By Matthew Ehret
I was surprised to discover a week ago, that Courtenay Turner authored a recent hit-piece on the figure of the late American philosopher Lyndon LaRouche (1922-2019).
Now many people know that Courtenay is my friend, and many also know that I am a fairly open supporter LaRouche’s method, and promote it as something which has had immense value in my own discoveries and which I believe to be grounded in solid universal history and Natural Law.
Reading though the hit piece, I was dismayed to find many data points which I identify as absolute fallacies and which I have brought to her attention over a week ago and it is likely that we will soon have a friendly debate about this topic in a public setting.
Until that time comes, I wanted to address a few disappointing assertions found both upon Courtenay’s original text and her recent lengthy 1800 word sequel published on X/Twitter on November 26, 2025.
So as not to leave readers confused or let the truth be left undefended for too long, I would like to take this opportunity here and now to tackle Courtenay’s specific claims made about LaRouche spreading lies that any serious opposition exists between Plato and the figure of Aristotle (whom she asserts actually improved upon his teachers’ ideas and positively influence human progress and science).
I will begin my response with Courtenay’s claim that LaRouche brainwashed his followers by asserting that sense perception should never be believed, and then expand to the broader issue of Plato vs Aristotle…
On Sensing Truth and the Plato vs Aristotle Debate
Dear Courtenay,
You say that LaRouche rejected sense perception and encouraged his followers to do the same…
You are aware that I have spent two decades studying LaRouche’s writings, and can explicitly state that no. He did not.
He rejected grounding one’s beliefs on a foundation built upon sense perception or logic that derives from sense perception alone (aka: Aposteriorism).
He inversely also rejected grounding one’s beliefs in foundations premised on unexamined axioms as a substitute for universal discovered principles (aka; Apriorism).
He did not ever say to reject sense perception, nor that sense perceptions have no value, nor did advise anyone reject having top down universal principles.
But instead he advocated not being limited to either while instead using the Platonic method of learning to ‘see’ with the mind’s eye by zeroing in on the reality of ONTOLOGICAL Paradoxes, and ironies that are the consequence of paradoxical divergences of sensory phenomena when contrasted with flawed hypotheses that attempt to explain a phenomenon.
That negation allows the mind to embrace a perplexity/dissonance that accompanies a very important learned ignorance (aka; The substance of Plato’s entire corpus).
By becoming aware of our false axioms- which must accompany discomfort but also humility, we become liberated to generate FROM WITHIN OURSELVES, solution-concepts (aka; Eurekas) to resolve those ontological paradoxes in a way which has the effect of increasing our own personal understanding and hence power (of perfecting our own understanding and potential for positive action in improving the external objective world simultaneously).
Our individual power to impart ideas by using ironies, providing intentionally truthful metaphors to awaken the discovery concept in the minds of our fellow humans also is a consequence of this process.
Now this is NOT something LaRouche created out of thin air, but was also advanced by Edgar Allan Poe who explicitly wrote of the follies of both Apriori and also Aposteriori thinking in his 1848 Eureka Essay (subtitle: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe).
Edgar Poe who was no fool, had advanced mastery of the differential calculus and linguistics which informed his poetic, philosophical and literary compositions. He also launched a devastating attack on Aristotle’s method and also the Baconian/Sarpian method of Aposteriorism in that essay composed the year prior to his assassination.
Poe attacked either path as “plain, baseless, worthless and fantastic altogether as on account of their pompous and infatuate proscription of all other roads to Truth than the two narrow and crooked paths — the one of creeping and the other of crawling — to which, in their ignorant perversity, they have dared to confine the Soul — the Soul which loves nothing so well as to soar in those regions of illimitable intuition which are utterly incognizant of ‘path.’”
Within his essay Poe contrasts these stagnant modes with the more potent creative method of intuitive leaps that allow the soul to “soar” with his narrator saying:
“You can easily understand how restrictions so absurd on their very face must have operated, in those days, to retard the progress of true Science, which makes its most important advances — as all History will show — by seemingly intuitive leaps.”
And what does Poe demonstrate is the healthy path of creative reason that soars beyond either false school of analysis? Poe goes straight to Johannes Kepler…
Poe literally cites Kepler and correctly identifies Kepler’s Platonic method which actually made discoveries of universal principles by not ‘creeping’ (aposteriorism/inductive reasoning) or ‘crawling (apriorism/deductive reasoning), but rather soaring.
Which means using the best of both worlds but not being limited to their syllogistic reasoning which is exactly what underlines computer/AI thinking. It is machine-like, it is didactic, it is Pattern-recognition based. But it is not human.
Poe literally says:
“Kepler admitted that these laws he guessed — these laws whose investigation disclosed to the greatest of British astronomers that principle, the basis of all (existing) physical principle, in going behind which we enter at once the nebulous kingdom of Metaphysics. Yes! — these vital laws Kepler guessed — that it is to say, he imagined them. Had he been asked to point out either the deductive or inductive route by which he attained them, his reply might have been — ‘I know nothing about routes — but I do know the machinery of the Universe.”
