"... insanity is often marked by the dominance of reason and the exclusion of creativity and humour. Pure reason is inhuman. The madman’s mind moves in a perfect, but narrow, circle, and his explanation of the world is comprehensive, at least to him."
To be fair it did work out suprisingly well in the early days, even the really weird comment chains attracted only a small minority of the bizarrely deranged. Probably because back then the median LW commentator was noticeably smarter than the median HN commentator.
Pascal’s mugging was even coined there I believe, but then as it grew… whatever communal anti-derangement protections existed gradually declined.
And it now is more often than not a negative example.
I am not against rationalism at all despite my quoting of Hume. Reason is essential and has done much good to the world. It's just that things tend to get kooky at the tail end of any distribution.
The rationalist community have some of the smartest people and the best blogs, and they think through things much more thoroughly and are much less prone to biases and fallacies than most online communities.
I feel like it's not a question if you can, but if you should.
Are you actually smart if you spend any significant amount of time thinking through things in order to be rational?
I have a good friend that is by all reasonable metrics incredibly smart. Graduated high school and college at the same time at age 16. Doctorate at 22. Professor at a top university for several years. But lives in absolute squalor and spends his time and brain power on rational thinking and philosophy to understand life.
But, it is life, and if you don't experience it how can you understand it, and if you do understand it, what is gained?
His life is the inside of his house and a daily trip to Dollar general to buy mountain dew, cigarettes and frozen burritos.
I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be linked unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. Such snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.
Yes, exactly, “Crime and punishment” or ”Demons” or others. Some of the dialogues are exactly about the ideologies and how different characters think and apply them, how reason manifests in violence.
This made me think of C&P as well. Specifically how Raskolnikov developed his own half baked ideology where “great men” were free to act with impunity. It’s not hard to draw parallels with “longtermism” and effective altruism.
Even Aristotle knew that reason was just an aspect of being a human and not the whole thing
To be honest the only philosopher I know of who convincingly argued that everything is reason is Hegel, but he did so more by making the idea of reason so broad that even empiricism (and emotion, humour, love, the body, etc.) falls under it...
Hegel still has a really bad reputation regarding atrocities and his Philosophy of history.
"History as the slaughter-bench" - and yet the aims of reason are accomplished."
But there are also Hegel scholars (Walter Jaeschke for example) who simply consider these accusations to be uneducated and that he does not see the atrocities of history as reasonable, but on the contrary makes criticism possible in the first place.
All of Hegel, and most of his descendants, are fashionable nonsense. All types of "Dialectics" are fake and don't exist. It's telling that the most common version of the term "Dialectics" that everyone thinks Hegel coined was actually coined by one of his (many butthurt) students, Fitche.
Philosophy will continue to be bankrupt for as long as Hegel's stranglehold on Philosophy remains. Kill his thought, Kill "dialectics", Kill the "world spirit" or "Geist". Otherwise philosophy continues down the "post modern neo marxism" loony world that has led so many to turn reactionary.
Edit (in response to the comment cus I can't reply faster since Dang's HN policies are bad):
I cover to cover read his shitty books. They weren't worth opening, let alone reading. This is the same for most of the rest of the "postmodern" canon.
Competitive debate meant that we weaponized these long dead idolaters for our own needs. I've (unfortunately) read Zizek, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Sartre, Heidigger, etc. I regret most of the time I spent reading these authors. They are all intellectually bankrupt and many of them are straight up pseudo-scientific charlatan snake oil salespeople (Lacan).
So you’ve discarded a lot of modern , post modern and contemporary thinkers without offering some alternative or do you mean that there isn’t much to philosophy in general? I’m curious because I have also come to a similar conclusion but I have to admit that I have not read everyone that you’ve mentioned but I have read summaries and analysis.
> This is the same for most of the rest of the "postmodern" canon.
I genuinely can’t think of anyone less postmodern than Hegel. He’s a pure rational traditionalist who believed completely in objective truth and morality and grand narratives lol
This sounds a lot like the psychopath Anton Chigurh in the movie No Country for Old Men. His view of the world is he is the arbiter of people's destiny, which often involves them being murdered.
"... insanity is often marked by the dominance of reason and the exclusion of creativity and humour. Pure reason is inhuman. The madman’s mind moves in a perfect, but narrow, circle, and his explanation of the world is comprehensive, at least to him."