r/rationalphilosophy

One tries to reason, but one is always bludgeoned by unjustified assertions. Hegelians engage exactly like fundamentalist theologians engage: they assert Hegel’s premises and simply demand allegiance to them, as though they were absolute commands uttered by God.

This is why Hegelians become upset when a Reasoner challenges their claims, because they expect the authoritarian assertions that worked on them, to be just as psychologically effective when applied to others. They don’t understand why a Reasoner won’t simply accept the declarations of Hegel as absolute and sufficient proof.

This is exactly how fundamentalists feel about the assertions of the Bible.

I have been here many times with Hegelians, and what happens is that they attack and gaslight the Reasoner. So one begins thinking that the Hegelian wants to reason, and indeed, the Hegelian does begin with this posture, but as reason sharpens against his claims, the Hegelian more and more departs from reason.

This is because the truth is that they were never engaged in reason, they were only engaged in the act of declaring a secular theology. There are no Hegelian reasoners, there are only Hegelian preachers!

I have now reached a point where I realize that discourse with Hegelians isn’t possible (because it’s a f*cking philosophy cult). To attempt it means that one is subjecting themselves to abuse and unjustified contempt. It’s rather easy to manifest this mindset in Hegelian theologians, just like it’s easy to manifest it in fundamentalists:

Is it possible that what the Bible says is false? A fundamentalist will always answer “no.”

Likewise, was Hegel ever wrong, are there errors in Hegel, and if he was, if there are, how would you know it?

But Hegelianism provides the Hegelian with a wall of Pseudo-Rationalist-Jargon and endless paradoxes, and this is what the Hegelian wields, and it’s exceedingly effective. Reason exposes and shatters it, but it’s time consuming, and one is still left facing the psychological contempt of the Hegelian.

Every Hegelian I have refuted has gone full nihilist at the point of refutation— because this absolute fatalism works as a psychological defense mechanism to keep them locked in the system, just like a cult, just like Paulian Christianity: “if Christ be not raised from the dead, we are of all men most miserable.”

Engaging with Hegelians is a nasty business. This is why it’s better to simply expose and refute them. One does not actually engage with a Hegelian, just like one doesn’t actually engage with a fundamentalist. They are trying to convert you, they are not seeking truth.

EDIT: Sorry for the post title having a harsh word (CRAP), unfortunately, I cannot change it to something better...

Hi, I find it funny the adoption of solipsism as a personal belief. This doesn't look right, and here is why:

1. Solipsism has never been proven; that means solipsism is just a thought / idea, among countless other equally compelling ideas about reality (and many others are more appealing).
2. By adopting solipsism as a belief, you are taking an unproven idea and giving all the power to this idea, effectively making it your boss, so that you are basing your entire life on this unproven idea and possibly creating a lot of suffering for yourself.
3. Solipsism or not, reality still works under cause and effect; if you hurt other people, you can go to jail, feel guilty, undermine your own happiness, etc. The fact is that you are completely a slave of cause and effect, and thus, you have to respect this fact. Because 'you' are not in control of cause and effect, and because your well-being is completely dependent on 'others', be they real or not, then in practice you are not in a superior ontological position relative to other people, so you have to work with them in a constructive manner.
4. What we want is to be happy, independent of what reality is or is not. And there are ways to cultivate happiness. This is a fact. If you are sane and happy and satisfied with just being, why would you give a rat's ass about 'figuring out' what reality really is?

EDIT: I'm only writing this because I'm seeing a lot of people mentally disturbed by solipsism, so I think it's important to challenge this idea. If solipsism is making you happy and it's making the other 'illusory' people in your reality happy, then maybe this post is not for you.

Dialectics, while they may have helped Marx in terms of originally analyzing capitalism, have actually served to cast materialism back into idealism and mysticism.

Marxism has gone the way of abstract idealism. But it doesn’t have to go this way; it simply needs to learn how to make a clean break through logic and scientific skepticism.

By falling into the secular religion of philosophy, Marxism has not emancipated itself from idealism, but is kept in bondage by it. And, out of all critical modalities, it shouldn’t be! Above all, it has the capacity to free itself and complete its materialist critique.

Marxism has absolutely no need of Hegel’s mysticism of “contradiction as the rule of the true.” Marxism doesn’t actually accept this, and while it has historically believed itself to find emancipation in “dialectical contradiction,” it actually robbed itself of its power by being seduced by this serpent.

At the functional level Marxism is not dialectics, it’s the application of developed social consciousness that sees harm in the irrational organization of society. There is no mysticism here! The errors are straightforward and not bound up in “contradictions,” that was always a lie. While there are contradictions— these contradictions function exactly as they do in the laws of logic: because we know that contradiction is error, we use it to move toward the truth.

Every complaint in Marxism, is not also a non-complaint, or a contradiction of itself. The Marxist doesn’t say that exploitation is “good and bad,” but that it’s an evil that restricts the social development of the species.

A theologian thinks they have refuted an objector at the point they catch the objector failing to validate a premise of their theology. The same is true of modern philosophy. (These are modalities that assume their claims as standards of truth, otherwise known as orthodoxy. And to depart from orthodoxy, for these all-too-religious-thinkers, is proof of error). But this is not how reason works.

