... reality happens to be cruel..
RATIONALISM AND DEMOCRACY
I may wish all kinds of things,
but my wishes clash with reality.
And I see then that reality not only, is in discord with them,
but that it doesn't care for them in the least.
Reality  I
Views of reality.
There was a French thinker around 1800, Maine de  Biran,
who thought reasonably
that to us reality appears primarily in the following way:
our will, or our wishes, meet with some kind of resistance.
They clash with something which is independent of us.
That something, whatever it is, we call  reality.
People often do not want to accept that reality.
For sometimes it is terrifying.
As the eminent Polish logician Roman Suszko used to say:
 there are hideous truths and beautiful falsehoods.
Reality is those hideous truths,
and we often flee from it  into those beautiful falsehoods.
Reality  II
Reality is absolutely solid.
In contradistinction to our wishes, reality stands there like a rock.
Positivism, Thomism,
Irrationalism metaphysical, Irrationalism naturalist.
Yes, indeed. There are four types of philosophy and of viewing reality.
Fashionable Philosophy
What nowadays prevails is - what I call -
a naturalist irrationalism.
The belief that in man emotions matter more than reason.
This stems  from Freud and all his tradition.
It's completely mistaken,
for what we conceive - reality with is reason only.
There is a depreciation of reason going on,
to be seen in the decline of the school.
As they say, school is the place to express the emotions
of the pupils, not of forming their intellect.
That's our times.
Reason
My God, what is reason?
There is a little verse by the Polish painter and poet
Kazimierz Sichulski, which goes like this:
"A fool asked the clever man
what is the use of reason.
The clever one didn't answer.
However, with the fool still bothering him,
he said finally:
it's use is, to my opinion,
not answering silly questions."
I m sorry, but I have to answer the same to your question.
Reality III
But, as I've said, reality happens to be cruel
Language and Reality (L. Wittgenstein)
Relation of language to reality, well, that's the main subject
that philosophy I was concerned with:
that contained in Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-pilosophicus".
One's for sure: 
a discovery of the XX century,
or rather an enlightment of that century,
was what you ask: relation of reason to reality.
Between reason and reality there is a kind of window pane
or rather a lense; and that lense is language.
On the one hand language is co-extensive with our thinking:
wherever there is some thought, there is language too.
According to Plato, language is the conversation of soul with itself.
But speaking to itself, the soul has to use some kind of language.
On the other hand, however,
that was mightily stressed in Wittgenstein's Tractatus
and has deeply influenced contemporary philosophy,
language is a mirror of reality.
In some way which we don't see quite clearly,
even if partly we do,
the logical structure of language
mirrors the metaphysical structure of reality.
That's how one may put it, a bit enigmatically.
Well, as I say, on the one hand –
as again Wittgenstein said in his Tractatus -
language is part of the human organism,
and no less complicated than that organism in total.
Gradually we begin to realize
what a complicated and finely wrought structure
our language is in which,
in form of its logical structure, all our logic resides.
Language forms our thinking; on the other hand,
however, its logical structure –
in mirroring the metaphysical structure of reality -
transfers it, so to say, into our heads.
But all I tell you here are just generalities,
they won't help you much.
But as Wittgenstein put it:
whatever can't be spoken of, has to be kept silent.
So that's what I'll do now myself.
Logic  (Gottlob Frege)
I've come to Frege through Witgenstein's Tractatus.
Presently Frege is viewed by many as one
of the three greatest logicians of all time.
The first one is Aristotle, the second one is Leibniz,
and he is the third.
In the book by Kneale “The Development of Logic”
the history of logic is cut in two: in what was before Frege,
and in what has happened after him.
It's not only that Frege has had such great influence on Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein was also among the first to acknowledge Frege's ideas.
So when dealing with Wittgenstein it was impossible
to me not to hit upon Frege too.
Frege, however, that's mathematical logic,
really mathematical logic, so in fact mathematics
I don't think that might be of interest to a wider audience.
Language and Thought
Frege's view was - though not particularly original here,
as the same was that of Plato and Aristotle more than two thousand years ago, 
that the content of our thoughts
is independent of ourselves.
E.g. the content of Pythagoras' theorem stating a2+b2=c2,
with a and b being the shorter sides of a right-angled triangle,
and c the longer one.
In that thought we conceive a content not of our own,
but one that  is common to many.
When I understand Pythagoras' theorem,
and you do, and so do many others
then it forms something common to all of us,
existing independently of ourselves.
For the truth that a2 + b2 = c2 did hold already then
when there were no human beings on Earth, but merely cockroaches,
for these belong to the most ancient living creatures.
in a realm of animals, of course.
