The Ancestral Principle

Perhaps the most important theological innovation in modern Heathen reconstruction is that of the Ancestral Principle which serves as the foundational underpinning of the pagan indo-european worldview. In this essay we will examine it, discuss how it functions and its theological and philosophical implications.

The Ancestral Principle can be simply summed up as the following statement:

“Authority belongs to the eldest intelligible command”

But the practical reality of this simple truth belies a hidden complexity which is not immediately apparent when reading this. To begin to understand the principle we must establish “what is Authority”, “what is Intelligibility” and “what is a command” as the three principle fulcrums of the Ancestral Principle.

Authority

(Much of this section can be further explored and expanded in my earlier work - Ancestry and Authority )

Authority tells us what is and what is not, it is the judging principle which allows us to make epistemological decisions and which serves as the foundation of all knowledge itself. This is a controversial claim - Authority is not universally accepted as foundational to all knowledge in all mainstream philosophical schools, but we can nevertheless show that this is the case through philosophical examination, requiring that any naysayers meet this with a valid response proving otherwise regarding their intended substitute.

The argument for why Authority exists as the foundation of all knowledge is fairly simple. Human Reason is a tool which relies upon certain brute facts which underlie reality and which cannot be gained through reason. Reason is reliant upon a foundation of understanding, language, a comprehension of cause and effect and socially informed notions of the self ones relation to objects and others which we gain exclusively through the means of Authority.

When a child is born and first begins to learn of the world around them and their own self, they are told these certain brute facts from their parents (the natural authority of any living being - their creator). I am Father, This is Mother, This is Brother, This is Ball, This is Water, This is Fire, This is Food - the child begins to form an understanding of the world around them which allows them to build a scaffolding of reason once these first brute principles are uncovered and accepted. They provide the foundational tools for rational inquisition from which we may discover internal laws and relationships.

Other reputable figures disagree such as Descartes in his meditations, who famously addresses the following:

“I suppose, then, that all the things that I see are false; I persuade myself that nothing has ever existed of all that my fallacious memory represents to me. I consider that I possess no senses; I imagine that body, figure, extension, movement and place are but the fictions of my mind. What, then, can be esteemed as true? Perhaps nothing at all, unless that there is nothing in the world that is certain. But how can I know there is not something different from those things that I have just considered, of which one cannot have the slightest doubt?

Is there not some God, or some other being by whatever name we call it, who puts these reflections into my mind? That is not necessary, for is it not possible that I am capable of producing them myself? I myself, am I not at least something? But I have already denied that I had senses and body. Yet I hesitate, for what follows from that? Am I so dependent on body and senses that I cannot exist without these? But I was persuaded that there was nothing in all the world, that there was no heaven, no earth, that there were no minds, nor any bodies: was I not then likewise persuaded that I did not exist?

Not at all; of a surety I myself did exist since I persuaded myself of something [or merely because I thought of something]. But there is some deceiver or other, very powerful and very cunning, who ever employs his ingenuity in deceiving me. Then without doubt I exist also if he deceives me, and let him deceive me as much as he will, he can never cause me to be nothing so long as I think that I am something.

So that after having reflected well and carefully examined all things, we must come to the definite conclusion that this proposition: I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it. But I do not yet know clearly enough what I am, I who am certain that I am; and hence I must be careful to see that I do not imprudently take some other object in place of myself, and thus that I do not go astray in respect of this knowledge that I hold to be the most certain and most evident of all that I have formerly learned.

That is why I shall now consider anew what I believed myself to be before I embarked upon these last reflections; and of my former opinions I shall withdraw all that might even in a small degree be invalidated by the reasons which I have just brought forward, in order that there may be nothing at all left beyond what is absolutely certain and indubitable.”¹

….

I shall now close my eyes, I shall stop my ears, I shall call away all my senses, I shall efface even from my thoughts all the images of corporeal things, or at least (for that is hardly possible) I shall esteem them as vain and false; and thus holding converse only with myself and considering my own nature, I shall try little by little to reach a better knowledge of and a more familiar acquaintanceship with myself. I am a thing that thinks, that is to say, that doubts, affirms, denies, that knows a few things, that is ignorant of many [that loves, that hates], that wills, that desires, that also imagines and perceives; for as I remarked before, although the things which I perceive and imagine are perhaps nothing at all apart from me and in themselves, I am nevertheless assured that these modes of thought that I call perceptions and imaginations, inasmuch only as they are modes of thought, certainly reside [and are met with] in me.

