Authority Over Truth

Defusing the Major Axial Argument

In the first article in our series on Axial apologetics, we set the stage for the debate between Axialists and folkish pagans. We laid out the stakes of the debate and the most basic disagreements. To recap, Axialists make three basic arguments:

1. Paganism is self-defeating;

2. Paganism is debased;

3. Paganism is retarded.

The major Axial argument is the first of these three. And in our first article, we laid the groundwork for understanding why the major Axial argument fails even to address those folkish foundations, let alone to undermine them. That major argument is presented in Enas Mathetes’s article Folkish Heathen Apologetics, Part I, Section I, and this article will be devoted to addressing it. The third article will deepen the critique to show just how alone the Axialist is among intellectual authorities, and the fourth and final article in our series will address the other two arguments presented above. We have addressed Enas’s first because once it is addressed, the other two will mostly be addressed as well.

Article Summary

The core claim is that while folkish apologetic defences may work within a continuous tradition, once that tradition is ruptured, it can only be revived through discourse, meaning that folkish paganism derives its revived authority from logocentric appeals to truth. In other words, once a tradition is broken, to reconstruct itself, it must identify its ancestors, its commands, and its continuity through truth-apt judgements external to the tradition. Enas concludes that folkish pagan revival reconstructs selectively and relies on universalist standards of truth and reason rather than particularized tradition.

His key arguments can be consolidated into two.

Argument 1: Biological Descent Is Not Enough

Enas claims that folkish writers conflate biological descent, cultural formation, and rightful jurisdiction. Even in the pre-Christian North, kinship was mediated by custom and ritual incorporation, not just a simple blood fact. Enas cites various Eddic and saga material to show that belonging to a group depended on norms and recognition, not solely on descent. He concludes that the folkish attempt to treat descent as a bridge to ancestral obligation is unstable.

Argument 2: Ancestral Authority Fails Under a Broken Tradition

Enas accepts that the ancestral principle (authorship is authority) binds where authority is proximate and continuously transmitted. However, once a tradition has been historically broken and must be reconstructed, one must first determine who the relevant ancestors are, what they commanded, and how those commands apply now. He claims that in cases of cultic rupture, the ancestral principle cannot make any of these determinations without importing extra-traditional standards of evidence and judgement.

Folkishness does not mainly argue that paganism is true, but that it is ancestrally appropriate for certain peoples—that command, not truth, is what binds a folk to a religion. Enas’s strategy is to argue the case for logos: that propositional reason, thus truth, is deeper than command—that a moral command has no force unless it can be translated into an objective statement that holds for all (i.e., truth-apt content); otherwise it is at best what he calls “group meditation.” Therefore, the article concludes that the ancestral principle cannot be an algorithm that excludes judgement, because it depends on prior standards of correctness and evidence.

Response to Article

In General

The reader will have already guessed the overall shape of our response based on the concepts outlined in our last article. Broadly, Axial apologetics fails by its own standard: the folkish pagan need not appeal to a purported standard outside folkish standards, because the Axialist’s logocentric case fails by its own measure. It defeats itself by demanding universal standards and then failing to demonstrate that Christianity or any other Axial theology lives up to those standards, or that it can even coherently articulate them. Enas’s incoherence is twofold:

1. Internal incoherence. Enas takes a biblical approach, and in the fields of academic biblical studies and university theology, scholars widely acknowledge that the Bible contains irreconcilable theological contradictions, with the status of these contradictions depending on what lens one analyzes the Bible through—a question which has no intelligible objective answer. The Christian must decide which lens to apply, either arbitrarily or, per factualism, according to his tradition. Citing certain biblical passages or applying certain lenses lends biblical weight to theological voluntarism and, in turn, to imperative ethics, thereby warranting the ancestral principle. Folkish apologists simply follow the Bible to its logical conclusions, but because the Bible is incoherent, its logical conclusions are de facto decided either by the reader (in which case the truth of the Bible is subjective) or by the tradition (in which case the truth of the Bible is relative).

