The ratio of: [Validity of intellectual product] over [The transcendent capacity to find ideas that achieve the transcendent property of truth ] has to, in each and every case, equal one or the value of the intellectual product is zero, it is insignificant.
If the mind is discredited, everything the mind produces is discredited, including what is used to discredit the mind. Talk about the ultimate humanly constructed catch-22. It's no wonder the materialism that does that turns out to be such a total disaster when it is imposed on real life. It's a disaster for itself.
The truth and representational significance of the product of a mind is only as valid as the independence of the mind that produced that product at the time of its production. Especially, as in the dogma of scientistic materialism, the claimed product of those minds is an accurate representation of some reality independent of the mind and its ephemeral, peculiar chemistry and physics.
To use Eddington's example, a boy's mind which produces 7x9=65 produced an invalid product, which, no doubt, all academic materialists (or those who learned their times tables) would hold to violate the transcendent truth that 7x9=63. That proves that even materialists want there to be a transcendent truth that is independent of the material causation they hold produced 65 as the answer. As Eddington pointed out 90 years ago, this year, materialism is either wrong or it totally destroys the concept of the product of materialist minds having that basic level of validity so as to produce that transcendent truth. Even the mathematics which provided the inventors of science their model of thought, their ideal example of producing reliable truth, cannot maintain its validity under such scientism.
If no product of the mind can achieve that transcendence denied them by materialist dogma, then the dogmatic materialism that claims that cannot be valid, itself.
I will interject that the very claim that there is some thing such as an overriding "objective truth" which escapes the merely local physical and chemical conditions that produce phenomena, more than implies that nature, itself, must be able to surpass the banal insignificance of mere material causation. Where does this "objective truth" reside in nature, outside of minds? But that's a different post.
That's not hard to figure out, though the entire realm of intellectual materialism ignores it or pretends it's not there. Entire careers in academia which get you book contracts, invited on radio and TV and to give papers and lectures are built on that pretense. It's among the strongest symptoms of intellectual degeneracy around today. Materialism is the ultimate decadence current in academic and intellectual life. I'd say it's endemic to the vulgar materialism of large parts of the legal system where, "Men like to substitute words for reality and then argue about the words," Edwin Armstrong. I'll resist the temptation to write a paragraph on the journalism of the likes of the New York Times and NPR, the cabloids and right on down to the sub-sewer levels that FOX and "social-media" feed and defecate into, what feeds Trumpian materialism.
What does this mean for egalitarian democracy? The production of a decent life for everyone?
All materialism, especially the scientistic variety, is deadly for those. Materialism is by choice and creed divorced from and opposed to that one source that nourishes egalitarian democracy. As the atheist Habermas said,
Das Christendom ist für das normative Selbstverständnis der Moderne nicht nur eine Vorläufergestalt
Christianity is, for normative understanding of modernity, not only a preformation
oder ein Katalysator gewesen.
or a catalyst.
Der egalitäre Universalismus, aus dem die Ideen von Freiheit und solidarischem Zusammenleben,
Egalitarian universalism*, from which the ideas of freedom and communal concord
von autonomer Lebensführung undEmanzipation, von individueller Gewissensmoral,
of autonomous life and emancipation, of individual moral conscience
Menschenrechten und Demokratie entsprungen sind,
human rights and democracy have sprung from,
ist unmittelbar ein Erbe der jüdischen Gerechtigkeits
is an unmittigated inheritance from the Jewish doctrine of justice
-und der christlichen Liebesethik.
and the Christian ethic of love.
In der Substanz unverändert,
In unchanged substance
ist dieses Erbe immer wieder kritisch angeeignet und neu interpretiert worden.
this inheritance has been critically adopted, over and over, and newly interpreted.
Dazu gibt es bis heute keine Alternative.
For that [meaning for producing all those things] there is till today no alternative.
My investigations into the politics of the post-war era have led me to believe that that atheist is right and that means materialism cannot feed egalitarian democracy, economic and social justice - the scientific dictatorships of the 20th century are about as impressive an experiment in that as could be devised - and that they will produce either the dwindling of them through starvation and the rise of fascist-neo-Nazism as aided and instituted by the former KGB man, Putin using the vulgar materialism in such things as American popular entertainment which provided him with a Trump card to destroy our democracy with.
Why Habermas remains an atheist instead of making the choice to believe after coming to that conclusion? Perhaps, as I was, he mistakenly believes belief is an involuntary act which has to come unaided by the work of conscious choice. If you wait for that to happen without committing yourself, consciously, it will never happen. The entire aspiration for egalitarian democracy, for its results, including the preservation of the world environment we all depend on to live, founders on that superstition of scientistic modernism.
* The Golden Rule, do to others as you would have them do unto you, is a perfect expression of egalitarian universalism expressed as human action, in the choice to abide by that equality even when you might benefit from not doing so, when you can get away with it. I would say that what Habermas calls the "Christian ethic of love" as expressed in the saying of Jesus, "love your neighbor as yourself" " I give you a new commandment, love one another as I have loved you." is a further extension and intensification of that rule. If they were universally followed, egalitarian democracy and a decent life would inevitably follow. One in which the inevitable pains of life would be transformed from incomprehensible tragedy which wears or seduces people and societies down into isolated, solipsistic Trumpian indifference, into the possibility of shared responsibility and betterment. I finally realized that is a choice that you have to make, it doesn't just happen by some force of nature.
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