And in the little that I have just said, I think I have summed up all that I really know, or at least all that hitherto I was aware that I knew. In order to try to extend my knowledge further, I shall now look around more carefully and see whether I cannot still discover in myself some other things which I have not hitherto perceived. I am certain that I am a thing which thinks; but do I not then likewise know what is requisite to render me certain of a truth?

Certainly in this first knowledge there is nothing that assures me of its truth, excepting the clear and distinct perception of that which I state, which would not indeed suffice to assure me that what I say is true, if it could ever happen that a thing which I conceived so clearly and distinctly could be false; and accordingly it seems to me that already I can establish as a general rule that all things which I perceive very clearly and very distinctly are true. At the same time I have before received and admitted many things to be very certain and manifest, which yet I afterwards recognized as being dubious.

What then were these things? They were the earth, sky, stars and all other objects which I apprehended by means of the senses. But what did I clearly [and distinctly] perceive in them? Nothing more than that the ideas or thoughts of these things were presented to my mind. And not even now do I deny that these ideas are met with in me. But there was yet another thing which I affirmed, and which, owing to the habit which I had formed of believing it, I thought I perceived very clearly, although in truth I did not perceive it at all, to wit, that there were objects outside of me from which these ideas proceeded, and to which they were entirely similar. And it was in this that I erred, or, if perchance my judgment was correct, this was not due to any knowledge arising from my perception. But when I took anything very simple and easy in the sphere of arithmetic or geometry into consideration, e.g. that two and three together made five, and other things of the sort, were not these present to my mind so clearly as to enable me to affirm that they were true?

Certainly if I judged that since such matters could be doubted, this would not have been so for any other reason than that it came into my mind that perhaps a God might have endowed me with such a nature that I may have been deceived even concerning things which seemed to me most manifest. But every time that this preconceived opinion of the sovereign power of a God presents itself to my thought, I am constrained to confess that it is easy to Him, if He wishes it, to cause me to err, even in matters in which I believe myself to have the best evidence. And, on the other hand, always when I direct my attention to things which I believe myself to perceive very clearly, I am so persuaded of their truth that I let myself break out into words such as these:

Let who will deceive me, He can never cause me to be nothing while I think that I am, or some day cause it to be true to say that I have never been, it being true now to say that I am, or that two and three make more or less than five, or any such thing in which I see a manifest contradiction.”²

In this Descartes presents to us a hypothetical examination not particularly distinct from the famous “brain in a vat” hypothesis to imagine us without any sensory experiences at all, a being of pure reason and intelligence who who can neither see, taste, touch or hear, and which can only reason inside their own mind. Descartes comes to the conclusions that there are two primary realities he can ascertain under these conditions.

1. That he exists and is a thinking being

2. That there exists a-priori knowledge of reality which he can verify with his reason alone, such as mathematics. 2+3=5, etc

Both of these conclusions we must solidly reject as products of error. The first being that he exists as an individual thinking being is a particular religio-cultural belief he has inadvertently smuggled into the hypothesis and has mistaken for being an objective brute fact about reality. To show that this is the case, I quote from my previous essay on Authority:

“We may briefly counter this argument by showing that the reputed self knowledge which Descartes claims to possess is in fact not self-evident. We may argue here that the myriad differences in the enumerability of the soul and the Truth of Being central to both religious traditions in the Germanic Faith (via the fact of the collective nature of the spirit, consisting thereof of both individual and clan souls³) and also that of Hinduism (Via the myriad arguments for various species of Advaita and attendant metaphysical monism).⁴

We are not required to show here that these beliefs are actually true, the fact that they exist is enough to showcase that the individuality of the self is not self-evident knowledge but a kind of inculturated tradition itself dependent on authority to promulgate, or via some species of reliance upon experience.”

Secondarily we may show that Descartes’ reliance on mathematics is a product of authority rather than reasoning, for while he possesses the ability to operate mathematically, this is only true after he has achieved awareness of the existence of numbers, of the importance of numericals, of ordering, and of the practical experience gained through being shown these simple sums and figures.

