To Advance Completeness, Some Arguments

To my dear fathers, brothers, and sons in philosophy,

It is known that philosophy is an endeavor in building. To arrive at an argument that is sound, a philosopher must have arrived there by considering his other knowledge at hand and identifying the yet missing fact that is the natural next. With items of knowledge such as, “The rich have proven themselves the most successful,” “The most successful should be the most rewarded,” “The rich, being empowered enormously by affluence, are the only ones to make meaningful contributions to societal progression,” and “The poor, being many of them, are more prepared and reliable to share the burden of taxation,” one can then come to the sound argument, “The rich ought not be taxed.”

There are, however, items in philosophy which do not need building to, but rather, prove themselves to be stable arguments in isolation. They do not need foundation, for they are themselves foundational: Grand foundations, on the measure of, “I think, therefore I am,” may make one envious of some recent years ago, when such claims were not yet articulated and given credit for. But aside from the grand foundations, there are, as well, a very great number of small foundations: items which, though there may be seen no sagacity in committing them to writings, all the same may be committed to writings in the hope that with their cataloging and codification, one or another here or there may prove to be some needed toehold for another argument of worthy grandeur later in time.

Here, I put forth three such small foundations, likely all of them already known to the man of prudent intelligence as truths that need no belabored explanation.

First: The stars exist at some ceiling threshold in the vault of the sky, and are made of material extremely light in weight. This is known because the stars are the farthest things out—nothing is ever seen to pass behind them—and, as small lily pads on water and as large bergs on the sea, these stars must be made of something that is lighter than air in order that they should remain suspended up there. It is most likely that there is further expanse of a yet lighter material beyond the stars, hence why they all float up to that threshold and no farther: neither a lily pad nor an iceberg would continue floating up past the water and into the air, for the air is then lighter, it is a natural sorting. There is, however, no possibility for any matter of substance to exist beyond the threshold of the stars, for, as light spreads dimly in water and greatly in air, the light of the stars would spread enormously through the thinner substance yet above them, and illuminate anything found in that further sky. As still no thing has been seen to exist there, the stars prove to all reason to be the highest.

Second: Our perception of invented characters invokes all of the same faculties used to perceive persons before us in the flesh, and moral crimes against invented characters are none different than moral crimes against men of flesh. The punishment given to a murderer—typically death or exile—is doled out to prevent the murderer from committing the crime a repeated time, and to appease the family of the victim that recompense has been settled. If some poet tells a tale of a worthy and beloved man, and then suddenly, as unprovoked as a murderer, tells tale of that man perishing in some unsatisfying way, his audience is the same as the family of a murdered man, and the poet the murderer, who ought then be put to death or exiled. A poet telling a tale of a man vandalizing the Parthenon, equal to the poet vandalizing the Parthenon himself, as either has created the same image in the faculties of his intended audience, making the poet and the vandal equal worthy of contempt and punishment.

Third: It is none too pleasant a topic to bring to the immaculate annals of philosophy, but for completeness in arguments, it ought be said that—though I hesitate to put the word, I must—bestiality, the hardly conceivable act of a man or a woman engaging in sexual congress with a mere animal, is an act of moral ruination, its perpetrators of no better moral worth than the animals they have put themselves to. It is the act of barbarians who live as animals do, running about the woods and hollering their unintelligible gibberish. It is the act of lunatics so confused on the foundations of love and worth that they are present to a mare’s whinny and hear an intelligently composed lyric. It is the act of the desperate pervert who sees a vessel of femininity or a dart of masculinity and is satisfied with that alone, and disregards that it holds none of the magnitudes and powers of a woman or a man, like an archer who attempts to fly straw rather than arrows. A man or a woman engaging in sexual congress with a mere animal is the complete abandonment of all that upright society holds imperative, and one who does so is no longer a moral agent, he or she has utterly thrown away his or her ability to abide by our best structures.

For completeness, these have been a simple three small foundations. Many more exist, I will endeavor to catalog them further, and would encourage others to the same endeavor.

Be it known, as well, that my arguments are unlike those of men of higher aspirations, who build one argument dependent on another three, like a tower of cards poised to fail if one argument should be disproven. I, rather, am far more fortified. One must disprove “I think, therefor I am” itself before the whole can be surrendered: indeed, my position is more alike to that of a trench in hard dirt, where one must destroy every aspect of an argument like removing shovels of soil, and all the while also needing to address what may easily slide in in one argument’s absence. And until then, my faith in my own reasoning stands a worthy shell above me, like an impregnable stone overhead.