For the discussion of all things philosophical.
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Lovin' it...lovin it...lovin' it!As dark, mechanistic universes go, it could be worse.
What is happening in such a sublunary world cut off from 'higher dimensions' is that, indeed, our value-system becomes one quite akin to natural systems, it begins to mirror those mechanistic systems. Man is stripped of his higher value and is reduced to just a biological particle. Now, the really interesting question is: Who gets to rule the production and distribution system? Who will gain ascendency and determine to what ends it functions? What will be included and what eliminated? How will 'higher values' be understood and defended? And who will do this? For after all there can be no 'higher' ethical or moral lawgiver, no 'invisible' standard that provides a guideline. If 'naturalism' defines ethics, and morality, then we really and truly have paved the way for absolute mechanical systems to administer the planet and all beings in it. If the administrator sees fit, say, to eliminate a sector or an individual or group who is not functioning properly within the System, what possible argument could one put forth to oppose it?"As soon as the world loses the Father of the world, as soon as it is deprived of God, it must necessarily be stripped of the invisible. And among invisibles, naturally, are norms such as justice and also the ethical laws of value that determine good and evil." (CG Jung)
You need to clarify this. What do you mean by 'imagined world'?Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:Our 'imagined world' is a description based in a strict scientific narrative.
Difficult to argue with given the above. Everything you say subsequent to this implies that by 'human' you mean 'human that accepts Gustav's metaphysics'.Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:But oddly, in that world, the 'human' begins to disappear.
Yes, because it is one we humans that question Gustav's metaphysics can all share.Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:In this vision, which is a now common and also highly transmittable vision of 'the world',
Ever since Plato attributed to Socrates (Phaedo) the claim that if a man could stick his head above the sub-lunary worldGustav Bjornstrand wrote:one is fully submerged in the 'sub-lunary' world
One can conceive higher and more subtle dimensions, but unless one chooses an off the peg one, one is unlikely to connect with other people's conceptions; as I suspect you are finding.Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:and one can no longer conceive of higher or more subtle dimensions, nor does one have access to the language or the metaphor, even, to refer to 'that'.
You have a conception of a 'higher world' that is entirely your own, and you regard people who don't share it, the multitudes, with contempt. The only evidence you have for this 'higher world' is your vanityGustav Bjornstrand wrote:In this sense one is cut off down there in the sublunary world. It has unforeseen consequences. When one is thusly reduced to a pure naturalistic and mechanical vision of life it is true that any sort of 'Bible-thumping' cannot be conceived of, and it also includes---fortunately or unfortunately, depending on one's perspective---every metaphysical description of reality and all that comes to us from that 'higher world'.
Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:A god-force that permeates all creation, some underpinning of divinity even from a subatomic level, a divinity that one can know, respond to, feel---consciousness as a miracle, as the impossible, as much more than reduction to a mechanistic computer language and electrical impulses in the brain's cells.
This presupposes that a concept of good and evil is necessary for ethics, it is a belief that only a moron could seriously subscribe to."As soon as the world loses the Father of the world, as soon as it is deprived of God, it must necessarily be stripped of the invisible. And among invisibles, naturally, are norms such as justice and also the ethical laws of value that determine good and evil." (CG Jung)
This would be offensive if it weren't so laughable. Most people have a value system that is based on respect and empathy regardless of their attachment to any higher dimensions.Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:What is happening in such a sublunary world cut off from 'higher dimensions' is that, indeed, our value-system becomes one quite akin to natural systems, it begins to mirror those mechanistic systems. Man is stripped of his higher value and is reduced to just a biological particle.
Have a peek at history and see who gains from peddling this 'higher dimensions' guff and the ends to which they have used it.Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:Now, the really interesting question is: Who gets to rule the production and distribution system? Who will gain ascendency and determine to what ends it functions?
This is paranoia or crass, apocalyptic doom-mongering.Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:What will be included and what eliminated? How will 'higher values' be understood and defended? And who will do this? For after all there can be no 'higher' ethical or moral lawgiver, no 'invisible' standard that provides a guideline. If 'naturalism' defines ethics, and morality, then we really and truly have paved the way for absolute mechanical systems to administer the planet and all beings in it. If the administrator sees fit, say, to eliminate a sector or an individual or group who is not functioning properly within the System, what possible argument could one put forth to oppose it?