We may prove that this is the case by recourse to examples of children raised without access to authority which they have utilized as the foundational source of knowledge and which they may attach the scaffolding of their reason. In essence, we can glean the closest possible experimental results of this “brain in a vat” experience through the few cases of truly startlingly heinous child abuse.

We will look into two compelling cases to ascertain the reality of this need for authority in forming knowledge of the world, but will start with the more modern of the two, the case of Genie.

Although I will reproduce relevant snippets I will not waste the readers time with an exhaustive examination of the social and criminal conditions of her family life, the abuse of her father and mother, or her condition except to establish things which are relevant to our inquiry. That primarily she was born healthy and mentally whole is well established by repeated doctor visits before the age of 1.5 years.

“In the house Genie was confined to a small bedroom, harnessed to an infant's potty seat. Genie's father sewed the harness, himself; unclad except for the harness, Genie was left to sit on that chair. Unable to move anything except her fingers and hands, feet and toes, Genie was left to sit, tied-up, hour after hour, often into the night, day after day, month after month, year after year. At night, when Genie was not forgotten, she was removed from her harness only to be placed into another restraining garment—a sleeping bag which her father had fashioned to hold Genie's arms stationary (allegedly to prevent her from taking it off). In effect, it was a straight jacket. Therein constrained, Genie was put into an infant's crib with wire mesh sides and a wire mesh cover overhead. Caged by night, harnessed by day, Genie was left to somehow endure the hours and years of her life.

There was little for her to listen to ; there was no TV or radio in the house. Genie's bedroom was in the back of the house next to a bedroom and a bathroom. The adjacent bedroom was left unoccupied the entire time the family lived in the house. It was (the father's) "mother's" room. Not wishing to "defile" it, Genie's father permitted no one to enter it, not even to dust. The father had an intolerance for noise, so what little conversation there was between family members in the rest of the house was kept at a low volume. Except for moments of anger, when her father swore, Genie did not hear any language outside her door, and thus received practically no auditory stimulation of any kind, aside from bathroom noises.

There were two windows in her room, and one of them was kept open several inches. She may, therefore, have occasionally heard an 6 Genie : A Psycholinguistic Study airplane overhead or some other traffic or environmental noises; but set in the back of the house, Genie would not have heard much noise from the street. Hungry and forgotten, Genie would sometimes attempt to attract attention by making noise. Angered, her father would often beat her for doing so. In fact, there was a large piece of wood left in the corner of Genie's room which her father used solely to beat her whenever she made any sound. Genie learned to keep silent and to suppress all vocalization; but sometimes, desperate for attention or food, Genie would use her body or some object to make noise.

Her father would not tolerate this either, and he often beat her with his wooden stick on these occasions as well. During these times, and on all other occasions that her father dealt with Genie, he never spoke to her. Instead, he acted like a wild dog. He made barking sounds, he growled at her, he let his nails grow long and scratched her, he bared his teeth at her; and if he wished to merely threaten her with his presence, he stood outside the door and made his dog-like noises— to warn her that he was there and that if she persisted in whatever she was doing, he would come in and beat her. That terrible noise, the sound of her father standing outside her door growling or barking or both, was almost the only sound Genie heard during those years she was imprisoned in her room. ”⁵

We may see here the extent of the serious abuse and conditions in which Genie lived, but may also note that this is about as good as one may reasonably or ethically get to the circumstances described by Descartes. Genie was not allowed to interact with things, forced to a stationary position and with no stimulation aside from her own inner perceptions.

Upon being discovered and placed into a form of care, we witness her initial state and then produce a rather remarkable transformation.

“Genie was pitiful. Hardly ever having worn clothing, she did not react to temperature, heat or cold. Never having eaten solid food, Genie did not know how to chew, and had great difficulty in swallowing. Having been strapped down and left sitting on a potty chair, she could not stand erect, could not straighten her arms or legs, could not run, hop, jump, or climb; in fact, she could only walk with difficulty, shuffling her feet, swaying from side to side. Hardly ever having seen more than a space of 10 feet in front of her (the distance from her potty chair to the door), she had become nearsighted exactly to that distance.