2. External coherence. Folkish apologetics better comports with empirical facts; offers a more robust account of metaphysics, epistemology, and metaethics; and aligns more closely with cognitive science and the broad linguistic trend of academic philosophy than Axial apologetics does.

This series will focus on the question of external coherence, as Christianity’s internal coherence has been sufficiently challenged by others. Folkish apologetics need not advance a neutral standard; it is enough to show how Axial apologetics fails by its own.

On Indo-European Maximalism

We will start with the simpler objections and work our way up to Enas’ main argument. First, the ranking problem: why would the logic of older commands prevailing not simply run back to Proto-Indo-European abstraction? Recall: the ancestral principle yields the rule that the oldest legible command is decisive. It is the oldest legible command, because the illegible command, even if older, cannot be followed. This is a practical limit, and in practice, the vast majority of Germanic paganism goes unchallenged, because it either aligns with Indo-European practices or those latter practices are illegible. But where known Germanic and Indo-European practices disagree, Germanic practices must reform themselves. This is an ongoing debate within the Germanic pagan sphere, but it is what the ancestral principle demands.

On Biological Totalism

Folkish apologetics explicitly accepts that biological inheritance is not a sufficient condition for identity. While we must never lose sight of the fact that it was exceptional, adoption of non-kindred male heirs into the family is found in most Indo-European branches, with the laws so similar between branches that we can plausibly reconstruct this as a Proto-Indo-European practice. Folkishness treats identity as nested and pre-political—family, then clan, tribe, folk, race—and treats command as specific to each of these relations.

However, this by itself is irrelevant to factualism and the ancestral principle. The “ancestral” in the ancestral principle is a metaphor. The ancestral principle does not begin with ancestry and derive authority from it, but begins with authority and determines that it is identical with authorship. We have demonstrated in our article Where Do Pagans Get Their Authority? that this conception of authority is shared by Christians, and we have demonstrated its Indo-European pedigree in our articles Bridging the Is-Ought Gap and Authority a la Carte.

On the Inevitability of Interpretation

The next strategic move is to say that while the folkish apologist is right to deny the Axialist the right to choose his authority via conscience, once interpretation enters, in practice, you choose what your authority means via conscience. The error here is to mistake the incompleteness of a tradition for the illegitimacy of the authority that commands it—the muffled command does not indicate a vacant throne. Conscience does not enter here as a legitimate co-legislator, but strictly as a symptom of failure—a sign that the transmission of the command has become obscured, not that the command itself has surrendered its primordial right to bind.

Imperative ethics distinguishes between first-order commands and secondary moral discourse. The primary commands constitute the actual law, while metaethical propositions merely describe who issued what to whom. The crucial point is that these descriptive reports lack prescriptive power and cannot confer the normative force of the original command.

Enas is right about this, however: to call the ancestral principle purely an algorithm overstates its mechanics; it minimizes the role of conscience rather than eliminating it. Conscience is unavoidable—the need for it arises the moment rightful commands demand contradictory action. But it would be disrespectful, to say the least, to demand of primordial authority that it clarify every last command before we accept them as binding—one does not petition the king for a parking ticket. This is what a heuristic is for. The role of the ancestral principle is to remove the need for conscience where possible, because conscience and judgment are strictly derivative: they serve as tools rather than the source of authority. The difference is that folkishness subordinates conscience in order to maximize obedience, whereas Axiality elevates conscience with the effect of maximizing disobedience.

On Broken Traditions

The broken tradition argument is not a serious argument on its own; the role of the broken tradition is to provide the necessary condition for the “argument from discursivity” (that reconstruction requires logos) to apply. However, it is worth briefly outlining a response to the tiresome claim that because a tradition has been broken, it cannot be restored.¹

The most obvious answer to this objection is that broken traditions have indeed been restored. For example, following Vatican II, in 1969, the Catholic Church transitioned from the centuries-old Tridentine Mass, celebrated in Latin, to the Novus Ordo Mass, celebrated in vernacular languages; then, in 2007, Pope Benedict XVI issued the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, officially restoring the older Latin liturgy.

