Posted by
Reasonsjester on Thursday, September 03, 2009 10:50:30 PM
The Objectivist Ayn Rand wrote a lot about the Aristotelian
Law of Identity - where A is A - and the associated (Platonic) "
Law of Non-Contradiction," where a thing must be what it is and it cannot be something else. Liberals believe in
subjectivism, or
solipsism, that way they don't have to be held accountable by reality.
In the progressives' world there is no such thing as contradiction - only "false choices." One could even say that
Marxist theory (based on
Hegelian theory) wars against the notion of non-contradiction by posing that thesis and anti-thesis are united in a synthesis.
Yet things are not this way. Either there is objective reality or everything is as a dream, with no causation (like
Hume argued) and no consequences (as the
Frankfurt School would have us believe). It cannot be that there is a half-way objective reality and half-way a dream that are synthesized.
Ontologically
speaking, it is either one way or the other. Either there is a real
world that exists independent of our minds that we perceive, or
everything is an illusion of the mind. The latter alternative is
impossible, because a universe cannot be the unity of one mind, the
product of a self-generated illusion with no external causes. This idea
is non-sensical.
Thus all progressive arguments, based on
post-modernism,
post-structuralism,
subjectivism,
intrinsicism,
solipsism,
radical skepticism, and pure
idealism, rest on feet of clay because these ideologies' ontological assumptions are simply wrong or even absurd.
Note: Occasionally you will get the pseudo-intellectual who holds up the
Wave-Particle Theory of Light
as an example of how the Law of Non-Contradiction is incorrect. Yet
light is a phenomenon that we perceive in a distinctly human fashion;
we receive and interpret sense-data using our eyes. Our minds thus use
concepts to describe the sense-data we refer to as "light." But even if
we explain light's behavior as exhibiting characteristics of a wave in
some circumstances and as a particle in other circumstances, we should
not conclude that light is both two different phenomena at the same
time - simply because our apprehension of its behavior at the
sub-atomic level is only indirectly observable and not fully
understood. Ultra-violet and infra-red light are not directly
perceivable, but since some physicists' rationality indicated to them
that these types of light must exist (in the wave spectrum) they
invented instruments to detect these other wave-lengths.
An
excellent supplementary example of how rationality can guide our
interpretation of sense-data, and actually our discovery of new forms
of sense-data, is the history of the concept of the atom. The idea that
material reality is composed of miniscule discrete units was first
formulated in ancient Greece by Leucippus and his student Democritus.
The concept of the atom was confirmed empirically much later using
electron microscopes.
The formulation of the related concept of
the molecule was developed in the early 19th century by such physicists
as Avogadro. Recently the structure of molecules was
confirmed empirically by the "evil" corporation IBM.
[A special thanks to ReaganX for helping me to appreciate such ideas as I attempt to relate here as accurately as I can.]