Philosophy declares the highest of human ambitions: to break free from religious superstition, to understand Nature and the Human, and to help mankind. For Nature, it worked; the philosophy of nature became scientific knowledge. For the knowledge of the Human, however, it is a stagnant swamp; there has been absolutely no progress. I would even say it is a beyond-total failure: philosophy seems to have culminated in the destruction of the human. Classical philosophy ended with Hegel’s dialectics, which very logically auto-dialectized itself from dialectical idealism into dialectical materialism, implemented as the dictatorship of the Soviet proletariat, with the pathetic anti-Marxist reaction of Nazism as collateral damage. Two World Wars as a result, and the end—the Hegelian Owl of Minerva—embodied in this perfectly realized final figure of philosophy: Pol Pot (who was trained in philosophy and Marxism in France, in my own city of Lyon).
Analytic philosophy places itself high above classical philosophy: it explains how the latter’s statements actually have no sense, no meaning. Finally! Thanks to analytic philosophy and its analytical methods, philosophical statements will finally make sense, and we will finally do real philosophy!
OK, what are the results?
My first confrontation with analytic philosophy, which opened my eyes to this discipline, took place at the Jean Piaget Center in Geneva, where I developed the MCogito metaphysical system as part of an AI thesis. A prominent analytic philosopher whose name I have forgotten came to speak to us, and as an example of actual philosophical analysis, he gave the case of a train station clock repairman who checks a clock at the Gare de Lyon in Paris, sees that it reads 4 o’clock just like his own watch, and proceeds to the next station. In reality, the clock is broken and stuck at 4 o’clock. The “work” of analytic philosophy consists of analyzing whether the sentence “the clock tells the right time” is true.
Unfortunately, there is no adjective insulting enough to express the philosophical absurdity of such an activity. We all have mobile phones; nobody looks at train station clocks anymore. Pondering the accuracy of station clocks has absolutely zero interest. Even in the 19th century, no traveler ever questioned the truth-value of the displayed time in a scenario where it had just been validated by the clock repairman while simultaneously being broken. Frankly, I cannot even imagine anything more insignificant in terms of philosophical interest. We are beyond insignificance; we are dealing with something else entirely, and you will soon see what.
And every single time I have been confronted with analytic philosophy, it was the exact same staggering philosophical autism. I went to a conference in Lyon about the English philosopher Anscombe regarding a moral problem, and the analytical example she gave was so utterly nonsensical that I honestly thought there was a syntax error in the translation!
Right here on this very forum, I put an end in a single post to the insanity of the Newcomb’s Paradox thread and its 700 posts—a true hamster wheel of analytic philosophy—by demonstrating that it was merely a time-travel paradox camouflaged under an attribute of omniscience.
Faced with such a level of absurdity, a falsity that can only be described as deranged, an alarm goes off in my head flashing: “religion… religion… religion…”
That is when I remembered that analytic philosophy emerged within a Protestant environment, and I finally understood its religious nature. I realized that it is merely the expression of a Yahvic terror:
Indeed, Protestants returned to the Jewish Bible; they returned to Yahweh, the ultra-violent, genocidal, psychopathic god of all other religious thought. Yet, the primary stance of philosophy is the absolute destruction of religious doxa, the destruction of the superstitious insanity of supernatural religious claims. The autistic insignificance of analytic philosophy unconsciously allows them to reconcile this with philosophical grandeur—to dress themselves in the majesty of the greatest human achievement on this planet, Greek philosophy—while remaining terrified Yahvic zombies.
Am I implying that you Anglo-Saxons do not think, that you have no access to philosophical thought, that you only have access to the commodification of the world and of the human being under the guise of Yahvic election? Absolutely!
Am I implying that the only true philosophical thought is what you disdainfully call, from the heights of your autistic syntactic stereotypies, “Continental philosophy”? Absolutely not!
The simple truth, the blindingly obvious fact, is that philosophy as the living frontier of human exploration was put to death by Judeo-Christian totalitarian monotheistic supernaturalism 2,000 years ago. In a matter of decades, it ended Greco-Roman civilization with its degenerate, inverted morality straight out of the desert—a morality that inverts the real lasts into the moral firsts, and the real firsts into the moral lasts. You can no longer be a First of Thought (a Greek), or a First of Engineering (a Roman), when the firsts are mandated to be the lasts, and when the supreme moral value consists in laying down your sword and turning the other cheek.
Every single guy called a “philosopher” after this catastrophe is either a literal believer or someone who discusses “God” with the utmost seriousness. They are not philosophers; they are monotheized subjects, unconscious cryptic Judeo-Christians, Yahvic zombies.
The Hegelian completion of philosophy was merely the metaphysical completion of Judeo-Christianity: dialectics is nothing more than a metaphysical reformulation of the contradictory inversion of the lasts into the firsts, and the firsts into the lasts.
Onward we go..