Speaking as a narrator in his short story, Poe continues to describe the heresy of Kepler’s method in the eyes of the scientific priesthood and quotes Kepler’s prayer from his Harmonice Mundi (1619) saying:
“Yes, Kepler was essentially a theorist; but this title, now of so much sanctity, was, in those ancient days, a designation of supreme contempt. It is only now that men begin to appreciate that divine old man — to sympathize with the prophetical and poetical rhapsody of his ever-memorable words. For my part,” continues the unknown correspondent, “I glow with a sacred fire when I even think of them, and feel that I shall never grow weary of their repetition: — in concluding this letter, let me have the real pleasure of transcribing them once again [that is the writing of Kepler who said]: — ‘I care not whether my work be read now or by posterity. I can afford to wait a century for readers when God himself has waited six thousand years for an observer. I triumph. I have stolen the golden secret of the Egyptians. I will indulge my sacred fury.’
Kepler knew that he was declaring war on the ‘secret doctrines’ of the Hermeticists such as Robert Fludd whom he attacked by name throughout his Harmonice Mundi (1618).
Don’t believe me? At the end of book five of the Harmonies of the World, Kepler calls out Robert Fludd’s numerological Egyptian neo-Platonic obscurantism saying:
“Fludd takes great delight in topics which are hidden in the darkness of riddles, whereas I strive to bring topics which are wrapped in obscurity out into the light of understanding. The former is familiar to alchemists, Hermeticists, and Paracelsians; the latter is considered their own by mathematicians.”
I go through this in depth in my essay ‘Poe’s Eureka’ which is part of my 2023 book ‘Science Unshackled’.
Now Poe, like Larouche later, zeroes in on the ontological superiority of Kepler’s method of thinking over the false mirror methods of Aristotle and Francis Bacon/Paolo Sarpi.
So what did this great astronomer admired by Poe and Larouche (Johannes Kepler) have to say about Aristotle and Plato?
Well Kepler wrote quite explicitly that his intention was to overthrow the Aristotelian system and revive Plato’s method citing explicitly the Timaeus, Meno, Phaedo, and Republic extensively throughout his life’s work from his original publication at 23 years of age (The Mysterium Cosmographicum where he revives Plato’s universal hypothesis outlined in the Timeaus two thousand years earlier, and proves it to be true through his New Astronomy of 1609, Six Sided Snowflake essay (opening up the door to Fractal mathematics, tiling and anti-Copenhagen School quantum mechanics), and especially his 1618 Harmony of the Worlds where he proves Plato had been correct about the harmonic organization of the solar system but simply lacked the data.
The fact that Kepler was able to ‘see’ the existence of the asteroid belt between Mars and Saturn nearly two centuries before it was to be discovered (by a student of Kepler’s harmonics) should demonstrate quite viscerally what true ‘seeing’ means for a Platonist.
In section 4 of this work, Kepler writes of Aristotle:
“Where Aristotle draws a universal conclusion, and convicts Plato of the stupidity which is his own fantasy, and finally where to the Platonic picture of the ‘self-taught’ slave he opposes a contrary picture of his own, asserting that the mind in itself is empty not only of other knowledge and of mathematical categories, but also of species, and is just a blank sheet, so that nothing is written on it… but everything can be written on it; from this aspect, I say, he is not to be tolerated in the Christian religion.”
I could go on for awhile with direct citations of great minds who use the Platonic method to discover universal principles, and identify correctly the ontological fallacies in the Aristotelian method of thinking.
The fact that Aristotle explicitly asserts that the method of healthy thinking is rooted in syllogism (ie: an admixture of deductive with a touch of inductive analysis rooted in axioms that must be assumed to be true without being proven intelligibly by acts of true discovery), is why NO SCIENTIST USING HIS METHOD HAS EVER MADE DISCOVERIES OF UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLES. None. Zilch.
Name me some if you disagree and we can then explore whether those individuals actually made discoveries or stole ideas from Platonists who actually did make discoveries OR just made up explanatory models that have no relationship to anything real or universal- but only pretends to be so… (aka Most everything springing up from the Standard Model Copenhagen School and its Big Bang, Dark Matter, Quantum Mechanical useless mathematical probabilistic fictions prevalent in today’s universities.)
So you say that we should all ignore the following assertion by Aristotle: “Is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom such a condition is expedient and right, or rather is not all slavery a violation of nature? There is no difficulty in answering this question, on grounds both of reason and of fact. For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.” [from his Politics]
You say that we would be dishonest to hold him accountable for what he says about the universality of slavery being programed into us at birth because of his later assertion that slaves, masters, women and children have equal reasoning faculties, although they are differently expressed in what you say “is by degrees”?