Having been beaten for making noise, she had learned to suppress almost all vocalization save a whimper. Suffering from malnutrition, she weighed only 59 pounds and stood only 54 inches tall. She was incontinent of feces and urine. Her hair was sparse and stringy. She salivated copiously, spitting onto anything at hand. Genie was unsocialized, primitive, hardly human. Surprisingly, however, Genie was alert and curious. She maintained good eye contact and avidly explored her new surroundings.

She was intensely eager for human contact and attention. In the face of her hunger for contact with her new world, her almost total silence had an eerie quality. Except for a highpitched whimpering and a few words she is reported to have imitated when she was first admitted to the hospital, she was a silent child who did not vocalize in any way, who did not even sob when she cried. Her silence was complete even in the face of frenzied emotion.

Sometimes, frightened and frustrated by both her former life and her new surroundings, Genie would erupt and have a raging tantrum, flailing about, scratching, spitting, blowing her nose, and frantically rubbing her face and hair with her own mucous, all the time trying to gouge or otherwise inflict pain on herself—all in silence.

It was several months after her admission into the hospital before careful linguistic observation, documentation, and investigation were begun. Thus, in order to determine that state of Genie's linguistic knowledge at the point when she was first discovered, we had to find out all we could from those who had had contact with her and from any and all records that were made regarding Genie during that first period at the hospital.

In tracing back we discovered that Genie understood a few words but had not acquired language. Our evidence came from a variety of sources. Reports from Genie's mother conflicted. One version was that Genie had begun to speak words, but stopped shortly thereafter. In another version, she reported that Genie never spoke at all. We didn't know which was true. The hospital staff had the general impression that Genie could understand a fair amount based on the fact that she maintained good eye contact and seemed to pay special attention to faces when people spoke to her. Yet all the staff interviewed admitted on questioning that they tended to point and demonstrate when relating to Genie, and thus a fair amount of gesturing most probably accompanied their speech to her. They also stated that often Genie did not respond to very common, simple commands or questions.

The careful observations made by Dr. K (Genie's primary therapist while she was at the hospital) in his notes were very revealing. Although his notes were based on daily visits with Genie, there was reference to language only once in November and six times in December of 1970. These notes reflect, first of all, then, the scarcity of linguistic responses that Genie exhibited in those months. More importantly, his notes reveal that Genie understood little more than a few single words and negative command intonation. His notes demonstrate that Genie zeroed in on single words and ignored the sentences in which they occurred. If someone used a word she understood, she responded to it in a uniform fashion, regardless of its grammatical or semantic context. “⁶

We find in the following years of intense education and profound care in her development, Genie began to materially improve, first testing at the level of a child between the ages of one and three respectively, and then in some cases to a child of six or seven, and a child of twelve or thirteen in some aspects. Although Genie never attained normality and always exhibited clear and disruptive social and intellectual malformations, she did succeed in acquiring basic awareness of numbers and language.

“Genie's language is far from normal. More important, however, over and above the specific similarities and differences that exist between Genie's language and the language of normal children, we must keep in mind that Genie's speech is rule-governed behavior, and that from a finite set of arbitrary linguistic elements she can and does create novel utterances that theoretically know no upper bound. These are the aspects of human language that set it apart from all other animal communication systems. Therefore, abnormalities notwithstanding, in the most fundamental and critical respects, Genie has language.”⁷

From this we may infer the critical role that this initial authority plays in the development process. Despite being confined to a chair with nothing to occupy her mind with trivialities, Genie did not develop a complex awareness of herself or her world. She did not express awareness of numbers or logic or construct a self-language imbued with meaning. She did not point at objects and give them names and possessed only the most rudimentary series of words, a handful she had acquired either from before her heinous conditions had begun, or had gleaned from what limited development she gained from her authority figures.

Although she eventually acquired some varying amount of skill in these fields, this occurred only after directed learning and management from authority figures teaching it to her, despite being of the age of 13-14 during most of this time period.

