The essence of Sophistry

InternetStranger

The essence of sophistry is shown in the simple case of the Wizard of Oz. The sophist points to the statement, attempting to conceal himself. Anyone can rehearse empty words they don't believe in, i.e., objections and arguments can be made forever. K-street agents can be made to neigh runaway slogans, think tanks built to purr the models of subtle statement; one draws ever further from the human being in its essence. I.e., machines generate endless prate and confused mixtures of arguments and semi-arguments, attempting to pass off idiocies as arguments for the sake of polemical propaganda on a planetary scale. If anyone points to the man behind the curtain, he waves his hands in a frenzied charlatan's trick, pay no attention: the opponent has committed the crime of "ad hominem!" Rhetoric is powerful, dialogic discussion often endangered, one must actively fight for reason.

In the current most powerful usage, ad hominem is a claim that the other is being impolite. However, one must exclude this manner of cheep charlatanism from genuine dialectic in the cause of reason. Or, put another way, the conflation with a request for comity with a logical rule. Genetic fallacy is only a matter of consideration, not something immediately decisive, for any serious-minded person. Considering that its reverse is authority. One must take authority seriously, just not infinitely seriously. Otherwise we would not be able to speak of great thinkers.

What is the issue here: It is this: The intelligent have always known these things. But what comes to power in the public forum can become a disease if not actively and strenuously combated. These days one often sees extreme idiocy passing for reason, this on regular occasions; even on a perpetual bases. Think of the puffed up ego of the idiot Dawkins (one must never be persuaded or manipulated into shrinking at calling someone who objectively deserves to be called a fool, a fool) who produced a retrograde, misleading and imbecilic metaphor, with no scientific content, and then became a celebrity on the basis of attacks on theology he had never studied and an appeal to defunct 18th century "free thinking". What could be more damaging to public life than this dangerous spread of appallingly irrational and execrable follies?

tim wood

But what comes to power in the public forum can become a disease if not actively and strenuously combated. — InternetStranger

one must actively fight for reason — InternetStranger

Let's remind ourselves of some diseases of recent history: Stalin, Hitler, Putin, Trump - clearly this listing could be expanded. Imo, your point is correct. But at some point, arguably, reason won't win - so history argues. What do you say comes after reason, if anything, and when, under what circumstances, and by whom should it come?

InternetStranger

↪tim wood

What you say is confused (though, the ideas, as well, fuse). There is the practical question of the conditions for reasoning. And there is the question of what reason is. Concerning what it is:

Reason would no longer be reason. In other words, one can't take the highest conclusions of reason proper, say, if it were possible in small groups to exclude the kind of trivial but de facto utterly powerful and banal grip of stupidity, as the true and proper cultivation of the human being. As the cultivation of a human nature, in the sense that if an acorn is left on the asphalt under the absolute white light of the sun, to whither and die, it doesn't achieve its potential. The right conditions for reasoning are like the soil for the human being. However, the result of that reasoning can no longer be understood as the true cultivation of the human being, as its true unfolding. Since the human being is perpetually transforming itself.

Ergo, the temptation is to go away, favoring the practical forces, into the harnessing of stupidity, the powers that won't cultivate reason. Most of all democratic impulses favor this idiocy, tempered only by the antidemocratic principle of protection of the minority. Thinking, the human essence, in its exercise, is the most extreme minority.

The essence of Sophistry

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