Authority as Primordial

A Quick and Dirty Guide to Factualism

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Quite a few new readers have come to this blog recently. It can be a bit overwhelming to the new reader because a lot of what’s happening here is introducing what look like new concepts but are just very old ways of thinking that we’ve lost.

So occasionally I’ve been doing “quick and dirty” explanations of some concept or another that we reference all the time. This article is on what we’ve called factualism. You know it as “irrationalism”, but that’s a defective term, first because it makes rationalism the primary term when it’s really the derivative, and second because it has the connotation of stupidity.

Factualism points out that if you want to reason, you have to start with a brute fact, and that this brute fact is neither analyzable by nor derived from reason. In other words, an axiom. But where do we get axioms? Most people don’t think about this at all, but when we scratch below the surface, we find something highly disturbing. In fact, the simple idea behind factualism upends all metaphysics, epistemology, and morality—it reorders the traditional priority of those disciplines. It also entails folkishness in a way that fully rules out liberalism.

No matter what you’re reasoning about, you have to assume something. Something has to be “already in place” before reason can even get going. Something has to be primordial.

As a simple example, suppose I say the following:

1. All men are mortal

2. Socrates is a man

3. Therefore Socrates is mortal

(1) is primordial. It’s not self-evident. I didn’t observe it. It was already “in the background”, thrust upon me before I even got to it—a brute fact. It doesn’t depend on reason; rather, reason depends on it. If it does depend on reasoning, this merely pushes the question back to a yet more primordial chain of reasoning, which traces back to a yet more primordial brute fact.

Where do you get your brute facts, that “something” at the very beginning? Not from reason, by definition. The short answer is that you get it from some authority. You didn’t observe that all men are mortal. You didn’t even observe that you can generalize (say, mortality) from a set of particulars (say, a series of men who died). That was handed to you, by some authority. Authority puts in place that which is always already there before reason. Authority is primordial.

Right, so we need some authority. But why do we need this particular authority? Can’t we decide if a particular authority is valid? Yes… but only on the basis of another brute fact. And where does that brute fact come from? Some other authority. There’s a kind of conservation law at work here—in order to evaluate some authority, you need to presume some other authority.

All this may seem fairly obvious so far. But where things start getting weird is when we consider what’s really involved in trying to decide between two authorities. In deciding between them, we have to posit a standard that they do or don’t meet. That standard, to be compelling, must come from some authority or another. Whatever determines the standard, is the authority. If it’s some third party, then that third party is the authority. If it’s not, that means the authority is you. Strictly speaking, “which authority” is a question that can’t even be sensibly asked without making oneself one’s own highest authority. Doing this has led to all kinds of inconsistencies in our thinking that have, over millennia, led us to cutting our dicks off and becoming transhuman.

So, this sounds really weird. Can we really not sensibly ask which is our real authority? One person says you need to obey the Ten Commandments, and another says you don’t. Is that question really unanswerable?

Think about what’s involved in answering that question. How could you evaluate it? You could start from assumptions you yourself came up with, but then that just means you are the ultimate authority. In which case morality is impossible because you could always just overrule any moral principle. So, you’re just left with pure appetite. Not much of a moral foundation. People will bring in natural law here as some sort of extra-traditional authority but that is pure nonsense. One look at the history of natural law shows what a post-hoc cope that is.

So, you have to start from assumptions you were handed. We call that tradition.

Tradition is simply the accumulated authoritative commands of a people. To evaluate the question “which authority” you need to lean on authority anyway—the authority of your tradition. Whatever basic epistemic assumptions could decide that question ultimately come from whatever tradition is yours. Trying to break away from your tradition would be like trying to take the government to court. There’s no higher court of appeal. You just have to take it as a brute fact that your tradition is right, even to reason at all.

Authority is an absolute presupposition and not debatable. If we disagree on which is our authority, this is as good as saying we are of different folkhoods, in which case there is no common ground on which to decide questions of good and truth—there is only war.

So, to boil it down to its basic elements:

• Authority is unquestionable

• The question “which authority?” is identical to the question “which folk?”

The upshot of authority as primordial is that discourse cannot rest on an abstract, self-justifying foundation. Neither our morality, nor our metaphysics, nor even our epistemology can be abstracted away from the background. Reason is never disembodied. It always depends on an agent. It is always bounded by a culture. ¹ All these are ways of saying that reason always depends upon authority.

At the end of the day, reason is governed by custom, which is just to say, reason is subordinate to folkishness, the particularity of a people.

You can’t ask for reasons all the way down. At some point you simply have to assume something, and that assumption comes from authority. Even your attempt to evaluate whether those assumptions were warranted rests on yet more basic assumptions, again given to you by authority. There is simply no way around this—the foundation of truth is authority.

This is a very disturbing realization for most people. Those on the left can’t stomach it at all. They would sooner explode the very possibility of truth than accept it. Even those on the right have trouble swallowing it.

I never cease to be amazed at how many supposedly authoritarian, traditionalist, or illiberal people turn into anarcho-libertarians when confronted with the fact that they literally can’t question everything. Usually because it means that their favoured revolution from yesteryear was doing exactly the same thing as the revolution from 5 seconds ago.

This is something the broader political right has not gotten its collective head around and it probably never will. Some things must be off-limits.

Some things cannot be inquired into. Not because they cannot be defended, but because then nothing can be defended, not even in principle. If we would question anything at all, some things must lie beyond question. This is factualism, and it is to reason what reason is to philosophy.

1. It is not a contradiction for me to say to you that reason is always culturally determined. I am, after all, speaking only to those whom I regard as my folk.