“From over 30 hours of tape, the evidence is very strong that Genie comprehended several individual words (namely, "rattle," "bunny," "red," "blue," "green," and "brown") and a few names (including "mother"), and, in addition, was able to extract the information NEG and WARNING from negative commands, and possibly the information QUESTION from yes/no question intonation. Moreover, it may be that some words were used spontaneously, but it is unclear because of Genie's poor articulation. There is no evidence, however, that Genie had any additional knowledge of English.”⁸

We may now look into a secondary event of this type, the very famous tale of the wild boy of Aveyron, of which our examination will be brief owing to the length of this piece and the fact that its relevant results align with the more detailed examination seen above.

“In 1800 a naked boy was sighted roaming the woods of south‐central France and finally captured. For six months he remained in the care of a naturalist in Ittidez, who published a short book on him. Mute, shameless, interested only in eating, sleeping and escaping, the boy was trained like a dog to a leash and housebroken to relieve himself outside. The Government then entrusted him to Roche‐Ambroise Sicard, director of the Institute for Deaf‐Mutes in Paris and a renowned teacher. Sicard found the boy totally unresponsive and intractable. A committee of experts headed by Philippe Pine!, one of the founders of psychiatry, finally declared the boy an incurable idiot‐ He would‐ have been put away in an insane asylum if Itard. barely 25, had not quietly challenged the diagnosis and offered to take charge. For the next six years Itard devoted several hours a day to a special training program for Victor, as the boy soon came to be called. A remarkable woman by the name of Madame Guenn virtually became his foster mother

When Itard made his first report to the Society of Observers of Man after six months, he documented the vast improvement in Victor's behavior and intelligence. The next report, reluctantly written after five more years of patient training, describes drastically slowed progress in the boy, failure to learn to speak, and major obstacles to further improvement. Victor fell barely yet exasperatingly short of becoming a full human person. Twenty years later Victor died in obscurity, still a charge of the state. Bird went on to a brilliant medical career and developed methods for training the partially deaf.

1. If Victor was not retarded, then his failure to learn speech beyond the rudiments of reading and hearing comprehension constitutes a significant contribution to the “critical period” theory of language learning. This hypothesis, described and supported in Eric Lenneberg's book “Biological Foundations of Language,” posits a limited time span somewhere between age 2 and puberty during which a person can learn his first language. Victor was captured and his training began just at the onset of puberty. Every detail of his case history deserves careful scrutiny in the light of the critical period hypothesis.

2. In three or four places Lane cites and examines what Itard keeps saying about Victor's failure to imitate behavior the way most young children do in learning. But the most stunning section in Itard's second report affirms the “psychological truth” that the capacity for imitation fluctuates with age and may have disappeared in Victor for lack of reinforcement. Itard's observations in this area of learning bear comparison to recent theories like John Bowlby's on “attachment” to a single protective figure.

3. At the end of his first report, Itard mentions that Victor's puberty has recently manifested itself “almost explosively” in recent weeks and in such a way as to “cast much doubt on the origin of certain affections of the heart that we look upon as very natural.” Behind this cryptic sentence and behind various pathetic and amusing sections of the two reports lies an unmistakable hypothesis that the essential organization of sexual behavior in humans is acquired, not instinctual. Accordingly, Victor comprehended the behavior of his sexual organs and their potential relation to the “other sex” even less than he did the possibilities of language communication. And it was sheer sexual tension, unfocused on any other person and presumably for that reason not accessible to sublimation to any other level, that helped bring an end to the training program, Lane scants the whole question.”⁹

We find once more that in the case of Victor, a complete lack of pedagogical authority by which he was allowed to make sense of the world resulted in a complete abandonment of primary human qualities to the point of regression to animalistic conditions. Victor never learned to talk or sign, and never learned to comport himself in socially acceptable ways. He died in obscurity a couple of decades later in institutional care.

To return to the philosophical argument surrounding the reality of authority as the epistemological foundation for all knowledge, we can concretely refute Descartes' two subjections in his meditations. We do not know that we are, nor do we possess an instinctive knowledge and awareness of certain knowledge such as mathematics or the usage of language (which is required as a foundational tool to reason in the first place, as can be gleaned from these two cases).

The notion now arises over whether or not language exists as a kind of special knowledge which humanity possesses and which is merely degraded and forgotten in cases of abuse and horrendous neglect. Noam Chomsky’s “Universal Grammar (UG)” hypothesis is a foundational theory in linguistics and cognitive science, proposing that humans are born with an innate capacity for language acquisition, underpinned by a universal set of grammatical principles shared across all human languages.

