Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences: the Dissolution of the West

Ideas Have Consequences: A Summery

This is the first in a series of posts that will summarize and expound on Richard Weaver's seminal work Ideas Have Consequences. This first article covers the first part of his introduction and provides a summary of his entire work.

Ideas Have Consequences was written by one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century. In his work, Richard Weaver (1910-1963) emphasizes the moral, philosophical, and metaphysical decline of the West. It is the goal of the current author to provide a lucid and cogent summery of his thoughts.

Weaver’s two paramount theses are that 1) reductionism and all other such proposals for the metaphysic of man are simply excuses to dismiss the current decadence of man as predetermined or unintelligible; 2) that man should not follow scientific analysis with a plea of “moral impotence.”[1]

The defeat of logical realism, Weaver argues, was the drastic turning point from morality to decadence. The opposition to logical realism was led by William of Occam and his doctrine of nominalism, the belief that universals (abstract ideas) do not have real existence. In the words of John Stuart Mill, “there is nothing general except names” (hence the prefix “nom”). This thinking ultimately leads to the question, “is there such thing as transcendent truth (and thus a transcendent Being)?” Nominalism answers no, and thus, modern day empiricism. With these as the foundation of one’s knowledge, one is bound to sequentially conclude, “Man is the measure of all things.” What follows is a concept of nature that does not imitate a transcendent being, but rather, contains its own “constitution and reality.”[2] From this belief, a careful study of nature (science) is encouraged and instituted, for the thought is that nature’s acts reveal her essence. By these same thoughts, the Aristotelian model of forms (that is, an element of unintelligibility) was done away with, and thus, finally the principle of original sin abrogated (a mistake that is in itself appalling, the idea that man progressively gets “better” is intrinsically philosophically flawed and the antithesis to the entire canon of history).

If nature then, is a self-functioning machine, and “man is a rational animal adequate to his needs,”[3] it follows that rationalism is exulted to the rank of philosophy, for man is the highest intellect capable of interpreting data. This leads man to the 18th century doctrine of Hobbs and Locke and the corollary that man only need reason “correctly upon evidence from nature.”[4] Finally, man arrives at the proposition of modern science, as Bacon stated in the New Atlantis, science is a means to domination.

Materialism was the next progression of man. Soon man desired to be described by nature, Darwin, Wallace, and others of the 19th century filled this call. Mankind was thus firmly enclosed in nature (and consequently the advent of reductionism). The last step for mankind is physiological behaviorism: a doctrine that denies even the most elementary freedom of will, and makes no distinction between man and brute. The condition of man is now “abysmality.”

Expressed logically this progression of man is as follows:

Logical realism defeated → nominalism → no transcendent truth or Being → modern day empiricism → “man is the measure of all things” → nature’s acts reveal her essence → the careful practice of science → Aristotelian unintelligibility eradicated → original sin nullified → Hobbesian and Lockean doctrines of nature → Modern science, “a means to domination” → materialism → reductionism → physiological behaviorism → abysmality.

[1] Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, (University of Chicago Press: 1948) 1.

[2] Ibid, 4.

[3] Ibid, 5.

[4] Ibid.