Quotes about Preconceptions

The worldview of modern scientism and capitalism are profoundly wrongheaded, rooted in an artificialism and arbitrarialism that cannot begin to see the primordial truth of the way nature actually works, in animals and in ourselves as well. All modern culture and ideology that try to disestablish these principles -- radical egalitarianism, capitalist or bourgeois materialist-artificialist hierarchicalism, arbitrarial libertarianism, etc. -- are flying in the face of the headwinds of both nature and values, the tides of human nature and human character. But these ideologies' fallacies are incomprehensible to them just because their culture systematically prohibits them from thinking about issues at the level of structural principles, of ultimate preconceptions: nothing but good pedestrian mechanical bourgeois logic, as remote as it can possibly be from philosophy.

On all vital existential questions, human beings have biases more deepset than they can begin to comprehend. The task of philosophers is not to work up fanciful idealistic rhetoric designed to appeal to hypothetical disinterested-bourgeois bipeds, but to get to know what the actual or extant preconceptions and worldviews of human beings really are, and WHY they ultimately are such as they are. It may be interesting ad hominem how and why humans might happen to presume themselves to be impartial listeners. But the truly challenging question is Nietzsche's: just how the hell did such a species ever imagine that it might want to know what "the truth" is, in the first place? Why would we presume ourselves to be at all INTERESTED in "the truth"?

Values and verdicts never bother me half as much as people trying to weasel their way around them, or people compromising their reason to pander to their own prejudices and preconceptions, which they are so rarely competent to look in the face.