The restoration of the Latin Mass was not invalidated by its neglect because continuity is irrelevant to legitimacy. The relevant question is not whether commands or a body of practices have been continuously followed, but whether they are valid, and the criterion for their validity is that they have been issued by rightful authority. Making continuity the criterion of legitimacy simply privileges whatever currently prevails, with the effect of forbidding restoration of any lapsed practice, no matter how recent. The difference between a continuous tradition and a revived one is simply a matter of continuity, not of validity—this difference does not annul upstream authority. Pagan revival should be understood as renewed obedience to commands that have never been annulled, because interruption does not dissolve ancestral claim.

On Discursivity

We now come to the major Axial argument: that because folkish reconstruction relies on logic, mathematics, coherence, and evidence, it has already entered a trans-folk arena of truth. The strategy is to recapitulate Axial supersessionary theology in the form of an argument: folkish paganism might have been valid on its own terms, but its rupture and replacement have created a one-time, irreversible move into discursivity, and attempts to return to the “Garden of Eden” are impossible since they rely on Axial acquisitions.

Ancient Error is Still Error

There are two issues at play here:

1. The validity of the Axial replacement;

2. The impossibility of return.

We will start with the first of these issues. The Axialist naturally assumes the validity of his replacement theology. However, this theology has no trans-traditional purchase on the folkish pagan because the pagan’s approach is foundationalist. The essential feature of folkish apologetics is that what is subsequent depends upon what is prior for its validity, so whatever Christian or otherwise Axial justifications were presented in antiquity for the original apostasy still rest on pagan foundations. In granting that the pagan originally “saw the light” from within his own worldview, the Axialist has already conceded too much.

If Christianity undermines folkishness, it undermines the basis upon which conversion rests. If it does not undermine it, conversion lacks justification. This is the inescapable dilemma. It does not matter how long ago the conversion occurred—ancient error is still error.

The original conversion to Christianity depended upon tradition-bound arguments. This fact comports with the nature of reason: for an argument to begin to persuade—or even to be intelligible—it must rest on axioms which are intelligible, and intelligible axioms are exhausted by our thrownness. This fact also comports with observed history: the instances of Christianity gerrymandering itself to fit within pagan theologies have been elaborated at length by scholars of religion.

Since the original justifications for apostasy depended on folkish pagan priors, undermining those priors has thereby undermined the justifications. This does not yet mean that paganism is validated—if the Axialist is truly right about the impossibility of return, it means something much darker: that we are left both without paganism and without its replacement. But the Axialist is wrong about the impossibility of return, as we shall see presently. For now, it is enough to grasp that the apostasy is self-undermining: Christianity claims universal jurisdiction, but this jurisdiction was originally derived from particularized jurisdiction, which, per the Christian, has been demolished, and therefore, along with it, the universal jurisdiction.

We have here another conservation law: “conservation of authority”—originary tradition cannot be created or destroyed, cannot be abandoned, but is a structural necessity that upholds the very possibility of justification, and therefore the possibility even of abandonment. In folkish terms, it is primordial. All the Axialist is left with is to say “you can’t go back; we are here now,” which not only does not help his case, but concedes that thrownness is normatively decisive—precisely the opposite of what he wants to say. But can we really not go back? Let us ask a better question: did we ever really leave our tradition behind?

Discourse is Always Tradition-Bound

The apostate faith’s reliance on the originary faith as foundation does not get us back to folkish paganism, but only to the impossibility of the apostate faith. We must address, head-on, the objection that discourse cannot revive folkish particularism, because, as the Axialist points out, we are here now. The folkish apologist replies that even if we are here now, rupture is irrelevant because of the nature of discourse itself.