UG posits that all humans possess an innate, biologically determined "language faculty" that provides a universal set of grammatical rules and constraints. This faculty enables children to acquire any natural language rapidly and uniformly, despite limited and often imperfect linguistic input (the "poverty of the stimulus" argument - Children learn grammar rules that are not explicitly taught or evident in the input they receive. For instance, they correctly apply complex rules like question formation ("Is the dog running?" not "Is the dog is running?") without hearing every possible construction. This suggests an innate knowledge of abstract grammatical constraints.)

Evidence for Chomsky’s theory is quite extensive and generally assumed as a principle of mainstream linguistics, but recent innovation in the field has started to question even this, most notably the work of Daniel Everret’s missionary experience to the Piraha people (of which I have already written extensively to discuss the topic relating to the uniqueness of the Piraha and the theological implications of their language and worldview - Here )

In short, A key aspect of Chomsky’s theory relies on the nature of Recursion. Recursion is a central concept in Chomsky’s UG hypothesis, which posits that all human languages share a set of innate grammatical principles. Recursion refers to the ability to embed structures within structures of the same type, allowing for potentially infinite complexity in language. For example, in English, you can embed clauses within clauses: “The cat [that chased the mouse [that ate the cheese]] ran away.” This hierarchical, self-referential property is considered a hallmark of human language, distinguishing it from animal communication systems, which lack such complexity.

Chomsky, along with Marc Hauser and W. Tecumseh Fitch, argued in a 2002 paper (Science, “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?”) that recursion is a core component of the human language faculty, possibly the only uniquely human aspect of language. They proposed that recursion is universal, present in all human languages, and hardwired in the brain, supporting UG’s claim of an innate language capacity.

Everett by contrast claims Piraha does not use recursive structures like embedded clauses. For example, instead of saying, “The man [who caught the fish] went home,” Piraha speakers might use separate sentences: “The man caught the fish. The man went home.”

Piraha relies on juxtaposition or coordination rather than subordination, producing simpler, non-hierarchical structures.

Everett ties this linguistic feature to Piraha culture, which he describes as adhering to an “immediacy of experience principle.” This cultural value prioritizes direct, concrete communication about immediate experiences, avoiding abstract or complex constructions like recursion.

For example, Piraha lacks fixed terms for numbers beyond “one” and “many” and avoids narratives about distant events, which might reduce the need for recursive grammar.

The clever reader may come to note here that not only is Everetts’ work on the Piraha people evidence that we lack a universal human grammar, but also that we lack universal human awareness of numerology or relational context, further bolstering the argument that authority is the foundational element, not a universally ingrained human reason.

Intelligibility

The second element of the Ancestral Principle revolves around the function of intelligibility. That is, what is useful and understood material in relation to our epistemological access to authority.

As we have established that Authority is necessary for knowledge and its acquisition, and have ascertained that the identity of Authority is most naturally one's own parents - their creator, we may ask ourselves what constitutes our ability to comprehend what they are even telling us in the first place?

To be intelligible we must understand not only the directive given to us in concrete terms - If our father tells us “This is ball” we must possess some functional awareness to the object he indicates is “ball”, but we must also be able to comprehend the functions of our authorities language to begin with. In the ball example, the command to take this object as “ball” is useless if we don’t understand the command and its meaning, whether through language or gesture and imitation.

This is an important practical element of the Ancestral Principle because it relates directly to the fact that while we have an ever ascending ladder of continually elder ancestors from which to adhere to, in practical terms our ability to comprehend their directives is much more limited than many people rightly assume and, in the case of europeans, terminates to some degree between the establishment of the Indo-European people in the steppes of Eurasia in 5500BC, and the formation of our descendent cultural groups “Germanic - Celtic - Italic - Slavic, etc) derived from the corded ware and yamnaya expansion.

Before the point of the descendent cultural groups we lack a fully reconstructable tradition in which to align our values and beliefs, and while elements of these are reconstructable (for instance, patriarchy and social structure, adherence to tradition itself, the basic elements of comparative mythology, etc) these are bare snippets in a desert of emptiness which no amount of conjecture or education shall ever be able to resurrect barring some miracle unearthing of a complete scriptural and legal source (unlikely for an oral people to begin with).