And that truth will hold when
there will be no more human beings on Earth
capable to catch it by their minds.
But it will stand by waiting for the appearance
of some post-humans to catch it up again.
Language and Thought  II
I've spoken about it already,
for Wittgenstein thought and language are fused.
Language and Thought III
Thought and language are inseparable -
like the two sides of one sheet of paper,
say page 243 and page 244 in a book.
That's one sheet, its sides can't be separated; that's the point.
There would be more to say here, some details,
 but then this would turn out to be a lecture.
Reason and Democracy
Whether it's rational, I don't know,
but it certainly is of highest value.
A value may be priceless and irrational, like in love affairs.
Alexander Solshenitsin said
"democracy is the polity of free people".
In a democracy where it is really a living one,
you are a citizen, not a subject.
A free man participating
in the life of the community.
In any other polity you are a subject.
And the subject is a human being limited in his freedom
not by his own reason only.
For that limitation has to be always there,
otherwise there is no real freedom.
In a  non-democracy you are limited by
another man' s whims.
I think, therefore, that democracy,
whether rational or not
is the best we can get 
in the set of all polities, of course.
Democracy and Reason III
Democracy is the field of innumerable conflicts,
precisely as the polity of free people.
In a totalitarian state you don't have all those conflicts,
for they are quenched by police force, simply.
No conflicts, everything works smoothly.
But I prefer disheveled democracy to sleek totalitarianism.
Me, Boguslaw Wolniewicz. Maybe there are other tastes.
People who think so,
like an author of the very good weekly "Najwy¿szy Czas" (High Time).
He is in favour of absolute monarchy.
To his opinion democracy is no good,
absolute monarchy would be best.
Mr. Peter, that's his Christian name,
if  I recall correctly Wielowiejski - but no, Wielomski!
He thinks so.
When I read such revelations, this comes to my mind:
well, in the XX century we've had already
three such absolute monarchies as absolute, as one could wish:
the Soviet Union of Stalin, Third Reich of Hitler,
and the Chinese Republic of Mao Tse tung.
Those three were no doubt absolute monarchs,
for surely absolute does not consist in walking with a crown on your head.
You can wear a baloon cap like Mao,
or a NSDAP cap like Hitler, that doesn't matter.
What matters is power.
Absolute monarchy means absolute power of the state.
There are no citizens, only subjects
who have to obey
what they are told by the absolute authority of the monarch.
If you like that, it's up to you.
To me you are politically an enemy.
Media and Reality
That prattle about the media being "the fourth power"
is just a means to flatter the journalists;
or maybe the way they flatter themselves to have any say.
They have no say at all,
the media by themselves have no power.
They are just an instrument of power,
like the gun or the prison.
Power has lots of instruments, media are just one of them.
Power rests in those who stand behind the media and use them.
They are the real power.
Presently, I'd say,
a new kind of power is emerging
by a fusion of bureaucracy and plutocracy
of the power of the state with the power of money.
This symbiosis is up to see,
you could see it e.g. in that
of Alexander Kwasniewski and Richard Krauze –
our former president and the boss of the company Prokom,
an informatic one, then regarded as big.
However, all that is unclear,
for as I say something new is emerging,
a new dominant stratum of society
consisting of the caste of officials on the one hand,
and of the plutocrats on the other.
In Greek plutos means wealth so plutocrats means the wealthy ones.
Officials and the rich, that's the real power.
Symbiosis I
State-power used to be divided into
legislative, executive and juridical.
But that's secondary,
that division dwindles,
for the fusion of plutocracy and bureaucracy brings it about
that state-power - divided into three powers: legislative, executive and juridical -
is concentrated in the executive power, in the government quite simply.
In Poland the Sejm has really no say,
voting as it is told by Tusk, i.e. by the government.
According to my observations the courts are totally –
or maybe not yet totally,
but overwhelmingly subservient to governmental directives,
as the Amber Gold affair has shown,
where the president of the court in Gdañsk
simply got his intructions from the Prime Minister's office.
That triple division of powers seems to me
over-advertised and secondary too.
What's essential here is another division of powers
the one western civilization stands upon,
the only one civilization which has given birth to democracy.
It's the division of powers secular and spiritual;
and the independence of both of them from each other.
This division of powers I regard as fundamental.
Therefore I attach such enormous weight
to the role of Christianity in our civilization.
The new totalism –
the bureaucratic-plutocratic one –
is just up to liquidate the second power, the spiritual one,
by subordinating it to the secular one.
