For some time, I have worked on a new project based on formalsing my earlier writings. I realised that some of the drafts can be interesting. Here is the first.
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We are trained to believe we live in a well-ordered world. We take for granted that what we can do, think and talk about are parts of a reality with proper foundations.
But as soon as you begin to investigate, you will find that the proper foundations disappear. Or better, the foundations have never been there, as they are just an illusion – a prison in the sky.
There is a huge gap in the current Western culture between the fundamentals in philosophy called
- Metaphysics (what can exist),
- Epistemology (limits of knowledge),
- Ontology (knowledge about being and existence)
and the practical world. This means that it is impossible to conduct a fundamental critique against, for example, the massive ideals of Obedience and Conformity.
Obedience and Conformity are, on the philosophical level, maintained by the concepts of Dualism, as in the relation between Objective and Subjective, and the Hierarchic order.
So, when we take for granted that critique is Subjective, we will always lose against the Objective perspective that protects How It Is or How It Must Be in a society built on the Hierarchic order.
It all boils down to the binary or dualistic restriction that there is only what is said to be Right or Wrong.
But on the highest conceptual level, or the philosophical level, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – to criticise, because there are no foundations for Dualism and the Hierarchic order.
To be precise, there are absolutely no formal foundations outside of religious texts that define why humans must be restricted to Dualism and the Hierarchic order.
To criticise religious texts leads nowhere, and today, very few will accept or understand that the contemporary Western philosophy is directly connected to a religious belief.
A large part of the present perspective of philosophy is based on trying to justify the current traditions of Dualism and the Hierarchic order. But to try to justify is not the same as to prove – WHY – humans must be restricted to Dualism and the Hierarchic order.
For sure, it is possible to criticise the practical use of Dualism and the Hierarchic order. But such activities are useless when there is no concrete alternative. And when there is a strong belief that a foundation exists for the current traditions, there is no need to listen to any argument.
My point is, of course, that when there is a concrete alternative – a genuine foundation for what we can think and talk about – then the existing traditions will be very easy to dissolve, as there are no foundations for the present traditions to restrict our intellectual capacities.
One of the fat reasons why there are no such formal foundations is that if there were, it would be very simple to show that the human intellectual capacity is not or cannot be restricted to Dualism and the Hierarchic order.
Outside of Obedience, for example, is the exploration of what can be understood and to grasp that we need our capacity for Imagination, which is also outside of what is said to be Right or Wrong.
Miranda Fricker highlights very well, in Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007), how no understanding of the rules and ideals of our society results in Epistemic Injustice.
Fricker writes the following in the last chapter, Hermeneutical Injustice. Hermeneutical means the capacity to interpret:
...But when there is no foundation for:
One way of taking the epistemological suggestion that social power has an unfair impact on collective forms of social understanding is to think of our shared understandings as reflecting the perspectives of different social groups, and to entertain the idea that relations of unequal power can skew shared hermeneutical resources so that the powerful tend to have appropriate understandings of their experiences ready to draw on as they make sense of their social experiences, whereas the powerless are more likely to find themselves having some social experiences through a glass darkly, with at best ill-fitting meanings to draw on in the effort to render them intelligible. ...
... the powerful tend to have appropriate understandings of their experiences ready to draw on as they make sense of their social experiences, ...then reality will change. At least if it is possible to make the message known and understood; then there can be a real change.
So, how do we name the form of injustice that results from the belief that there are philosophical foundations for Dualism and Hierarchy? It is not enough to call it Philosophical Injustice, as this refers to the present traditions.
HyperPhilosophical Injustice is a bit clunky but the best alternative at the moment. We, the citizens of the current Western culture, are victims of HyperPhilosophical Injustice.
Here is the formal definition:
HyperPhilosophical Injustice is the dogmatisation of fictive foundational philosophy where a culture’s core metaphysical, epistemological, and ontological assumptions are – in practice – fixed, unquestionable and beyond critique because they do not exist as formal declarations. This tradition prevents any real possibility of imagining or developing alternative frameworks.
Perplexity, based on ChatGPT, offered this perfect Orwellian version:
By locking the unreal at the heart of reality, HyperPhilosophical Injustice turns cultural foundations into a prison whose walls cannot be seen, yet whose limits cannot be crossed.
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The text above is primarily a concentration and formalisation of the messages in The Best Tractatus: Tractatus-Dialogo-Philosophicus.
