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Monday, February 7, 2022

Heidegger’s Critique of Rationalism

Scientism and the end of reality

by StFerdIII

 

 

How did the world end up with Totalitarian mandates over a false pandemic, better named ‘plandemic’, in which the death rate is the same as the common flu, and the only ‘scientific’ solution is the proffering of experimental sera with a long list of metals, contaminants that no one can spell or explain, with messenger RNA, which by default will interact with and derange your DNA and immune system?  How does one comport the unscientific imposition of face nappies, lockdowns and contaminated injection, all of which lead to misery, death and injury with ‘health and safety’?  Why would anyone comply or acquiesce to such a fascistic program of irrationality?

 

Heidegger was a vocal critic of ‘science’, namely the corruption of ‘science’ by technology and reductionism, itself a process allied to special interests and commercial profiteering.  In 1929 Heidegger debated another German philosopher, Cassirer, accusing him of neo-Kantian thinking, and carving the world up into domains each one protecting its own territory with appeals to specific specialist authority.  Ineluctably philosophy becomes irrelevant given that it stretches across domains and is linked to the world of humans and not only abstract thoughts or a specific domain’s changing truism.  Each domain uses its own tools, its own cant and dogma and its own biases to build walls, fortifications and declare that any intruder not steeped in the guild’s secret knowledge, to be a misinformed interloper.  Say nothing of the average person, who has no importance whatsoever in said domain.

 

Heidegger rightly argued that much of the world is not scientific, but materially emotional, immaterial, at times irrational, and largely unscientific.  Authentic encounters do not have to follow a ‘scientific method’, nor are they the slaves of purported ‘rationalist’ thought or observations, many of which are themselves irrational, biased and prone to fraud or exaggeration.  Heidegger presents a multi-layered criticism of ‘science’, with the ‘layers’ leading to ‘scientisim’ or the cult of science and its dogmatic canon within each specific and individually walled-off domain, immune to attack, inured from change.  For Heidegger scientism is the reduction of reality, including the complexity of a human, into mathematical symbols and DNA.  Humans are thus no more than biological data and the ‘real world’ is but an interpretation of how that biological data interacts with reality.  There were 3 layers to Heidegger’s criticism of scientism:

 

1-Transcendental logic (atemporal science and objects)

2-Transcendental objects (objects are independent things)

3-Causation and freedom

 

Transcendental logic refers to the creation by scientism of a ‘logic’ which transcends history and reality, to establish a ‘transcendental’ or objective ‘truth’.  This is the neo-Kantian view of the world, in which ‘science’ describes everything and all else is but an adjunct.  This is a metaphysical philosophy and by definition is not scientific.  

 

The second layer is about objects and what they really are.  Heidegger illustrates this by detailing that God is infinite and perfect and cannot exist in the same way as creation or its various objects.  What then is the nature of existence when God and objects both exist?  Heidegger argues that objects cannot simply exist independently.  If the unity of experience removes God as naturalism and the religion of Evolution do, how does one account for the unity of experience as it corresponds to an object or thing?  This unity cannot be explained by independent objects. 

 

The third layer is Heidegger’s arguments that by 1850 the neo-Kantian emphasis on spontaneity (life just forms naturally), had bound science to a subjective metaphysics of representation which allows for neither freedom nor provides direct access to the natural world.  This strict determinism of scientism negates freedom, object independence, entity existence or any other metaphysics and immateriality found in the natural world. 

 

These three levels lead to a technocratic scientism which neuters freedom and understanding.  We have removed God, nature and the awe of creation from our society.  We no longer stand in amazement at our own bodies or the world around us.  We don’t understand the workings of nature or its interdependent actors and objects.  We don’t believe in the ‘existence’ of things outside of mathematical symbols or chemical utility.  Humans are unimportant and just a biological construct, fashioned by chance, and odious to nature itself operating more as a cancer than an entity of attraction or relevancy.  Technocratic solutions are the only answer to reality’s challenges. 

 

In the context of the above it is very easy to see how the world can slip into Corona totalitarianism.  The dogma of ‘scientism’ is applied to a technocratic ideal of applying sera to humans, who are just biological data counters, against a viral infection, itself just another DNA collection, and any objection to the program is met with violence and hate, with the objectors cast as medieval anti-science self-flagellants, ignorant, dirty and outside the sunlit uplands of the virology ‘scientific’ domain, about which they know nothing.  Better to enforce the collective into ingesting the ‘only’ possible solution for a trivial ‘disease’ than allow dissent and investigation of a scientific domain.  The metaphysics of scientism, is as Heidegger laments, in itself, an irrational philosophy.