This claim is highly flawed for three reasons:
1) Slaves who have reasoning faculties “without authority or effect”, imply that the only way for slaves to attain freedom is for those masters who have reasoning faculties “with authority and effect” to give the freedom to the slave. Or the woman’s faculties- “who has authority but not effect”, can only wait until the higher echelon man gives her the effect? If this were to be acted upon, no emancipation of humanity from the condition of feudal serfdom would ever have occurred and especially no American revolution, and no Frederick Douglass emergence onto the scene of history. Freedom has never been something which we should wait to receive, nor should we expect people to wait until some time in the future for it to be given to us.
2) Aristotle’s very definition of ‘reasoning faculties’ is not at all akin or even compatible with Plato’s much more potent concept of ‘reasoning faculties’ which is rooted in the power to 1) discover ontological paradoxes and 2) generate universal concepts from within that allow discoveries of principles which transcend all syllogistic logic. The use of Aristotelian syllogistic logic is not equivalent to ‘Reasoning’ in the higher sense of the term, and it is useless for demonstrating the existence of an immortal soul. This is why Aristotle attacks Plato’s demonstrations of the immortal soul as outlined in the Phaedo and Meno (and which Kepler correctly identifies as reprehensible and dishonest in Aristotle).
3) Without this proof for the universal nature and power of the human soul as being divine (ie: by being able to generate discoveries from within never needing anything being ‘put into the head of the student’ from the outside), Aristotle cannot be genuine in his positing that souls truly exist ontological as universals which explains why he infers instead that we are born as Tabula Rasa.
In his De Anima, Aristotle states:
“When we said that mind is in a sense potentially whatever is thinkable, though actually it is nothing until it has thought? What it thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a writing-tablet on which as yet nothing stands written: this is exactly what happens with mind.”
Thus the difference in the categories of personhood outlined by Aristotle and the rights expressed by those four categories from slave to child to female to master are not “by degrees” as you assert, but are absolutely “in kind”.
Additionally, Aristotle’s four categories of personhood from Master to Slave is diametrically opposed to Plato’s demonstration that the maximum Tyrant expressed by that archetype of Callicles in the Gorgias Dialogue or Thrasymachos in Book 1 of the Republic… are in fact much greater slaves in principle and essence than the person born into slavery. The entire paradigm isn’t only ‘different’ but opposed.
This isn’t Manichean as you have labelled in your anti-LaRouche essay.
It is simply a matter of correct vs incorrect.
One is based on truth and the other an image pretending to the claim of truth but holding none of its substance.
It would also explain why it is weird that a gossipy narrative has been turned into a strange truism that Aristotle founded all of science and psychology, when everything he wrote about scientifically was wrong headed garbage although he arrogantly asserted his beliefs without any room for alternative hypotheses exhibiting an intense god-like arrogance. At the same time, I must re-emphasize that Aristotle’s actual METHOD never generated a discovery of anything universal in science ever (again: give me concrete examples of any Aristotelian scientist by name and their discovery to prove me wrong).
There is alot more I could say on this topic, and which I did say in my book ‘Science Unshackled: Restoring Causality to a World in Chaos’ and in my 5 Part Does Life or Death Govern the Universe’ series which I sent you last week, along with my 2 part Pythagorean Revival Needed to Overthrow Standard Model Physics which I also sent your way.
The substance of Plato’s method, as LaRouche, Kepler, Poe, Leibniz and MANY others explicitly understood it, was ANTI-Aristotelian in that it was based on discoveries and generating ontological paradoxes… ie: Learning how to see with the mind’s eye between the Cracks caused by the incongruity of false hypotheses when pressed up against real empirical phenomena.
The SUBSTANCE is in the process of discovery that unites self-reflective SUBJECTIVE action with a simultaneous OBJECTIVE exploration of principle- whereby each and all people regardless of race, sex or station in life can truly discover, to varying degrees of amplitude, the same truth of the existence of our universal divine soul as partaking in the same essence as the Creator, which is also the only solid foundation upon which a theory of human rights that is ontologically sustainable can stand all counter-arguments.
Everyone at every station can not only do this but as they do this can actualize both the reality of their reasoning faculties, their passion for truth, and express ever more abundantly their power… Especially those designated with a slave status. See again: Frederick Douglass as one of many good examples across time and space.
If you took the time to be more diligent and explore the material you wished to comment upon so prematurely, you would have discovered all of this, but your lack of patience, mixed with a bit too much hubris resulted in jumping into shallow waters.
I have encouraged you to review the facts I present with devotion in my book ‘Science Unshackled’ and broader essays which are the effect of over 20 years of unbroken concentration on the claims made by Lyndon LaRouche and direct studies of the minds of those figures who made the discoveries that liberated humanity from the shackles of oligarchism and improved our power to act and live more abundantly in the universe.
I am your friend and I want you to succeed, because you are a good person who has a lot of good ideas and passion for truth which I see as a benefit to humanity… BUT I implore you to be more careful because the damage you can do to your own mind as well as to others by speaking with too much certainty of things you didn’t take the time to comprehend is very serious.
This message has already gotten a bit long, so I will comment about the many fallacies you have brought up pertaining to Lyndon LaRouche on my Substack in the coming days ahead.
Good night