The Death Of Philosophy
By Gabriel Chiron

Today I accomplished a philosophical pilgrimage by paying a visit to the lecture hall at the University of Freiburg, Germany where Martin Heidegger used to lecture on philosophy.  I arrived there just before a lecture on philosophy to be given to some students at 11:00am.  As the professor came in, I suddenly realized that there were only four or five students in that great hall.  It was a hall filled mainly with ghosts.  After that I walked in the streets of Freiburg in a daze.  I had to register that the heart and core of Western philosophy was near death.

Western philosophy is near death because of a loss of interested, engaged and aspiring students.  The philosophical lecture halls at the Freiburg University feel more like a museum than a renewal of philosophical inquiry and original thinking.  I knew it was bad; I knew the level of thinking in Europe and America was going down; but I did not know that philosophy is already virtually dead.  When post-modernists like Richard Rorty kick the entire history of Western philosophy from Kant to Heidegger, they are kicking the corpse of a giant as would a clutch of dwarves who would not survive a real fight with the living body of German metaphysics.  In fact, when the head dwarf, Jacques Derrida, died a couple of weeks ago, even the trivial after-thought we call Post-Modernism also began to die as well.

What does humanity lose with the death of philosophy?  Nothing less than the collective forebrain.  Western civilization continues its self-lobotomy.  The instruments of the lobotomy are the television and the internet.  Emotionally appealing propaganda and the disintegration of knowledge into mere information bespeaks a “Brave New World Order” where the soul of human intelligence leaves the Earth ruled by perverse lunatics who rule by lies, propaganda and threats of terror.  Real thinking happens now only in what Hakim Bey calls Temporary Autonomous Zones operating outside the oppressive dead meat structures of officially O.K. normalcy.

Without a renewal of the ways of original thinking from the time of the pre-Socratic Greeks right through to the European philosophers, the entirety of Western culture is degenerating into a deranged pornographic insane asylum regulated by sadistic technocrats and corrupt corporations. 

A Western Greco-European world where Heraclitus and Heidegger are both forgotten is a world of spiritual and intellectual darkness worse than the Christian scholasticism.  There is only a dwindling trickle of souls alive on the planet who deeply read and think.  No more great dialogues and debates.  We are entering an era when the great philosophical questions are no longer stimulating young, awakening intellects.  The “they-self” is taking over the world mindlessly while the “authentic and resolute self” leaves the world like a sadhu wandering up into the remote Himalayas, forgotten, detached and contemplative as virtually already dead.

The Spirit of Philosophy is departing from humanity, leaving the masses to their crazed and neurotic distractions, conflicts and turmoil.  As Nietzsche put it, “the wasteland grows”.  Or as Heidegger put it, “not only is man not thinking, but thinking is withdrawing from man.”

As genuine philosophical inquiry or search for truth dies out, the thoughtful individual will find himself or herself increasingly isolated and undesirable in a world of empty souls and intellectual zombies as the society at large enters into increasing failure, corruption, distraction and chaos.  Spiritual and mental self-improvement will be increasingly self-neglected and forgotten with nothing left of the New Age but struggling health-food stores trying to fight off the corrupt governmental oppression stemming from the sick pharmaceutical companies and their human health destroying lobbies.  

On a busy street near the Freiburg University, there is an old stone arch over the street.  On that arch in big block letters, there is now a sign that says “MacDonald’s”.  American cheap consumerism has invaded and destroyed Freiburg.  It is fortunate that America put an end to Hitler, but it is not so fortunate that America is putting an end to civilization.  What is emerging from the globally dominating America is a global lobotomy of the human race.  Students no longer seek an education, but only an indoctrination in big business.  “Getting a job” is becoming more important than learning to think and relate intelligently.  Mexican street gangs from California and Texas will make up the new raping and torturing illiterate world army for oil-seizures and privatization.  Any form of real thinking will increasingly be treated as a crime against the state.

The present death of philosophy is worse than tragic.  It is catastrophic.  Humanity is becoming increasingly paranoid schizophrenic as the average state.  Consequently, articles such as this one will become more and more rare even on the Internet as more and more readers just roam the web sucking up sheer crap they have created for each other without thinking through what they are actually doing.

 

 

 

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