Reflections on Modern Thinking
The laws of self-delusion.— When materialists reduce the soul to the body and its “laws,” they are merely admitting that they have no plausible explanation for that element of themselves without which their materialist reductionism could not exist. That is, they cannot account for their experience of themselves qua investigators of matter. They, qua investigators of matter, by definition lie outside the range of their investigations and resulting theories. Their ability to conceal this from themselves is sometimes quite shocking — until one remembers that one essential error of modern thinking, perhaps the gravest and most ubiquitous of all its errors, is the near-universal dismissal of the foundation of all language, or more simply of all communicable thought, namely figurativity. The modern materialists speak in metaphors (as we all do), but absolutely believe they are describing cold, hard “facts of the matter.”
From Aristotle’s De Anima III. 4, 429a18-24.— “It is necessary then for mind, since it thinks all things, to be unmixed with anything, as Anaxagoras says, in order for it to rule, that is in order that it may know; for any incidental thing in it would hinder and block it, so mind can have no other nature but this, its potentiality. The part of the soul which is called mind (and by mind I mean that by which the soul thinks and judges) has no actual being until it thinks.”
The democratization of speech.— If all are speaking, none are. If everyone “has a voice,” no one does. The night in which all cows are black. Of course, the democratization of speech, of which our advanced world is so proud, does not actually result in everyone having his own voice, but rather in everyone “having,” which is to say participating in, one of perhaps only two or three distinguishable voices. But even three voices, if each of them is replicated and echoed a billion times, produces an effect at least as obscuring and suffocating of a single unamplified, unechoed voice as billions of unique voices, all speaking at once, would do. The dream of clarity and coherence in the era of democratized speech is therefore nothing in practice but the hope of boiling the cacophony of billions of replicated voices down to their three distinguishable prototypes, or even better down to one, and to corral all those the echoing replications into a perfect unison without any marring exceptions or “false notes.” Words made uniformly inexpressive. Language made clear in the sense of admitting no nuances of doubt or disagreement. Thought fully mass-produced at last, with all private craftsmen, especially master craftsmen, cleansed from the system. Intelligence made artificial.
