Antiphilosophy Disguised as Science
A reader with the binary but cartomantic name of “The Deuce” remarks:
“Darwinism is actually a philosophical claim dressed up as a scientific theory. Specifically, it’s a philosophical claim that teleology in biology can be explained and accounted for via the fully mechanistic and non-teleological.”
Hear, hear and bravo.
I think of Darwinism as the first case of an epidemic disease of skilled scientists acting as unskilled philosophers, and spreading confusion and self-contradiction into the minds of the common man, using prestige in one field, to spread nonsense in another.
It is the outcome of the “Treason of the Clerks” where the intellectuals of the West abandoned the Western intellectual tradition. The Enlightenment project of retaining Catholic moral and social teaching but by replacing Catholic theological axioms with rational but secular theological axioms is, and has always been, a paradox and a vanity.
Darwin’s theology, disguised as biology, was one leg of this modernistic tripod of anti-intellectual and irrational thought.
Darwin proposed that creation had no creator, hence man is an animal, indistinguishable from others, differing in degree, not in kind. Man is not man.
Freud proposes that man’s soul is a morass of self-deception, his conscience the ghost of conformist instinct, his sins are natural and healthy expressions of incestuous and murderous impulses found in all. Soul is not soul.
Marx combined and refined both ideas. He proposes that man’s civilization is a blind machine governed by historical mechanisms and forces over which we have no control, an endless Darwinian struggle of class against class, disguised as law and order by a morass of self-deception. Law is not Law.
All three agree that Man lacks free will, conscience, reason, purpose, or point.
All three propose theories that are philosophical rather than scientific in nature, and which, if true, would not allow philosophy to exist. If man is one animal among others, human reason is not reliable; if man’s soul is self-deception, human reason is not reliable; if man is a byproduct of inhuman material forces, and his ideas are an ideological superstructure of class interests, all thought is self-deception, including this one.
This is a philosophy that destroys philosophy, a thought that stops thought. How and why it was smuggled into the Western intellectual tradition is a more complex question. That it must be rejected is not.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
