Free Republic

Many of the greatest horrors of the history of humanity owe their occurrence solely to the establishment and social enforcement of a false reality. With gratitude to the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper and his important 1970 essay “Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power” for the term and idea, we can refer to these alternative realities as ideological pseudo-realities. Pseudo-realities, being false and unreal, will always generate tragedy and evil on a scale that is at least proportional to the reach of their grip on power—which is their chief interest—whether social, cultural, economic, political, or (particularly) a combination of several or...

Has any body read Abus of Language Abuse of Power by Josef Pieper or any other books by Pieper? Would you comment on them please? Good? Recommended? Thanks.

According to the German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper, the “wisdom of the West” expresses the sum total of what man “ought to” be. This wisdom was then discredited and rejected in the Modern era, and so is largely unavailable to post-modern man, who bobs along in the wake of Modernism, which has largely discredited itself. Here I use Pieper’s vision as the standard against which to chart the spiritual and cultural decline of the West.ON FAITHPieper:  Man, insofar as he realizes his meaning, is someone who—in faith—opens himself by listening to God’s word, whenever he can perceive it.Modern:  Modern man,...

Enlightenment–bashing, it would seem, is “in.” If anything could unite the discordant voices inside the cacophony of postmodern “discourse,” it must surely be the almost unanimously acknowledged thesis that the Enlightenment project has exhausted itself. What earlier intellectual historians had so smugly called the “triumph of reason” over obscurantist dogma is now looked on as in reality an imperious (and imperial) Will to Power. Reason’s claim to universality is now regarded as just a cover for Europe’s colonial outreach, the velvet glove of reasonability cloaking the iron fist of its aggressive, hegemonic domination of the rest of the globe....