with human consciousness). During Hegel’s time advocates of this kind of philosophy, later to be characterised by Marx, were known as young Hegelians. It was another example of the young generation wanting to usurp the old guard. The other path, to me at least, appears to be very much like P – Eugenia through eugenic ideals (the true, yet sometimes morally disturbing way – not at odds with natural law, but often found to be at odds with human consciousness and what we see, at our earthly level, to be right or wrong). Advocates of this school were the ‘gammon’ of the day, so to speak: Old Hegelians. So from Hegelian philosophy we ended up with the two behemoths we see at war today, really – Marxism/The Left/Dysgenia proper, and it’s nemesis Fascism/The Right/Eugenia proper. Had he written his philosophy as concisely as P, I don’t believe that there would have been room for Marxism to ever exist within it’s bounds, and gain a foothold in the minds of the population. P is ‘essentially’ Old Hegelianism + Accurate terminology + Scientific Justification + So much more. Had he done the job he set out to do properly (I believe he always intended his work to be interpreted the Right way, so to speak), we wouldn’t have found ourselves in the mess we are in today. Your work basically completes his initial goal, only doesn’t use wishy-washy, unknowable language, but language of almost mathematical precision and meaning. You finish the job he started. You’ve created the total philosophy I believe he envisaged in some way. But creating it and applying it are two different things. Especially from the position we are in now. He often wrote of the French Revolution that humanity had taken a bright dawn and turned it into a dusk. If he witnessed a dusk, then we must exist in the early hours of the morning. It’s cold and dark. But if we can overcome the hurdles in front of us, we will push humanity to Godhood. We will realise The Idea. We can beat the red queen, or get so damn close to it we can be proud of our efforts. I hope that clarifies a little where I get the connections to Hegelian philosophy from. That, and he was addicted to using trinities to explain everything. You do the same thing, really, through P, only do it all more accurately. If Old Hegelian philosophy was the child, P is the man it could be considered to grow up to become. === By Joseph E. Postma Ryan, you recently posted somewhere asking if Propertarianism (P) is the fruition of Hegel’s philosophy. I would say rather that P is the dialectical synthesis of the theses and antitheses which have been present between Western Democracy vs Communism, Capitalism vs. Socialism, European Natural Law/paganism vs. Abrahamism…and likely a few other historical contrasts which could be added in. “P” is the synthesis which resolves the contradictions which were present between all of these things. What we were actually looking for was reciprocity. Each side of all of the aforementioned contrasts contain aspects of reciprocity idealized in some form. Even Abrahamism conveys the idea of a final due to reciprocity, where those who deserve it finally get their comeuppance. Of course however, the comeuppance needs to occur in the here and now, not afterwards. P is not the final completion of Hegel and the dialectic, but it is certainly the current completion, i.e. the current synthesis. P certainly does mark an entire phase change in human existence, as much as classical philosophy induced such a change, and Abrahamism induced such a change. Thus, it is the new thesis, and may well require hundreds or thousands of years to pull out any internal contradictions and antitheses. Well, I guess that comes back to your point and your question: perhaps P is the final synthesis. I cannot possibly imagine what would be an improvement beyond reciprocity. If this is the case, then it will only be relatively minor details and kinks which get worked out, but over-all it will be the final and last phase-change to human interaction and conception. So I guess I come back to agree with you: P is the culmination of the dialectic in the realm of understanding and regulating human interaction. I have said myself many times that P represents “warp drive” for humanity. By that I mean, and we can infer, Hegel’s end-point of man becoming God. === by Stephen Wells P Puts man’s law in harmony with “God’s” law. === by Ryan Drummond I quite agree with you, absolutely. I believe P to be the perfect synthesis of the ideologies currently at war. Every synthesis is the product of necessity, either through thought at the scale of the human, or through physics at the scale of total natural law. There is certainly a necessity for “something more”, at the moment, and using all of the knowledge I have at my disposal I have never come across anything as succinct as P before. I became absolutely obsessed with Hegelian philosophy during my postgraduate years, to the point of my peers calling me a madman quite frequently. Once you see it at work in the world and in the universe, you cannot unsee it. I knew it had flaws, though, and for a few years I tried my damnedest to plug the gaps to try and take Hegelian philosophy to the next level. I then happened to stumble across the writing of Curt Doolittle, and after reading a few posts he turned my head. After reading a few more I started thinking “Jesus, this man gets it…”. A few more and it dawned on me that he not only “got it”, but was the first person I had ever seen who seemed to grasp totality in philosophy as well as myself…within a matter of weeks I knew he not only grasped it as well as myself, but he had far surpassed myself – and come up with what seemed to be the perfect philosophy to advance humankind and rectify the troubles of the world we live in. Now I don’t act so much as an independent pioneer of philosophical thought, but I act in the capacity of catching up with Curt, and with P, and the many other wonderful guys I see who have spent longer becoming acquainted with P than myself. We can change the world. I truly believe that. God’s law says we must. This was a lovely post to read.