Let us begin with morality. Morality reduces to commands, and commands are agent-relative.² They deal not in truth-values but in aptness, a kind of “felicity.”³ They are valid “for me” but not “for you,” i.e., they are particularist and bound to a specific community or relation. Commands are what linguists call performatives—they do not aim at truth; they aim at action. A moral “ought” is not a mere adjective on a fact, but an abstracted command. It is a category of language that, by its nature, cannot be captured by truth-conditions.

As J. L. Austin shows, performatives are “assessable” not by true/false but by appropriateness or felicity.⁴ We sense that a command like “Feed the baby!” cannot be classified as true or false, only fitting or misfitting. Thus, insisting on a truth‐valued judgment of “ought” statements misconceives their nature. To demand that a moral rule be “true” in the same way as a scientific fact is to ignore that ethical discourse functions as commentary on imperative speech. This contrasts with universal propositions, which must hold for anyone regardless of who utters them.

That is troubling enough for Axialists—that morality reduces to agent-relative utterances means moral universalism is already lost. However, it gets much worse for the Axial logocentrist: even propositions themselves reduce to commands. All our basic concepts are introduced by ostensive naming—pointing plus a command—long before any true-or-false proposition appears.⁵ For example, a child’s first word learning occurs when a parent points and says, “That’s Dad,” implicitly commanding the child to take that appearance as “Dad.” Such an ostensive utterance is not a propositional statement at all (it has no truth‐value) but an action: it tells the child to associate a name with an experienced phenomenon. All names (i.e., concepts) come from these ostensive definitions, each carrying an implied command (e.g. “take X to be Y”).

In other words, naming is performative: it depends on the speaker’s authority or tradition to attach meaning. Only once we have such names can we form propositions by combining them. The example we gave in our Ethical Relativism for Chads article was the copulative “is” statement: when a child finally says “Rover is a dog,” they have linked two previously learned names (“Rover,” “dog”). This is the first proposition.

Truth and falsity only enter at this stage, after names and concepts are in place. In short, conceptual content and even propositional form arise from commands—truth comes late to the party. All concepts are just names, and all names depend on ostensives and commands—so the predicate relation (“is”) is built on tradition‐bound naming. Since concepts are literally the names we have inherited, no proposition is intelligible apart from those naming commands. Thus, propositions are built on imperatives, which are particularist. This is to say that even propositions depend on tradition, which was implicit in our observation that even the justifications for the apostate faith depend upon the foundations furnished by the originary faith.

Folkish Anti-Logocentrism: From Augustine to the Linguistic Turn in Modern Philosophy

The Christian may at this point attempt to reject the ostensive model of linguistic acquisition as modern and therefore invalid, but if he did, he would disagree with one of the church fathers. Augustine himself, in his Confessions, puts forth precisely this model of ostensive definition:

When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shown by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples; the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of the voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.⁶

Some 1500 years later, Bertrand Russell formalized Augustine’s ostensive definition model.⁷ Russell argued that all nominal (verbal) definitions must ultimately rest on ostensive definitions. If you look up a word in the dictionary, it is defined in terms of other words. If you look up those words, you find more words. To prevent an infinite loop, language must attach directly to something outside the self. That anchor is ostension—pointing to a perceived object and naming it. In his 1957 critique of P. F. Strawson,⁸ Russell noted that ostensive definitions are inherently tied to experience. He famously wrote that “the meanings of all empirical words depend ultimately upon ostensive definitions, that ostensive definitions depend upon experience, and that experience is egocentric.” By “egocentric,” Russell is gesturing toward what we have called agent-relative, or tradition-bound.

But that is not the end of the matter. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein attempts to move beyond Augustine’s ostension, arguing that ostensive definitions are ambiguous. For example, pointing to a red ball and saying “red” could be interpreted ambiguously as a definition of the colour, the shape, the object itself, or the action of holding it. Instead of treating language as a picture, Wittgenstein encouraged us to treat language as a tool. We have left behind the “picture” theory of language and moved to the “tool” theory of language. Discourse is not about the agreement between words and states of affairs in the world, as Plato and Axialists assume, but about the appropriateness, or once again, the “felicity” of the tool being employed. Words are deeds—discourse is about action, thus imperatives, before it is about truth.

