Dubious wrote: ↑Mon Feb 05, 2024 1:58 amThe
regular laws of nature do not in any way preclude using imagination - providing one has the means - in creating supernatural scenarios of all kinds and all types. When or where in history has this not occurred? If nature provides the means, it cannot be outside its regular laws. A thinking machine cannot prevent coming up with its own absurdities often incipient to an advancement of actual discovery, which as default must include what we connote as metaphysical. Everything we endorse as reality in various degrees of confirmation is conceptually based. In that respect, metaphysics is valid only if the
regular laws of nature are contained in it.
...anyway, that's how I see it...for now.
A couple of notes about why the issue of *metaphysics* has continuing importance for me. First, the context. The context here has been a vehement difference of opinion between the worldview of Immanuel Can, which also includes reasoning techniques and propensities, and that of a group operating on this forum which quite simply cannot see things as he sees them. One has to define what, exactly, he is seeing, and also what his *reasoning techniques* are, in order to nail down the precise quality of his viewpoint. So we can say, fairly, that he is a *Bible literalist* which means that he takes every biblical account as a *history*. But what is the fuel or the empowering agent standing behind and lending conviction to these literalisms? Well, whatever he means by the world *faith*.
Recently, I have kept a focus on the literalist description of both a Garden, a Couple, and the most important element of this symbolic picture, The Fall. What interests me about the notion of a Fall, or put another way what I am not inclined to dismiss (in absolute terms) as *unreal* and *non-valuable* is the
connotation of a fall. Yet it is clear, to me at least, that there never was an historical event as the one pictured in Genesis. And since I am not, in any sense, a Bible literalist, and I have lost the sense of what the relevancy of necessity of *worship* of a divine figure is, I cannot by any means *be a Christian*, nor believe in any of the theisms that could be resorted to.
How then could I hold to, entertain, contemplate, or let's say deal on a spiritual level, with the ideas that stand behind the notion of a Fall which is, I must note, a universal concept and not only a Christian one? The answer is by resorting to what I call
a metaphysical way of thinking. Or to engage with the sense of the idea through allegory and metaphor. But what else? What I notice is that the destruction of a *picture* such as that of The Fall of Man, by we moderns who in different ways are acute literalists, seems to me to result in the destruction of what I might refer to as
fancy and
imagination (these were topics Coleridge wrote about and were of concern to him). Obviously, I am referring on one hand to the value or the importance of *poetic value* but also to a type of mental and spiritual means or method of being in the world; seeing things; as well as connecting things through an associative activity. So I could drop the notion of metaphysics as *otherworldly* or *supernatural* or as being, somehow, an unreal part of human experience. I could say, as you say:
The regular laws of nature do not in any way preclude using imagination
But whether I resorted to that description, which is in its own way a truth-claim, or whether I chose, as I sometimes have chosen, to see "metaphysical ideas' more in the Platonic sense as *existing* but in a realm (if such a description is even possible today) that is non-tangible, and non-locatable, in what we call our *natural world*, the description I apply does not change the fact that, and this is my point and this is what I notice and what concerns me, that when realism becomes the predominant mode of perception, and when realism excludes other modes of *interpretation* of reality, that edifices of meaning collapse and are made to seam *unreal* to the degree that
a realism outlook becomes dominant.
You have often used phrasing like this: "using imagination [to create] supernatural scenarios of all kinds and all types". What you have done, and this is something central to your way of thinking and seeing and I have no interest in arguing against it, is to have asserted that these *scenarios*
are created. You phrasing, just to be exact, was
The regular laws of nature do not in any way preclude using imagination - providing one has the means - in creating supernatural scenarios.
I must agree: it is
possible, and indeed is
a predominant occurrence, that *supernatural scenarios* -- the creation of visualized, mythologized scenes (pictures) -- defines a human inclination. And we can therefore examine the Christian notion of a Fall and an Exile through our agreed-upon interpretive stance and agree that *it never happened*.
However, and perhaps it is possible that I am merely stuck in some other perceptual condition that is thoroughly outmoded and must, eventually, pass away entirely, I would make reference to statements such as this (Shakesepeare,
A Midsummer Night's Dream):
“The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.”
Obviously, there is no *heaven* in a position *above* -- though in Shakespeare's world, even if that understanding was on the wane, there really was a division between heaven: (angelic reality) and Earth (a point of condensation in an ordered Cosmos). Each word in this poetical declaration is "loaded" with meanings that we have a hard time holding to or believing in. Even or especially the word "eye".
In this sense -- this is what I believe I am asserting -- when we refer to *eye*
now we refer to *technological instrument* that (now) does the seeing for us. Our minds begin to resemble, if you will, the machines that surround us.
If you were to ask: "OK, some part of what you say does make sense, and there does result a loss if one mode of perception, hard realism, destroys other more lyrical or *poetic* modes of seeing, and thus understanding -- What is your real issue? What ultimately concerns you"
The answer I would give involves all senses connected with *meaning*. The word *meaning* is extremely complex. What does it mean that something
means something? When we talk about *meaning* what are we talking about?
mean′ing•ly, adv.
syn: meaning, sense, significance, purport denote that which is expressed or indicated by language or action. meaning is general, describing that which is intended to be, or actually is, expressed: the meaning of a statement. sense often refers to a particular meaning of a word or phrase: The word “run” has many senses. sense may also be used of meaning that is intelligible or reasonable: There's no sense in what you say. significance refers to a meaning that is only implied: the significance of a glance. It may also refer to a meaning the importance of which is not immediately perceived: We did not grasp its significance until years later. purport usu. refers to the essential meaning of something complicated: the purport of a theory.
So, circling back around, and as always keeping the topic on what has been going on here locally, I recently said (but there is little animus in it) that Immanuel Can's mind functions at an *inferior* level. Why? What happened to him that he has decided that this brand of *realism* is the best way, and perhaps the only way, through which his soul can be saved? (And he says this is the most important thing: getting saved).
You see, what I notice is that Immanuel Can's mind, like all of our minds (it is a question of degree) imitates a
machine eye. It is a kind of seeing (perceiving, interpreting) that has few moving parts. It
corresponds (this is my speculation) to mechanical ways of seeing that are common today. He is attempting to apply a realistic-oriented science model (to see things as they are, and not to embellish) to his faith-position in Bible literalism.
As I say: He does more to destroy a *conceptual pathway* to an
appreciation of the
value-content in Christianity (and there is a great deal) by his insistence that there is only one way (his way) to look at it. And in this sense he is in a condition in which *higher meaning* has actually been destroyed and this corresponds to the perceptual-situation of many of those who is locked into Mortal Combat with, a a new Literalist Man.
Immanuel Can is, for me, an
obstacle that requires a
transcendent leap. I admit that I am not very adept at it, but then my condition is not that different from all of our condition. In order to resolve the *discordancies* that have twisted Immanuel into a strange postmodernist Christian pretzel, I have to cross internal barriers.
[And yes, as you guessed, this will
all be put forth in
Part Two of
The 10-Week Email Course.]