The modern philosopher feels they have refuted the objector, not by actuality demonstrating error with reason, but by claiming the objector is “ignorant.” But what exactly is this appeal of ignorance an appeal to?

It is not an appeal to an error in reasoning, it is precisely an appeal to a violation of orthodoxy!

The philosopher isn’t saying, “you are making false statements, and here’s why they’re false,” he’s saying, “you have failed to validate the premises that make up my orthodoxy” (and) “if you actually comprehended my orthodoxy, you would prove it by accepting it and validating it as truth.”

This is a hidden premise in religion: “my claims are only rejected because they are misunderstood— no person who accurately comprehended my claims could reject them, they only reject them because they don’t comprehend them.”

Rejection is thus proof of a failure to comprehend, forever insulating one’s belief through cognitive dissonance. Nothing can ever be wrong with one’s claims, the failure is always with the person’s comprehension, which is the only reason they don’t validate those claims with committed belief.

So because the Reasoner is challenging the orthodox claims of the philosopher, the philosopher assumes he is wrong. This form of anti-reasoning is precisely how religion works! It should not be found in philosophy, but it is.

The philosopher feels that he has accomplished the act of refutation, merely by wielding his orthodoxy (which amounts to a philosophical narrative) as a standard of truth, and then using derogatory terms to classify and dismiss those who contradict his orthodoxy. This is all very religious, and very irrational!

What’s wild is that those philosophers (philosopher-readers) who attack truth, only want takes that are true. Isn’t this strange? (Unless, it is their contention that the things they believe are false, and that they want to believe false things?)

We think “good political commentary,” for example, is commentary that merely upholds and reinforces our ideology— or commentary that accurately describes and breaks down a situation?

If we like a philosophy or call it “good,” we do such on the basis of what standard— that it is articulating something that is false, or articulating what is true?

But how can anything be true if the laws of logic are false?

So, performatively, every modern philosopher, thinker, philosophy-reader, simply reserves the truth of the laws of logic to claims they like, but rejects the truth of these laws once they come into collision with the narrative sovereignty they demand for their subjectivity.

There is an amazing growing body of human consciousness, wherein people aren't necessarily trying to "leave" the faith (though some do); they are trying to identify weak reasoning that was handed to them as absolute truth.

They are looking for cultural baggage, distinguishing between what the Bible actually says vs. what 21st-century Western culture added to it.

Logical Inconsistencies: Questioning doctrines that don't seem to hold up under the weight of historical evidence or moral scrutiny.

Systemic Failures: Examining how power, politics, or "church hurt" might have skewed the reasoning they were taught.

Many people in this movement are identifying and rejecting what they perceive as weak arguments within the church or their religion. They want to be undeceived, they want to deconstruct for the sake of truth.

I come from a generation where this wasn’t a normative process. Atheism was the opposition to theism, but now there is a rising, immanent movement of people that were basically born into this process of deconstruction. It’s incredibly fascinating to see it. They have their own subreddit: r/Deconstruction

In the introduction to *On First Philosophy*, Al-Kindi makes a claim that struck me as philosophically significant and still relevant today.
He is responding, in effect, to a question that arises whenever a tradition adopts ideas from outside its own cultural and linguistic context: on what basis can foreign philosophy be treated as authoritative?
Greek philosophy, as it entered the early Islamic world through translation in Baghdad, was not simply a neutral body of knowledge. It came from a different civilization with different religious and intellectual assumptions. This raises a general philosophical issue: does the origin of an idea affect its validity?
Al-Kindi’s answer is clear. It does not.
Truth, for him, is not tied to the identity of the person or culture that discovers it. It is to be accepted wherever it is found. As he writes:
“We should not hesitate to appreciate and assimilate the truth regardless of the source from which it may come to us.”
From this, he develops a broader view of philosophy:
Philosophical knowledge is not owned by any single people or tradition.
Earlier thinkers contribute partial insights that later thinkers can build upon.
The value of philosophy lies in its relation to truth, not its cultural origin.
This implies a strongly universalist conception of reason. If truth is independent of origin, then rational inquiry must be capable of operating across cultural and linguistic boundaries.
It also reframes the reception of Greek philosophy in the Islamic world. Rather than seeing it as imitation of a foreign tradition, Al-Kindi presents it as participation in a shared, cumulative search for truth.
A question I am still trying to think through is whether this position is best understood as a historical justification for translation, or as a deeper claim about the nature of reason itself.
Does philosophical truth require a universalist framework to be meaningful, or can it remain meaningfully tied to particular traditions of thought?

Oh philosopher, can you climb this hill?
Instead, you say it is a hill that you have already climbed.
For you claim you sit atop a tower looking down on those below.
And so we take you at your word,
But what is your word in this sense,
For it has not climbed the hill from which it claims to speak?
But here you are speaking,
Claiming you speak from the Highest Tower.
We do not deny it,
We just ask that you climb the hill with us.
And if you cannot, then how can you possibly speak from the Highest Tower,
And why are we the only ones climbing the hill?