Due to this principle, our intelligible authority terminates most practically at our individual cultural groups. We may extend our ancestors backwards to the Corded Ware expansion but not meaningfully before this element. As such, we must disfavor the notion of PIE-revivalism as a distinct religious field and be content with its use as comparative material for the more widely attested younger faiths.

Command

The question now arises as to what is a command exactly, and how we differentiate this from a general statement or preference of our ancestors that bears no moral or obligatory weight.

I will quote Imperium Press and his substack on the topic of the Is/Ought Gap¹⁰ and the epistemological nature of command ontology.

“As we discussed in our articles on the is-ought gap¹¹¹², moral propositions aren’t really propositions at the end of the day, but always conceal commands. No combination of “is” statements will ever by themselves demand action. There is a gap between metaphysics and ethics—the is-ought gap. At some point the chain of moral “is” statements must terminate in an “ought” statement, and whenever you have an “ought”, there is lurking behind the ought a command. If a statement demands action of you, it’s because it either comments on or points to some command.

Let’s give an example: it’s wrong to have sex before marriage. But why is it wrong? We could say “because sex is for reproduction and reproduction is sanctioned only in marriage”. But why? Why are either of those “is” statements valid? If you ask “why” enough you will eventually come to the bedrock reason: “because God said so”, or God commands it. All moral statements finally cash out to commands in exactly the same way.

This is the case not just for morality, but for epistemology, for any belief at all. If a belief is warranted, this means it demands that we accept it. There is a command in there somewhere demanding that we do something—believe.

….

The takeaway here is that metaphysics (the propositional picture of the world) cannot justify the command. The proposition isn’t the primitive element. The command is the primitive element. For there even to be metaphysics at all depends on there being an authority that generates the names to be predicated.

But we have a problem here, or at least, we think we do. How do you know which commands are authoritative? After all, anyone can issue a command. What makes them a real authority? The answer can’t be metaphysics, because metaphysics depends on authority already being in place. The answer is that authority is primordial.”

As such a command demands that we take some action, when our father points to a ball and tells us “ball” this is a command to take this object as “ball” rather than a separate usage of language “Is the tree brown”. By contrast, we can compare this as an ontological usage of command to arrive at the imperative - “the tree is brown” commands us to hold the tree as being the color of brown, but does not tell us anything about what we should do with that tree. It has no moral actionable weight to it like the command “Do not go beyond the brown tree” does.

This is the Is/Ought gap, one cannot logically derive a statement about what ought to be (a moral or prescriptive statement) from a statement about what is (a factual or descriptive statement). The Ancestral principle sidesteps Hume’s gap by avoiding prepositions entirely. We do not say “The father should obey the son” the father merely says “Obey Me”.

1. Descartes, René. 1996. Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies. Translated by John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meditation II, 16–23.

2. Descartes, René. 1996. Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies. Translated by John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meditation III, 24–35.

3. Vilhelm Grönbech, “The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2”, (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2010), pg 158-164.

4. Badarayana, “Brahma Sutras (Shankara Bhashya)”, Trans. Swami Vireshwarananda, Vedanta Pr (1982)

5. Curtiss, Susan (1977), Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day "Wild Child", Perspectives in Neurolinguistics and Psycholinguistics, Boston, MA: Academic Press, pgs. 5-6

6. Curtiss, Susan (1977), Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day "Wild Child", Perspectives in Neurolinguistics and Psycholinguistics, Boston, MA: Academic Press, pgs. 10-11

7. Curtiss, Susan (1977), Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day "Wild Child", Perspectives in Neurolinguistics and Psycholinguistics, Boston, MA: Academic Press, pg. 204

8. Curtiss, Susan (1977), Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day "Wild Child", Perspectives in Neurolinguistics and Psycholinguistics, Boston, MA: Academic Press, pg. 13

9. https://www.nytimes.com/1976/05/16/archives/the-wild-boy-of-aveyron.html

10. Tradition All the Way Down

11. Bridging the Is-Ought Gap

12. Authority a la Carte