Reply To: Fundamental Principles to be documented within our constitution

[Anonymous]

#1390

Haha, yup this is real getting into the weeds stuff! It’s good! I haven’t read Kant, but I totally agree with the sentiment that you need experience to keep reason in check. I’ve just downloaded Kant’s book on my Kindle, and seen that it’s 250,000 words so I’ll need to feel an urge to get into the weeds as much as that. From what I’ve picked up via analog mentions, is that Kant was brilliant. The trouble with great writers is that they’re the most widely misunderstood, and I can’t hold an idea responsible for the people who claim to understand it. I’ve seen extremely postmodern (communist party member) types use him to justify their stance, because he showed that ‘we cannot know truth’. Then I’ve seen Jung illustrate what he meant, and that he would hate to be associated with the people who associate with him and his ideas. It’s the same with Nietzsche.

I use both rationality/reason and experience/empiricism – don’t see how one excludes the other. When deciding what actions to take in life you have to use reason/rationality. Once you take action however, all you can do is observe – because your mental representation is now up against reality. You can use reason to decide to start a business. Once reality is involved, and say your business isn’t a success, you have to incorporate that empirical ‘data’ into your representation/worldview. You’d be an absolute fool not to. So I see it more as one step with reason, the next with experience…one foot after the other we grow. That’s basically fiction writing where the protagonist learns (experience) and acts (reason), one after the other, and grows as a person, defeating the antagonist. The old ‘a story walks on two legs’.

Representative government, federalism, civil society, etc. are not only ideas – they’re manifest in reality. I’ve come to understand them, and appreciate their manifestation through both my critical faculties and my lived experience. I don’t make plans for my plans like I used to when I was younger. I maintain the bandwidth to take the next step. If you have layers of plans, each assuming the success of the previous, then you’re just compounding an error that will be there because we’re merely human.

Representative government can be explained with reason and can be experienced as it exists – it can be contrasted with non-representative governments. Individualism simply protects the Truth so that the protagonists among us can turn it into knowledge and manifest into in reality – to our collective benefit. If you do not protect the Truth, you have no capitalism, no representative government, no West. Whether you are a protagonist or a beneficiary depends upon how you exercise your free will.

St Thomas of Aquinas and St Augustine are without a doubt, great thinkers. I don’t see a need to choose between theological knowledge or ‘modern’ knowledge – in fact I don’t think they occupy the same ‘space’. I’m more interested in seeing if I can acquire and use both forms as adequately as possible. What’s the point of mysticism without realism? Or realism without mysticism? They are each far more meaningful together than they are kept seperate. We can never be sure that we know the whole truth, but we can be sure that we know some of the truth – and we experience it as heightened life satisfaction or happiness or whatever you’d like to call it.