On the contrary, it is the idea of the immutable that constructs a rigid structure. Churches everywhere have had to recant in the face of change.Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:When man begins to see his own self mechanistically and no longer has the language or the metaphor to refer to himself except in such mechanical terms, he participates in the construction of a rigid structure, as we see evolving around us.
This is offensive. Worse, it is the product of a 'value system' that condones the dismissing of the 'multitudes'. It is elitist, Platonist nonsense that anyone with a scrap of human decency should resist.Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:This is indeed what is happening, and the multitudes don't have enough understanding of what is lost to even react.
There are all sorts of sects that have predicted imminent disaster. So far they have all been wrong.Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:We could be said to live on the edge of a long encroaching dusk.
Depending on how you intend to do that, it is psychoanalysis, psychology or psychiatry none of which would claim to be an exact science, with the possible exception of psychoanalysis, which ironically is the least scientific.Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:To refer to those who respond, let us say, to religious callings or to the inner sense of a Divinity operating in this world in absolute negative terms is a mistake, yet so is it a mistake not to acknowledge to what degree man's understanding of his world has been influenced by the natural sciences---and greatly to the good in many ways---and how man is, in a very real sense, in his physical being, part and parcel of organic chemical processes. But that is not all he is and that is why it is imperative to understand man's 'psyche' and to try to do the very difficult: use psyche to look at, and try to understand, psyche. This is metaphysical work in the most poignant sense!
The point about science is that it doesn't claim certainty; that's what religion does, arrogantly.Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:What I have tried to do in these various pages is to take a sort of stand against the virulent 'atheistic' narrative that overruns the intellectual countryside and does so with, as I see it, a great deal of arrogance and (false) certainty.
It is your view, it's part of life's rich tapestry. Thank you for sharing it, but I agree with marjoramblues, I thought what skip wrote was absolutely beautiful.Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:It reacts to the low-end of religious zealotry, and despises it (rightfully in many senses), without being able to understand how religious motive and sentiment functions at the upper end. And also what stands to be lost if it happens that a purely mechanistic view of life and humanity gains ascendency within culture generally.
I wish there was a special place in this forum where I could place all the beautiful texts and arguments, not simply an 'Aesthetics' box...It is your view, it's part of life's rich tapestry. Thank you for sharing it, but I agree with marjoramblues, I thought what skip wrote was absolutely beautiful.
Enjoyed the above. Modern-day Stoicism has recently captured my attention...people have tried to use the idea that there is a heaven and an Earth to the same reactionary ends that Plato did. That is the vision that medieval scholars wedded to essentially Stoic ethics and the cult figure Jesus Christ to create the blight upon humanity that is christianity.
This is inaccurate. As I 'declared' at the opening post's subject line, I am a non-Christian apologist for Christianity. That is the bite that I bit off and have been chewing. Though I am myself quite convinced that 'the human self' is being attacked at every turn by all manner of different forces and entities, and for all manner of different reasons, and that this is a conversation that fascinates me, still I must be forthright and say that I am gaining a good deal of insight [on the destruction of the human self and 'the person'] from the work of Christopher Dawson (The Historic Reality of Christian Culture: A Way to the Renewal of Human Life) and from Helmut Thielicke (Nihilism: It's Origin and Nature---With a Christian Answer). Jung as I understand him makes a stark defense of Christianity as the heritage of the European soul, it is true, and some of what he says is quite compelling, and since he is literally a psychiatrist (psyche-iatrist = doctor of the soul) it is also true that he has written a prescription for the West that is none too promising. But I also find him at times a little opaque. This is NOT just my personal formulation in fact. I have referenced in my last post a group of people who have delved into this area. I mention these people because, as I have been saying, there is a common and virulent 'atheistic argument' that is stalking the land. I find that at the base of it is not so much 'good reasoning' as rather stark 'will' which also takes the form of emotionalism. I sense a whole area of barely submerged anger, almost an unconscious anger, and a desire to strike out, to do harm. I begin to have the sense that what I am noting is an 'unconscious' factor, but as Skip pointed out, indirectly perhaps, the angle of psychological analysis is problematic. But to be truthful with you I do not see how our psychology can be avoided, and since 'the psyche' as the strange entity that navigates this life and this world is a tremendous puzzle, and we have a hard time looking at it because 'it' is the eye doing the seeing, still I am wedded to the view that this cannot be avoided.uwot wrote:Everything you say subsequent to this implies that by 'human' you mean 'human that accepts Gustav's metaphysics'.