I learned they’re not. I learned they don’t even know how to reason. I learned that they attack reason, because they are so incompetent at reason that they need to discredit it so they cannot be held accountable to it.

This became most clear when reading Hegel and discoursing with Hegelians. I was under the false impression that “dialectic” was a logic superior to the laws of logic, more “advanced,” more rationally defensible at the fundamental level. This error was swiftly refuted the more I pressed into the extraordinary claims made by dialecticians. In every case, the defense of these claims was simply authoritarian assertions that I was expected to accept without question, the same way they had come to believe them as truth. Challenging them resulted in being personally attacked (it still does).

But it wasn’t only Hegelians, it was Kantians, Critical Theorists, Marxists, Pragmatists, Analytical Philosophers, Continental Philosophers of all varieties, and even Formal Logicians. It was obvious that all of them resorted to narratives about reason and logic, instead of using reason to defend and establish their claims. They all, in subtle ways, speak as though they are above and beyond the laws of logic. (A claim I am always willing to explore; but not a single one of them has been able sustain it without stealing* from these laws to make their case).

And I am an honest thinker, a Reasoner— so what I am suppose to do, pretend with them??? I cannot. I can only proceed by reason, by the laws of logic, I don’t have any other standards or know of any other standards more authoritative, defensible and basic than these laws. Others believe they do, merely out of ignorance (the same way theologians believe they have access to divine revelation that transcends all reason and knowledge).

But any term these “philosophers” use, they must justify, as that is how the burden of proof works, but they cannot do this without utilizing the laws of logic. How then can they even make a claim, let alone defend it? (How can they even provide a critique without rational standards of critique? And what are the specific rules of these standards that they should be called “rational”?)

So instead of pretending with these philosophers, we should be standing with Reason. Rationalists don’t have any other choice. We don’t get to pick and choose the nature of rationality, and we don’t get to pick and choose what demarcates itself as an enemy of Reason.

——-

*The stolen concept fallacy occurs when someone uses a concept while simultaneously denying the validity of the fundamental, earlier concepts upon which it depends. It is a self-refuting argument, often called the "road runner tactic," because it relies on the truth of what it attempts to disprove.

But you are making critiques— by what rules and standards are you making these critiques?

Are these rules just “your own” feelings, or are they standards that you believe apply to everyone?

By what authority do you condemn 'universal' standards of truth while simultaneously expecting your own critique to be accepted as universally valid?

If all truth claims are merely expressions of power dynamics, is your current argument an exception, or is it simply your own attempt to exert power over me?

If you reject the 'binary' of true and false, does that mean your own thesis can be both true and false at the same time? (And does the logic you use to make this determination suffer the same fate?) If so, why should we bother debating it?

You claim logic is a 'tool of the oppressor.' Are you using that same tool right now to build your argument? If not, what is the precise 'non-logical' mechanism you’re using to prove your point?

If language is incapable of conveying objective meaning, are you prepared for me to interpret all your words as a recipe for sourdough bread? Or do you expect me to respect the 'objective' meaning of your words?

If all perspectives are “equally valid,” does that include the perspective that your view is completely wrong?

“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”

Because it rationally criticizes philosophy, and those who read and worship philosophy, those who find their identities in it feel deeply threatened by it.

And they should feel this way, because reason is not philosophy, and the time has come to expose and refute the jargon of philosophy with reason. And this subreddit exists to defend and promote reason in the world, which is the functional mechanism of all philosophy.

Don’t let the lack of upvotes fool you, why would you expect reason to be celebrated on Reddit? (Many an embittered sophist lurks in the shadows, feeling spurned that they were robbed of their “right” to mislead, confuse and deceive with their rhetoric and games of paradox. For these empower them on every other platform, but not here, and the downvote is their only revenge).

What is more likely, asked David Hume, that Reddit is full of Reasoners, or that Reddit is full of Irrationalists who rebel from the application of reason? (‘The application of reason’— that is not something a philosopher even has the ability to clearly explain! For that clarity you must ask a Reasoner or Critical Thinker).

Philosophers are every bit as authoritarian as theologians, and they deeply resent having their narratives challenged by reason, because they get all their legitimacy and power from their narratives. To expose the irrationality of their narratives, is to expose the sham of their reason; it is to rob them of their social power.

But how can we judge? How do we know when reason is in motion and being applied? What does it look like? What specific rules does it follow in order to guarantee itself as reason?

These are questions that philosophers fear and will not answer, and if they do answer, they demand a finality to their proclamations, the same way that theologians demand their claims be accepted on the basis of authority, without question. They are not established, they are asserted. But Reasoners know only how to live through and by questions, and our concern is only with the truth or falsity of claims.

Why is this the most hated philosophy subreddit on Reddit? Because philosophy is no longer aligned with reason, and nor does it practice it, because philosophy is now just another species of sophistry, it is a secular theology— and philosophers hate being called out and exposed in this way. They want the identity of being Reasoners, of being “rational” without actually having to abide by the rules of reason.