Sublime

irrational fideism

By the accident of my present detachment, I can see the inevitable smash of the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Shaw, as clearly as an inevitable railway smash could be seen from a balloon. They are all on the road to the emptiness of the asylum. For madness may be defined as using mental activity so as to reach mental

Today’s Remixed reject authority, institution, creed, and moral universalism. They value intuition, personal feeling, and experiences.

C’est ainsi que, lorsque la partie rationnelle fait un pas dans une direction, la partie irrationnelle nous fait avancer dans la direction opposée. Épictète pense que la plupart de nos actions sont purement automatiques. Socrate lui-même, et l’on doute qu’il ait été beaucoup plus optimiste que ses disciples, affirme que la plupart des hommes

This cognitive disorder rests on the illusion that the knowledge of the individual citizen is of less value than the “knowledge” of science. The former is the opinion of individuals. It is merely subjective and is excluded from policies. The latter is “objective”–defined by science and promulgated by expert spokesmen.

We must choose between hiding away in empty truths or accepting the radical uncertainty of our knowledge—remaining, like the Earth, suspended in a void.

As long as there are humans, the irrational will find its voices and means of spreading. Rationality is something to be acquired by individuals, not by mass movements or technological progress.

Common to both groups, however, though for very different reasons, was a pronounced distrust of the power and abilities of human reason in individual men. This distrust resulted from a strong reaction