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Comment by cat199 | Hacker News Reader

> One age cannot bind itself, and thus conspire, to place a succeeding one in a condition whereby it would be impossible for the later age to expand its knowledge (particularly where it is so very important), to rid itself of errors, and generally to increase its enlightenment.

Unless they are talking correctly about truths which are unchanging. in which case, good sir, you have a philosophical bias towards false progress.

Plato teaches me far more about true knowledge than does the enlightenment.

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Plato's procedural/dialogical approach to learning is also vastly superior to the Kantian/illuminist 'one and done' understanding of proof and discovery. Kant was a funny sort of progressive, who also believed that his work in metaphysics and epistemology laid the absolute foundation for the field.

It's odd but only enlightenment and post-enlightenment thinkers seem to approach their work this way, as if it were an absolute step forward which will never need to be revisited. You don't generally find it in ancient or medieval philosophers, who are much more interested in eking out nuance and exposing difficulties than in laying absolute groundworks and so on. In the enlightenment (at least in philosophy), progressivism and delusional absolutism always go hand in hand.

There is some truth in this. Two and two will never be five.

Unfortunately I most often see the notion of eternal unchanging truth invoked to defend very temporal and mutable things: cultural and aesthetic biases, social and economic hierarchy, gender roles, racial stereotypes, religion, the state, etc.

People wish to rub some of the eternal truth of math and logic onto their favorite idols but it never sticks. Human hierarchy and symbol are very mutable.

Nobody bothers to pound the table about the eternal truth of actual eternal truths. There's no point.

> There is some truth in this. Two and two will never be five.

unless you swap some digits name's :cough:

I think you're misreading Kant. He's not saying that it's impossible for a particular truth to be immutable; he's saying that every generation must make its own judgment about the truths that are handed down to it (which is compatible with accepting that received knowledge is valid).

a call for generations to challenge the limits of our understanding of reality ? reminds me of the poetic roots of facism (not calling this idea a facist idea as the mainstream notion of the word)

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