COVID and the Strange Death of Philosophy

The whole Corona fiasco has revealed serious issues in contemporary philosophy. But this could be a new beginning.

Since Covid hit the world stage and our beloved authorities did their legendary 180, going from “muh, Rona” to flipping around our entire value system overnight, one of the more remarkable aspects has been the eerie silence of those trained in philosophy.

You would think that philosophers, whether in or out of academia, should have been the right people to coherently formulate what should have been obvious to common sense: that almost all Covid policies were fundamentally incompatible with the tradition of Western thought.

You would think that those trained in rational argument, in thinking about first principles, and in looking beyond all the fashionable and fleeting hoopla du jour should have been the first to throw an intellectual wrench into the works of a power elite that suddenly proclaimed that there had never been any values except absolute safety, and that every whim of any wannabe tyrant, every hate-filled, sputtering denouncement of those with different opinions, had to be tolerated or even applauded.

And yet, as far as I can tell, crickets. There had been a few op-eds here and there by elderly politicians, former judges, or retired academics who reminded us that, well yeah, what is happening here might be, shall we say, slightly problematic in light of, uhm, every book in the Western canon ever written before yesterday. But forceful, detailed rebukes of the madness by scholars familiar with the nuances of ethics, theology, ancient or modern philosophy? Perhaps I just haven’t looked hard enough…

And this despite that it would have been crucial, and not that difficult, to make good arguments against Ronaism based on first principles, thereby avoiding all the number games about mortality, death counts, and so on. You see, as important as those numbers are, they potentially imply that you accept that were those numbers worse, you would agree to the Covid measures.

In other words, if you argue just about statistics and medical science, without also discussing first principles, you might implicitly accept that:

• Lockdowns and chasing lonely grandmas in parks might have been acceptable IF the virus really was that bad

• Mandatory vaccination really should have been done IF in fact the studies showed the vaccines were pretty safe and effective

• Isolating the elderly and letting them wither and die alone COULD have been the right approach IF we really had a virus with a very high mortality rate among the elderly

• Etc.

I don’t know about you, but: no thanks.

Two Arguments on First Principles

To give two examples of how those equipped to do so might have argued, one based more in the German/continental tradition and one based in the Anglo tradition:

1. According to Kant, on whom much of the German (among other nations) legal philosophy is based, human beings have an intrinsic value, which makes it impossible to treat them as mere objects of expediency. What gives them intrinsic value? It is their status as autonomous moral agents, that is, as human beings capable of moral insight and moral growth. It follows that if you deny them this status, for example by treating them as irrational children and reduce them to mere virus spreaders, then you deny that they have intrinsic value. But if you do that, then there can no longer be any right to life, which is based on intrinsic value, and therefore no justification for “saving lives.” You might as well let the sick die to save the economy for the greater good in the long term. In other words: this leads to a contradiction where the governments’ very actions imply a negation of its own motivation for those actions.

2. According to John Stuart Mill, when we want to maximize the well-being of individuals in a society, we can’t forget that there are higher and lower forms of pleasures. That is, while indulging in a cake-binging fest might be as pleasurable as reading a good book and gaining wisdom, the latter is a higher form of pleasure and should take precedence. This could be generalized: a more active life—an engagement with the deeper aspects of life—should be preferable to a sedative life. It follows that individual risk-taking is a crucial element for the attainment of “higher pleasure,” which is why, for example, we encourage elderly people to go for walks even though it might be risky instead of telling them to stay in bed in front of the TV all day. So it seems that even from a utilitarian perspective, eliminating risk at all cost can’t be justified, even though it might, in theory, “save lives.”

But instead of such arguments (I’m sure there are better ones), what we saw during the Rona years were stunningly ridiculous attempts to justify the madness, even while the fundamental incompatibility with everything everybody professed they stood for before was patently obvious.

Instead of intellectuals using their supposedly great expertise in the Western tradition to push back, I remember an endless stream of pseudo-thoughtful utterances about how Covid means a break with everything we thought and felt before: a “reset” not just of long-standing administrative and economic principles, but of our entire civilization and philosophical heritage.

One of the more pathetic examples comes from Germany’s idiot minister of health, Karl Lauterbach, who invoked Kant’s categorical imperative to convince everybody to get vaccinated. You see, if “I don’t want to get vaccinated” were to become the principle of a general law, nobody would get vaccinated, and we were all gonna die. Or something.

Nevermind that the principle of those critical of the vaccine mandates has always been one of self-determination based on reason, with which nobody should have a problem (and nobody in fact had, 5 minutes ago), least of all Kant. Also nevermind that Kant’s premises have directly led to a downgrading of the right to life in the German constitution (and other constitutions) in favor of freedom rights, and especially the irrevocable and inviolable character of human dignity, which legally is without constraints entirely and takes precedence over everything.¹ In other words, Kant and the legal tradition he spawned are, fundamentally and on principle, opposed to a safety-first approach.²

What a loser.

