Immanuel: Concisely put. That is what "unalienable" implies, when we talk about "unalienable" rights.
Exactly so.
Harbal: A moral claim is a right?
In the US Constitution, the writers included “inalienable rights”:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …
Some commentary from a Constitutional website:
What does “self-evident” mean? According to Jefferson and other prominent thinkers of his time, such statements as “all Men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights’ are obviously true. Such statements do not require proof. The “truths” are held to be unquestionable and beyond debate, since their truth is said to be obvious. They can be stated without elaborating or defending them. These ideas were very familiar to Jefferson and the other authors and editors of the Declaration. They were also very familiar to most Americans of the time. Why should this have been so?
History of the term “self-evident truths.” That “all Men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with Certain unalienable Rights” was self-evident to Americans at the time of the writing of the Declaration. They were a deeply religious people who were very familiar with the idea of universal human equality from the teachings of Christianity and from English republicanism. They were familiar with the idea of inalienable rights from the political writings of John Locke’s Second Treatise and other English sources.
These “rights” were as self-evident to these men as the veracity of Christian theological concepts were real and beyond question. If the latter was non-debatable then it extended to the former and to what that Creator had revealed as true.
Immanuel, and Henry, though they have incommensurable belief-systems, derive their notion of human rights from the assertion that God did and said thus-and-such, etc. And since that God so defined is the author of all things, and the owner of Reality Existence and Destiny, there can be no conceivable opposition to the Will of God — except through diabolical rebellion.
All of Immanuel’s assertions are based in this central tenet.
The various references to Nietzsche are relevant because it was Nietzsche who first exclaimed, in a dramatic way, that "God had died". God died and (here is the irony) "we killed him". That is to say that the Christian picture, which in most senses is constructed a child's fairly tale, as a take suitable to innocent children, became
unbelievable. When the World was examined, and examined in detail, it was seen to actually operate according to laws, rules and orders that were absolutely contradictory to each and every Christian tenet and assertion about the World and, indeed, about the Cosmos and the Universe.
If a *divinity* created the world that we actually live in, and of which we are a part through-and-through, then the creator-god could not in any sense be pictured as the Christian God is pictured, and therefore the entire theological-creationist picture could then only be seen as being false. Meaning that such a gulf and such a contrast existed between *the World* (and man in the world) as it really is, as-against the false picture of the World (and reality) offered by Hebrew and Christian view, that one or the other had to be abandoned -- or
revised.
Nietzsche was (in my own opinion) literally chewed up and split apart because of the intensity of the contrast and conflict he lived in at a fundamental level. Let me present how Nietzsche actually saw *the World* and I offer this as a way to see also into the conflict that (in my opinion) he lived in and through:
“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms striving toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self- creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself— do you want a name for this world? A solution for all of its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!”
Immanuel, naturally, functions here in these conversations like an oracular ghost for an old system of seeing and understanding *the World*. Gary is an important player in these rehearsals and this extended drama (in my opinion of course) because he demonstrates what happens in the body, mind and soul of the post-Christian man. The structure of the very Self begins to dissolve! What held it together comes unglued. The *conflict* that I referenced in respect to Nietzsche is also quite evident in Gary, but in Gary's case his argument has become a tirade of
ressentiment expressed against "Yahweh" who, in the ghost story which still captures his mind (as part of a disappearing conceptual order), is the creator of the terrible and terrifying World that Nietzsche described in the quoted paragraph.
Immanuel tries to recapture, or re-ghost, Gary but Gary kicks up his heels against the metaphysical net Immanuel tries to capture him in. When lucid, Gary expresses his quandary and largely in comprehensible, coherent terms. But when he is *in his sickness* he lets loose with his own suppressed
ressentiment against *life as it is* and in which he cannot compete -- indeed he does not want to compete within this *cruel* world.
And so he resolves to lay down and die.
Therapy and therapeutics enter in here from all sides.
[New Latin therapia, from Greek therapeia, from therapeuein, to treat medically; see therapeutic.]
In Gary's case, and for a collapsed man who, literally, only wishes to die, the therapy is chemical intervention. In this sense he (this man, and here I do speak generally) has lost all capacity to self-direct, to rudder his own boat, within this terrible world that is fundamentally incomprehensible. The New Man, as it seems, cannot stand on his own and *face the facts*. And so he remains, let's say, addicted to the notion of *salvation*. When you actually examine what Gary (sorry old boy) has presented I believe you can see in its flaccid desperation a sort of *diagramming* of where Man stands today. Everything hinged upon his *love for a woman*. He just wanted that and nothing more. And not only did he not get that but she robbed him of his last dime. Desperate man will do
ANYTHING to avoid facing the real facts about his real condition, and so man chases all sorts of chimera because he can't, or won't, face
himself.
Immanuel will not allow Man to take his own matters in hand. To declare self-sufficiency. To imagine himself free of a metaphysical overlord, a tyrant-god who is so much a terrible daddy that all his *children* are really his
victims. Within the therapeutic relationship this *god* could be comparable to a sick therapist who wants to keep his patients
addicted to the need of him.
However, there is very clearly a way out of the *sick* relationship, and the slave relationship, but it involves an internal revolution inside of one's own self. Immanuel could only see this as 'diabolical rebellion' and, let's face it, when some people face themselves, and the real conditions of life, and when they have to resolve to grow up and face themselves, their process is often like a kind of therapeutic fever. To claim oneself is to claim the totality of oneself, and that does seem to mean seeing reality, and oneself, in a holistic, undivided sense.
Let's examine *salvation* more closely:
“Christian salvation opposes tragic knowledge. The chance of being saved destroys the tragic sense of being trapped without chance of escape. Therefore no genuinely Christian tragedy can exist. For in Christian plays, the mystery of redemption is the basis and framework of the plot, and the tension of tragic knowledge has been released from the outset with the experience of man’s perfection and salvation through grace.
Think about it: if spiritual Salvation is not evident (or effective) then it follows, doesn't it, that salvation will have to be sought through other salvific means. But in a sense (looking at it from one angle) the entire Construct is a trap. In any case, and from Nietzsche's perspective, to become a Christian is in some sense to give up being a man. Certainly being a man capable of living in and withstanding *tragic existence*.
to the one who recognizes the reference...no cheating!
