EXPLAINING NOMINALISM, THE IDEOLOGY FROM HELL

Dr Nathan Jacobs combines a number of professions and interests that are hard to find in an individual person (website). He is a philosopher, an artist and filmmaker, as well as a computer scientist, all at once. He is also a Realist and an Eastern Orthodox Christian, that shapes his view of the world (link). He recently started a series of podcasts on his YouTube Channel (link) of which we shall today repost episode 16 on the Ideology of Hell. We are doing so, because we have repeatedly commented ourselves on the absurdities of Nominalism (link). Jacobs gives us not just the historical overview and the origin of the ideology. He also places it in today's context, and explains a number of recent, and perhaps not so recent developments in Western culture that are rooted in Nominalism, like Progressivism and Transgenderism. 

Sep. 5, 2024 The Nathan Jacobs Podcast: The Ideology of Hell | Nominalism & the Liberation of the Individual | Episode 16.

Nominalism is an ideology prevailing in the West among intellectual elites, who believe -- applied to language -- that words have no meaning or essence and are simply arbitrary conventions; the spoken word is no more than sound waves. This is the origin of the flat, empty, nihilistic phenomenon of 'labels'. 

Nominalism inherently fragments and disintegrates, as it denies the existence of universals and concepts. As Jacobs explains the root in buried deep in time with Plato, Neo Platonism, the Gnostics and the hedonistic schools like Epicureanism (link).

It surfaces in the West in the scholastic period, perhaps not coincidentally after the Great Schism from the Orthodox mother Church in 1054.

It has had its main influence on our time frame in Germany in the Idealistic period (from idea) with anti philosophers like Kant and Hegel and culminating in Marxism. We have a blog specifically devoted to the analysis of this destructive period in the latter part of the Enlightenment (link). 

Kant's fatal fallacy was to confuse ideas, which are universals, with actual knowledge itself. Knowledge is always of the particular. 

Ideas are just instruments that assist our mental processes.

Per Rizzi: "Ideas are that by which we know things" (link).

In other words, ideas are not what we know, but how we know. The result is the confusion of 'beings of reason' with entities in reality.  Beings of reason are abstractions that exist solely as mental constructs, without independent existence. 

They are not physical entities, but rather intellectual constructs, such as measurements, and value terms. They  share the following characteristics: 

*  They are abstractions, non-physical, intangible, and lack  existence.

* They are conceived or imagined by reason as having a certain nature or properties.

Examples of 'beings of reason' include the universals the Nominalists deny even exist (for example abstractions like humanity, justice). Measurements (lengths, weights). And the sacred transcendentals (beauty, goodness, truth, unity, being, reality and identity) that encompasses all beings and all categories. God has it to perfection, but all beings share these transcendentals in a more or lesser degree.  

It is any wonder that the product of this thinking is a flat, soulless, fragmented world in which there is no meaning and relations are seen as just chance. 

To sum up a couple of consequences of this fallacy:

* moral relativism

* dropping essences

* separation from the physical, except for quantities

* mechanistic thinking

* algorithmic thinking (procedural, rote without comprehension, missing relationships and contexts)

* assigning all concepts equal and disconnected from ontology (in reality or not)

Since the properties of things are rooted in essences, which have been dropped by the Nominalists, properties become mere accidents. 

Before some clever Libertarian is going to point out that we need Nominalism for the preservation of individual rights, let me explain what is the present situation in my adopted home country, Greece. 

Historically Aristotle's theory of hylomorphic substance (link) has been passed on in tact over the centuries with the dogma of the Eastern Orthodox Church added to Aristotle's 'four causes' . Read all about Aristotle's theories in "How the West Became a Philosophical Wasteland" (link). 

Thankfully any form of Nominalism has passed Greece by. And guess what is the dominant social classification? Individualism, to the point of personal excentricism! But somehow this has not been able to fragment the nation into 5 million individual islands without interconnecting tissue. 

A long and strong cultural history may have saved the day, or the connecting work of the Church of Greece. Whatever the case may be, the ideology from hell is no prerequisite for individualism at all! 

It goes to reason that in places where Nominalism is being practiced -- for example in Western universities -- ontological mistakes are a feature, not a bug. 

We include our favorite image of 'the running nose' illustrating what can happen when essences are removed from an entity. 

Jacobs is recommending watching Episode 1 as well, which covers The Most Important Question (link). 

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