Another example is Germany’s infamous “ethics council” which, sponsored and appointed by the government, unsurprisingly but nonetheless ridiculously, rubber-stamped everything the government said and did. Its chairwoman, one Alena Buyx who apparently has studied medicine and philosophy, recently tried to save face by “admitting” that the Covid measures caused harm to children (something she never dared to forcefully point out back when it counted), while still refusing to apologize. (As someone on Twitter put it: if you beat up a child, it’s, uhm, not really enough to one year later “admit” that well, this beating up business may have caused some harm to the child after all.)

The Great Reveal and Its Philosophical Implications

Intellectuals, whether in academia, think tanks, or official bodies, have profoundly failed us. They turned out to be mere stenographers for those in power, justifying and rationalizing their masters’ actions and ideologies.

In that sense, the whole spectacle has been very revealing. Perhaps our vision had been blurred by the odd genius in the history of philosophy who went against the grain at his time and later entered the canon, when in fact, the vast majority of philosophers had always been that: people paid to justify whatever the zeitgeist, and those dominating the zeitgeist, wanted.

After all, what do you expect from philosophers who have been busy propping up and proselytizing for the Church of Scientism™ for the last 100 years? Who took seriously crazy ideas such as that we live in a dead physicalist universe, devoid of free will, or even without consciousness—desperately trying to square the circle instead of pushing back with all they got, as they could and should?³ Who allowed horrendous, sociopathic utilitarian ethics and, lately, the abomination that is Effective Altruism, to flourish?

What do you expect from an analytic philosophy that, in its zeal to emulate and justify what they believe to be The Officially True Science, got lost in footnotes about footnotes within a strange canon of little logical puzzles and counter-factual scenarios? And from a continental philosophy that got lost in progressive politics, while losing touch with science entirely?⁴

Perhaps it’s time to realize how wrong, or at least one-sided, mainstream academia has been for a long time about so many things.⁵

If philosophy died, it died with Covid, not of Covid.

And so, it is quite telling that it is here on Substack (where else?) that I came across a serious philosophical critique of Corona measures for the first time: “Why Vaccine Mandates are Unethical” by

Michael Kowalik

. ⁶

In it, Michael argues that since the unvaccinated status is the natural⁷ state of the human being, there cannot be any discrimination based on it:

Vaccine mandates imply that all humans are born in a defective, inherently harmful state that must be biotechnologically augmented to allow our unrestricted participation in society, which amounts to discrimination on the basis of healthy, innate characteristics of the human race. This devaluation of the innate human constitution is not only universally dehumanising, but it perverts the very concept of human rights; discrimination against the unvaccinated implies that our innate human constitution is no longer a guarantee of full human rights.

Again, the importance of such arguments is that they are not based on empirical data, but on first principles. This means they hold true regardless of side effects, efficiency, etc. That is, should we face a more deadly virus in the future, and should there be a good vaccine or other Big Pharma product against it, we can still use that argument against an overreaching authority tempted by emergency powers.

This is especially important in light of the transhumanism agenda: imagine, for example, some sort of brain microchip that could demonstrably lower our cancer risk, or help avoid car accidents, or whatever. We need good arguments against such shenanigans, even or especially if the empirical data might suggest we would be better off if everybody got one of those devices. For if you are like me, you don’t want that—or at the very least you want to decide for yourself, with no strings attached, whether you go for it or not.

But there’s more to the Covid spectacle that warrants philosophical examination.

Puzzling: People’s Different Reactions to the Covid Madness

Part of the Enlightenment heritage is the idea that we are born as a blank slate: that humans are malleable, and their individual differences depend entirely on the environment—especially on education. This directly follows from the glorification of rationality: if we can figure things out using rational thought, so the argument goes, it should be possible for everybody to come to the same truthful understanding of things, and to convince others of its merits solely based on truthful arguments. Education, then, becomes the prime vehicle to usher in the enlightened golden age.

While there has been a split among the heirs of the Enlightenment with regard to the blank slate theory (some, like Steven Pinker, reject it on biological grounds, while others, like many on the left, still hold on to it), both camps share the same roots: the concept that everybody, in principle, should be capable of “seeing the light” if only we find the right way of convincing them, especially by way of education.

Now, during the Covid time, we have all seen that this can’t possibly be true. Your mileage may vary, but it soon became apparent that roughly 15 percent of the population quickly realized that they had been let down the primrose path by the authorities; that about 15 percent turned into fanatical true believers eager to forget overnight everything they had been told before about values such as freedom, individual choice, and the importance to resist authoritarian overreach, just to become vile snitches possessed by the age-old spirit of witch burning hatred for everybody not following along the new party line; and that about 70 percent kind of followed along to get along without thinking too hard about anything, half of which probably didn’t like the new marching order very much, whereas the other half, while not fanatical, fully supported the New World.