Wittgenstein’s loose ideas were formalized by J. L. Austin into a structured linguistic theory that John Searle later refined into his Speech Act Theory, which categorizes language not foundationally as a tool for description, but more fundamentally as a system of actions. Let us set out Searle’s theory to demonstrate how modern philosophy agrees with our folkish framework.

Discourse is enabled by constitutive rules: authority commands you to “take X to be Y.” Searle argued that social reality is governed by rules that create new possibilities for behaviour. While some rules are regulative, like “drive on the left side of the road,” the more foundational rules are constitutive because they define the activity itself.⁹ Searle uses the formula X counts as Y in context C. Physical paper currency (X) counts as money (Y) within our economic system (C). Uttering a promise (X) counts as placing yourself under an obligation (Y) within a social framework (C). And so on. The important point is that this is how all naming works, even for “objective” facts. To take the example we gave in our article Bridging the Is-Ought Gap:

You have one name for the colour blue, but the Russian has голубой (goluboy) and синий (siniy)—he has been commanded to notice that these are categorically different colours. Fundamentally, the command to notice this and not that, to take X and not Y as a distinct thing is the source of all propositions by pre-rationally supplying us in the first place with subjects that can then be predicated.

In the blue example, A to B wavelength of light counts as goluboy; C to D wavelength counts as siniy. This is how all concepts work: an otherwise raw, uninterpreted perception (X) is collectively accorded the status of an institutional reality (Y), but this translation holds only within a shared world of meaning (C). By stripping away the illusion of objective, standalone facts, we see that Y does not exist out in the wild, but is always socially mediated. Consequently, C is not a neutral, objective backdrop; it is always a tradition-bound social framework. It relies entirely on a community’s historically inherited customs, unspoken rules, and shared habits of mind to give the formula any power at all.

One revealing part of Searle’s theory is the declarative statement. Declarations like a judge saying “case dismissed” or a priest saying “I now pronounce you man and wife” have both a word-to-world and world-to-word fit. In other words, they do not merely describe a pre-existing reality; they change the institutional reality simply by being spoken. When we categorize or name things—even in ordinary statements like “this is a table”—we are relying on collectively accepted rules. Without the social framework of language, we would just be pointing at a collection of unintegrated perceptions. By using a word to categorize the object, we bring the social reality of “a table” into existence, and others agree to treat it as such in order for discourse to hold.¹⁰

Because interactions rely on these collectively inherited rules, speech carries an inherent, invisible authority. When you use language, you are drawing on the authority of a system which precedes any agreement. If you refuse to follow the rules of the language game—whether by naming things incorrectly, or failing to abide by the social commitments your statements create—you compromise your ability to participate in discourse. This, and not universality, is the root of even supposed ironclad laws of logic such as the law of non-contradiction. These laws are not commands written across the face of reality, but social prohibitions against undermining the naming order.

The continuum from Russell to Wittgenstein to Austin to Searle seemed to have buried ostensive definition, while radicalizing the relativistic nature of discourse. Even Augustine himself had doubts similar to those of modern thinkers. In his dialogue De magistro, Augustine pointed out that ostension is inherently circular. In this, he agreed with traditional structural linguistics, spearheaded by Ferdinand de Saussure, which views language as a closed, abstract system of arbitrary signs (or, words) that relate only to other words.

Wittgenstein dealt a blow to ostensive definition, but Eric Gans rescued it a generation later by radicalizing Wittgenstein himself. While Wittgenstein argued in the Philosophical Investigations that language is a series of social games and that ostension can be ambiguous, Gans employs the tool theory of language to defend ostension in what he calls Generative Anthropology.¹¹ This anthropological model posits an Originary Scene: the very first human utterance was an urgent, physical ostensive sign meant to prevent immediate tribal warfare, thereby making ostension the most primitive and fundamental form of all human thought.

