Form: Outline

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