And it seems that nothing, absolutely nothing, could have changed those numbers: no rational argument, no reason, no well thought-out appeal to a common tradition of values, not even an appeal to past authorities, or present authorities for that matter. The only thing that could have changed anything would have been for the entire authority complex—media, politics, official scientific bodies—to give a different marching order.⁸

That is, about 50 percent of the population simply seem to follow the orders of the current authorities, embodying the current presuppositions and beliefs, of which about 15 percent become the leading radicals. The other 50 percent seem to sense when something ain’t right despite the authorities telling them it’s all good, of which about 15 percent care enough to look deeply into things and form their opinion more or less independently: they are morally self-sufficient.

Well, there goes the dream of Enlightenment-by-education. Over 300 years of trying: all in vain.

Not only have the Covid years revealed that the education of the masses doesn’t seem to have any effect whatsoever on the internalization of common, reasonable values that can survive crisis and changing narratives by the dominant authorities, but also that intelligence and education seem to be hardly correlated at all with the ability to perceive a totally obvious, blatant lie by those dominating the public discourse that breaks with everything we have supposedly been agreeing on before. In fact, the split has been revealed to cut wildly through social classes and milieus, education levels, and almost any group you can think of.

This is a serious, serious problem for philosophy, especially Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy. Are humans fundamentally different, after all? On a level way deeper than IQ, education, gender, class, temperament, and so on?

Perhaps the pre-moderns were onto something, after all, with their archaic talk about principalities, demons, soul qualities, ultimate destinies, those with eyes to see and ears to hear, and the rest? What does that mean for our cosmology? And is there a way to update such old-school notions which are barely understandable to the modern mind, and, once again, to embark on a journey to re-formulate and even go beyond forgotten wisdom, using modern language, science, and philosophical concepts more suited for our age?

Such metaphysical reflections have practical implications. To give one example: if you accept a certain interpretation of (neo-)Darwinism, our evolution is essentially random and arbitrary, except that it forces humanity to adapt to our environment. There is no ultimate reason for this process, though, no purpose beyond survival, no teleology. Given these assumptions, how can you defend yourself against transhumanism, whose purpose is precisely survival and adaptation? In the transhumanist picture, forcing a world of cyborgs on us could be seen as just another step in Darwinian evolution, and therefore entirely natural. That is, the argument by Michael Kowalik against vaccine mandates based on an innate state of the human being risks being undermined, because you lose the definition of “innate” or “natural.” If, on the other hand, we hold on to the idea of a human being as an intermediary realm between nature and cosmos that is not to be tempered with, capable of manifesting two fundamentally different teleological end points based on the reality of good and evil, we can stand firm against such transhumanist visions, based on first principles, calling them heralds of an evil future even while everybody around us might be singing their praises. You know, saving lives and the planet and all that.

To conclude, what we are seeing here is not really the death of philosophy, but perhaps the death of some long-entrenched dogmas we all have unquestionably absorbed. Indeed, we might see a rebirth of truly important, interesting, and impactful philosophical discourse.

The signs that this more optimistic scenario will play itself out, I think, are already here.

1. See the first few articles of the German Basic Law: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.html

2. It is also noteworthy that Kant, in his famous What is Enlightenment? piece, argued that even while we might hold an office which requires us to go along with the authorities, we should still publicly profess what we believe. While this seems somewhat naive, it would have opened the door for intellectuals who are not revolutionaries by temperament to at least make their case, if they are so inclined.

3. The Enlightenment brought with it the split between mind and matter, and the subsequent exclusion of mind from science as a convenience to study the natural world. Over time, we forgot that it was just a convenience and took it for reality: we started believing that there are no minds, that they are essentially an illusion and can be reduced to what people in the 18th and 19th centuries believed to be physics. So entrenched became this dogma that even quantum mechanics, which showed just how ignorant we still are even about the fundamentals in physics, couldn’t shatter the physicalist mental construct of a causally closed, deterministic, absolute-law-abiding, dead, goalless, narrowly defined material universe that, as A. N. Whitehead famously put it, mistook a model for reality.

4. I’m not an expert in either field, but I do know that there is great value in some of the works both in analytic and continental philosophy. But there is no doubt in my mind that much has gone wrong, too, and that new approaches and ideas are needed that move past some of the entrenched concepts, dividing lines, and presuppositions.

5. This may be a bit unfair since there are, and always have been, brilliant academics who seek truth and offer great insights. Needless to say, the kind of labor-intensive and thorough study academia is famous for is to be greatly admired. However, as is to be expected if an institution gains so much power on our minds and society, things seem to have gone from bad to worse, and we are now facing something akin to a ruthless ideological and doctrinaire cult at the center of intellectual life as opposed to a forum where more or less sound research can be discussed.

6. Michael Kowalik has penned quite a few arguments against various aspects of the Covid madness, which you’ll find on his substack.

7. Kowalik distinguishes between “natural” and “innate,” a distinction with which I agree. However, I ignore it here for the purposes of this article.

8. I’m not saying here that education is irrelevant, but rather that universalism doesn’t seem to hold: education, if it is the right kind, can work wonders for many people. But not all, apparently, and the effects of mass education seem to have been exaggerated to an almost mystical level in the wake of the Enlightenment.