If the journalists deem to be some kind of a fourth power,
or fifth, or fifteens one, they are grossly mistaken.
They are simply megalomaniac then.
Conspiracy Theory
But pardon me,
you've just said conspiracy theories are for simpletons. Why?
Here I take the freedom to ask you myself
for that's such an easy move to say
"conspiracy theories are for simpletons"
I regard conspiracy theories with regard to history
as most reasonable.
All of human history is a sequence of conspiracies.
Which means that reason –
the one you regard as so lost presently
when hitting upon a conspiracy theory
will not be much in error.
It's the conspirators themselves
who try to persuade reason there are no conspiracies there.
It's their basic way to camouflage themselves.
Right before our eyes there are conspiracies under way,
but we've been told so persuasively
there are none that we don't see them.
And that confounding of minds you've mentioned,
that's another way confuse people.
By that new stratum of society, the one presently emerging.
As once upon a time there was aristocracy
and later bourgeoise,
so we get the symbiosis of plutocracy with bureaucracy.
It's in the interest of that new power
to be not recognizable,
hence that confounding of people's minds.
Symbiosis II
I don't think that's a permanent solution,
just a make-shift one receding the introduction of that new totalitarianism.
What we e.g. in Poland now, that's not democracy.
Or in the European Union, nor even in America.
It's something closer to anarcho-syndycalism
than to democracy,
and anarchy can't be a permanent way of people living together.
It must change over into something else,
and the easiest change is into totalitarian system.
And you get totalitarianism when that bi-division of powers
into secular and spiritual is abolished.
Totalitarianism consists exactly in the fusing of those two.
State power is at the same time the spiritual one.
What nowadays they call rather nonsensically,
"political correctness", or "p-correctness" as I call it,
shows how secular power usurps for itself also the right
to be the spiritual one.
to decide, e.g., about the admissibility of "hate speech", as they say.
If I myself express some views,
there is to be somebody else to decide
whether I may be allowed to do that, or not.
So that's of the forms of that creeping totalitarianis:
the ideology justifying persecution
of the so-called "hate speech", or things of that kind.
Another example are the courts.
They also usurp for themselves the right to judge about
what may be said, and what not; what may be debated, and what not.
A classic example if the so-called "Auschwitz lie".
The views of the judge turn out to be the criterion of truth.
The question  how the great extermination of Jews
by the German conducted during World War II,
has been turned into something you are not allowed any more
to discuss freely -for you meet the barrier of the "Auschwitz lie".
There is indeed a British historian David Irving,
not  a very bright one, to be sure,
who tried to throw into question fact
that millions of Jews have been murdered.
His arguments were silly, no doubt about that.
Democracy, however, the one based upon the separation
of secular and spiritual power,
admits of expressing even the silliest views.
At the start of our talk you have asked about Reason.
Now democracy is based upon the faith in human reason.
I don't know whether that faith is rational,
whether id does not give too much credit to human reason,
but democracy is really based on it an the belief
that in the clash of opinions,
however silly, eventually truth will come up.
But it will come up only if a free clash of views is allowed –
of all views.
That's the only way to reach truth.
It can't be so, or rather it shouldn't,
that truth is being upheld by police means.
So these advocates of persectuing the"Auschwitz lie",
of the so-called “hate speech”,
they are a new form of Inquisition.
From the democratic point of view -
the one I have tried to represent all my life –
the only way to make truth win is leave it quite alone.
And the surest way to kill it is to create for it police props.
But the courts nowadays are eager for it.
They give such verdicts.
When that David Irving turned up in Austria,
where there are some " laws against the Auschwitz lie",
they put him in jail, for two years.
For he questioned the accepted number of victims.
Why did they do it?
His arguments were silly,
so they should have corrected him by less silly ones.
Truth
My dear sir,
for truth there are no more chances to stay up than for democracy.
Democracy is the polity of free people and of free thought.
A polity, where human thought knows no limits,
where you are allowed to put forward your reasons,
and the others - to put theirs too.
That polity is based upon the faith
that eventually truth will always come up.
This faith may be an illusion,
that I've got to admit.
There is no guarantee that this polity of free people –
which is such a wonderful flower of western civilization,
i.e. the Christtian one - will survive.
I call it "Christian", not "Judeo-Christian",
as recently some are fond to say
following the precepts of "political correctness",
for the latter is a hoax. No adjuncts here.
as there was not socialist civilisation or socialist democracy.
Now it's not clear
whether in that violently changing world of ours
that magnificent civilization of the West
is not in mortal danger.
That's how I see it.
Let's hope I'm wrong.
I think this will do.