I think I do see what you mean. A couple of things: One is that to get through 'all this' and to understand it (if that is possible) is, as I have said, not a project that is accessible to just anyone. That surely smacks of elitism and heaven-knows what else for you and others. But in truth that is not my problem. I am trying to arrive at some basic facts, if this is possible. And I have already said this and repeat it here: I do not think that 'real understanding' of 'our world' is possible for 'the multitude' (Mass Man). And we have to see and understand all the points where our being and our understanding connects with 'the multitude' (I mean this in the negative sense). If there is a message to be preached, and the message I am interested in is uniquely sophisticated and non-accessible without a good deal of study and willingness, that message is that there are 'inner dimensions' to the symbols that surround us, and I most definitely place 'Christianity' in that camp. To speak in terms of symbols and to make semiotic references is necessary because of the nature of psyche (that does the analysis) and 'our condition' within limited psyches. I know that you have only contempt for it and can refer to it as 'the blight upon humanity that is christianity', and I understand so many of the reasons you have this position (a reading of Christopher Hitchens and others quite easily provides it), but I present another angle for viewing the problem.One can conceive higher and more subtle dimensions, but unless one chooses an off the peg one, one is unlikely to connect with other people's conceptions; as I suspect you are finding.
This is not an accurate assessment. I am fully willing to admit that in contentious conversations it is easy to jump to conclusions---I have done it on occasion---but if you hold to this view you will be making a mistake. True, I have my own sense of what 'higher world' means for me, but in many ways I am borrowing from already established philosophers-of-sorts such as CG Jung and Amos Wilder just for two examples. The question is really: are you familiar at all with those who have developed more progressive views on matters of 'metaphysics'?You have a conception of a 'higher world' that is entirely your own, and you regard people who don't share it, the multitudes, with contempt. The only evidence you have for this 'higher world' is your vanity.
Science is not now and likely will not form the basis of a general philosophical-spiritual-religious grasp of existence and it does not seem capable to provide much real insight into ethics and morality. It is important to understand the limitation of 'science' and also 'rationality' (as we generally understand it) to provide insight or answers to these larger questions. This pushes us back into both religion and philosophy, and this is really one of my main points: we cannot abandon any part of what has gone before and through which we have 'constructed self' but need to look at it all over again. You make a supposition that I am proposing some 'reactionary project' but I don't think this is so. But I do acknowledge that there is a great deal of tension between 'progressive' viewpoints and 'conservative' viewpoints and that there is no such thing as an abstract conversation about all that is right at the center of Value itself.Science cannot yet explain consciousness, even if it succeeds in accounting for it, science will never produce a theory the understanding of which generates sensation in the way that light, sounds, touch, taste and smell do. In that sense, consciousness is beyond science, but it is not therefore a miracle.
This is a baiting statement and, at least I think so, you might modify it. I am certain that there are schools of philosophy that do not require a stark 'evil' to develop an ethics, but the issue of 'evil' in an especially human sense is not therefor done away with. To understand how Jung viewed the issue I suppose you'd have to read him! As I say I find him a little opaque on certain questions, myself. He gives with his right hand and snatches away with his left, the devil!This presupposes that a concept of good and evil is necessary for ethics, it is a belief that only a moron could seriously subscribe to.
I am happy then that you choose to laugh! Again, you are making baiting statements and this does nothing for conversation except to externalize anger or resentment. It is very true that 'people' have value-systems, but I would suggest that we all are living in the dusk and a falling-away from large and established systems of value---moral capital it has been called---and that what rises out of the presently developed systems are pseudo-value systems, and value-systems determined by mechanistic values, production and distribution systems, even corporate or busines-based value systems. The respect and empathy values that 'people' do have, especially in our cultures, are a product of the heritage of our culture and are linked to Christian and philosophic values derived from Christianity. The notion of empathy is changing, though, as is that of 'respect'. A mechanized and machine culture will produce mechanical and machine values in people. I suggest that it is a good idea to be aware of and preserve the notion of the human.This would be offensive if it weren't so laughable. Most people have a value system that is based on respect and empathy regardless of their attachment to any higher dimensions.
