Proof of the Obvious: Why Most Philosophy is Just Arguing with Idiots
The Illusion of Profundity
What is called philosophy today is largely a waste of time better spent praying or doing something of actual merit. It’s endless distinctions dressed up in seemingly sophisticated jargon, what is commonly derided as “academese”, the intent of which is to impress the listener and hide the fact that nothing of substance is actually being communicated. In his classic essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell famously critiqued this kind of pretentious diction, noting that it’s designed “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Most philosophical discourse operates on this exact frequency, a grand illusion of depth built entirely on hollow verbiage.
You see, most philosophical problems aren’t discoveries of deep difficulties in reality. What they are are artificial puzzles produced by defective concepts, equivocation, or prior metaphysical errors.
The pseudo-intellectual has always been content with simply asking “why” or “how” as his only means of rebuttal. He genuinely believes that the presentation of an absurd alternative hypothetical is sufficient to counter a point: “How can you be sure the ground is wet because it rained? What if you’re actually a brain in a vat, and a mad scientist is feeding your neurons electrical impulses to simulate the sensation of damp earth and grey skies?”
He thinks it enough to impeach a witness by simply asserting that the witness is lying because his testimony entails something uncomfortable. The ignorant masses confuse this with intelligence when in reality it’s the simulation of intelligence by a mind that’s mistaken objection for thought.
The Mind’s Mistaken Priority
Take, for example, the “problem” of whether the external world exists. This problem arises only after one begins inside consciousness instead of being.
Modern thinkers have mistakenly given the mind epistemic priority (how we know things) and then treated that priority as if it were ontological priority (how things actually exist). Yes, we know things through the mind, but it doesn’t then follow that things exist because of the mind, or that they are grounded first in mind.
Contact with Being
Sight is ordered to color. Hearing is ordered to sound. Intellect is ordered to being. The mind doesn’t create its first object, it works from something sensible. The senses are acted upon by things. They’re receptive, not constructive.
We don’t invent heat, resistance, color, motion, pain, or sound out of pure consciousness. We receive them. The intellect then abstracts intelligible forms from this experience. Hence, knowing begins with contact with being, not imprisonment inside ideas.
To doubt the external world already requires concepts like existence, appearance, error, truth, distinction, cause, self, and world. Radical skepticism parasitically depends on the very realism it seeks to question. What are the senses reacting to, something already present only in the mind? No. That would knowledge of the thing prior to sense data, which is exactly backwards. Whatever’s in the mind was first in the senses, the principle referred to as the Peripatetic axiom.
The Demand for Infinite Proof
Only an idiot requires justification for the obvious. If the notion of proof itself requires proof, we end up in an infinite epistemic regress.
This is why Aristotle says in Book IV of the Metaphysics that those who demand demonstration of the principle of non-contradiction do so through want of education. An educated mind knows what requires proof and what doesn’t.
Personally, I share the view of Avicenna, who says in Book I of his own Metaphysics: “As for the obstinate, he must be plunged into fire, since fire and non-fire are identical. Let him be beaten, since suffering and not suffering are the same. Let him be deprived of food and drink, since eating and drinking are identical to abstaining.”
The Skeptic’s Self-Defeating Trap
Well, the idiot replies, what about the Münchhausen (also called “Agrippa’s”) trilemma? It says every attempted justification ends in one of three bad options:
- An infinite regress, where every proof needs another proof.
- A circular argument, where the argument assumes what it tries to prove.
- A dogma, where something is simply asserted rather than proved.
Because of his want of education, the idiot fails to realize that his trilemma falls victim to itself. It implies that all knowledge must be proved by prior reasoning. But how does the idiot intend to demonstrate that claim?
If every proposition requires proof, then the proposition “every proposition requires proof” also requires proof. And then that proof requires proof. And so on forever. The whole thing collapses under its own demand.
A Return to First Principles
Some truths are first principles, known per se nota, self-evident by immediate intellectual apprehension. The very concept of “proof” only makes sense in the light of these first principles. Proof cannot be justified by some further proof requiring infinitely more proof. All demonstration rests upon what is prior to demonstration, otherwise, proof itself becomes an impossibility.
A modern inquisition is necessary, not for the enforcement of religious dogmas, but for the defense of basic, undeniable truth. Those who stubbornly deny the existence of the external world ought to be taken at their word and denied access to it by the rest of us.