Philosophers like Heidegger and Wittgenstein had already established that language is historically conditioned and bound to cultural traditions. Gans deepens this by showing that discourse derives from a tool specifically designed to preserve communal peace. Discourse is not a neutral system that happens to accumulate cultural baggage over time, but a survival mechanism explicitly built atop a historical tradition of containing human violence. Every piece of human discourse relies on a shared, inherited understanding of what is “sacred” or “forbidden.” This communal agreement prevents us from destroying each other. Thus, discourse can never be completely separated from its specific cultural and historical lineage.¹² When the logocentrist claims that engaging in discourse means playing a universalist game, they forget that discourse is simply deferred violence. We can no more call language a neutral, universal framework because we agree to its rules than we could call a peace treaty a universal moral truth because neither side wants to resume shooting each other.

Gans points out that before humans could ever look at the “world” and state “facts,” they had to manage urgent, explosive desires. Language evolved from the ostensive into the imperative long before it ever became a declarative proposition. The proposition only emerged later to describe a world that had already been made safe and stable by commands and taboos. Therefore, logic and factual statements are merely highly refined versions of more primitive commands.

Axial philosophy views authority as something external that corrupts or manipulates otherwise free discourse. Through a Generative Anthropology lens, we see that authority is the absolute prerequisite for speech. In Gans’s Originary Scene, the very first sign is born because a group of proto-humans collectively yield to the authority of a central, sacred object (which represents the threat of total tribal warfare). Because of this, every conversation we have today implicitly respects a shared centre of authority. Even when we argue, we submit to the authority of grammar, turn-taking, and mutual recognition. Authority is not added to discourse later, and it is certainly not arrived at through discourse; authority is the foundation that keeps human communication from collapsing into violence.

For centuries, Axial philosophy treated logos (“discourse determines authority”) as the ultimate courtroom where all arguments are judged. Thinkers assumed that human beings are rational creatures who use objective logic to find absolute truth. Gans totally undermines this metaphysical ideal: logos is not a timeless cosmic judge ruling over human affairs, but a cultural byproduct. This is anti-logos—authority determines discursivity. Logic did not create the human community; the human community created logic to keep from slaughtering itself. Statements are not fundamentally true because they agree with an abstract framework; instead, ideas are deemed “reasonable” insofar as they successfully defer human resentment and promote peace. Gans does not disagree with Searle’s Speech Act Theory, but confirms it. Historically, the development of logic and language required communal agreements. He replaces a cosmic, logical tribunal with a practical, anthropological one: the survival and harmony of the community.

In the third article in our series, we will expand on the lineage we have just sketched, showing that the Axialist disagrees with virtually every important thinker of our time—both on the left and on the right—on the question of universalism.

1. This response is elaborated in our article The Worst Argument Against Paganism.

2. Imperium Press Substack, How To Destroy Universalism.

3. Felicity, from Latin felix, which among other things means “fertile,” derives from a Proto-Indo-European root from *dʰeh₁(y)- which means “to suckle.” What is felicitous or appropriate enjoys a relationship of birth, precisely matching the ancestral principle.

4. Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lectures I and II.

5. Imperium Press Substack, Ethical Relativism for Chads.

6. Augustine, Confessions, I.8.

7. Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1957), Part II, Chapter II: “Ostensive Definition”.

8. Bertrand Russell, Mr. Strawson on Referring (1957).

9. Anton Benz, “Epistemic Perspectives and Communicative Acts,” in Frontiers in Communication, August 2021.

10. Raimo Tuomela, “Searle’s New Construction of Social Reality,” in Analysis, Volume 71, Issue 4, October 2011.

11. Eric Gans, The Origin of Language (1981).

12. Eric Gans, “A Brief Introduction to Generative Anthropology,” Anthropoetics, UCLA, February 16, 2017, https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/gaintro/.