I very much disagree with you. I do admit, certainly, that there is such a thing as 'doom-mongering' though. But what I am referring to is, I think, evident. Just recently as you are surely aware it has come to light how all Internet communications are monitored and stored. How advanced computer systems and programs can be used to track information, people, thoughts, movements. Multiply that by 2, then 4, then 10. This is one example amid a group os systemic examples to allude to a system of control and management that is taking shape. In that scenario 'the individual' and the 'person' are irrelevancies insofar as a machine cannot think about value or assign value. When mechanical culture gains ascendency it is 'the human person' who loses relevancy. It is important to understand how loss of value and the ability to define value in one area has wide effects in other areas.This is paranoia or crass, apocalyptic doom-mongering. [Gustav wrote: What will be included and what eliminated? How will 'higher values' be understood and defended? And who will do this? For after all there can be no 'higher' ethical or moral lawgiver, no 'invisible' standard that provides a guideline. If 'naturalism' defines ethics, and morality, then we really and truly have paved the way for absolute mechanical systems to administer the planet and all beings in it. If the administrator sees fit, say, to eliminate a sector or an individual or group who is not functioning properly within the System, what possible argument could one put forth to oppose it?]
Ilan Stavans, a Mexican writer, wrote an essay on the destructiveness of 'politically correct thinking'. His views influenced me a great deal. I have no interest at all in defending what I understand as the 'politically correct'. If we choose to be really free, intellectually and on any other level, I think we have to confront, within ourselves, the way that the politically correct infringes on our 'intellectual freedom'. I am convinced, myself, that the 'mass man' as Ortega y Gasset has defined him is part of a problem. The 'mass man' in this sense is 'unstructured will', or appetite, and perhaps a form of 'uncomprehending being-in-the-world'. He is a product of modern democracy and also of consumer culture. Myself, I do not refer to 'him' when I need answers or seek answers to Grand Questions. I look at him when I need to remind myself of what I am and what I need to avoid. The way to grow [away from 'him'] is to seek to deepen one's own understanding, if one can. To read, to think, to study, and also to listen. Way back at the beginning I spoke of respect for hierarchy and my position has not changed in this sense. It is really a question of who and what one values and who and what one desires to support. I want to value and support those who have done the best possible work in coming to understanding. I don't have any problem at all in defining that as an elite project. But that DOES NOT at all mean that I am defining an oppression for 'mass man', or a way to channel contempt. Quite the contrary. By defending the 'sovereignty of persons' and personalism generally, one has some conceptual tools to define just how 'mass man' should be educated, and I do not have a problem is making statements about that either!This is offensive. Worse, it is the product of a 'value system' that condones the dismissing of the 'multitudes'. It is elitist, Platonist nonsense that anyone with a scrap of human decency should resist.
Controlling, coercive culture is not mechanical by it nature; these sophisticated machines are merely its latest tools to replace the cross and iron maiden. (Correction: not replace - augment, along with detainment centers and women's dress code.)When mechanical culture gains ascendency it is 'the human person' who loses relevancy. It is important to understand how loss of value and the ability to define value in one area has wide effects in other areas.
To speak in these terms is almost to engage in Fantasy. Because I am a member of 'our culture' I know these tendencies: self-contempt, self-criticism, and the sense (vague, really) that there might have been some other way. If I am not mistaken this critique is a by-product of post-Sixties radicalism and criticism. But it also has deeper roots. It could even trace its roots to the Jewish Prophets! It is very important to incorporate critical viewpoints and not to deny them, in my view. But there is something, again in my view, just too easy in investing in the critical view if one is not also engaged in some sort of work within the present. To work in the present means to work with the present, and since history has taken the course it has, what value can there be in mapping alternatives and proposing that things 'might have been different'?Skip wrote:The present political and economic hierarchy is the end product of Roman-Christian-European-Capitalist tradition. We might have done better along a different path. We might still survive, could we but find an alternate route.
OMGSkip wrote:Mapping alternatives, along with mitigating the damage of the past is a proper work of the present, if there is to be a future.
Mapping alternatives can be a proper work of the present if it is carried out intelligently and carefully. Incorrectly carried out it could also result simply in other levels of catastrophe. One problem with critical positions, especially if they arise from unsettled feelings or even outright resentment, or immaturity and ignorance, is that a destructive impulse can take over. I suggest that there is a destructive impulse present, consciously and unconsciously, in many who express a desire or a will to do away or to eliminate either religion and specifically Christianity. That is the position I take toward so-called atheism. It will not happen that Christianity will be 'eliminated' in the sense of erased, so such that desire is simple fantasy and in that sense unreal. At best. At the worst it is a mask for a destructive impulse. And mitigation, I don't think, should not be equatable with elimination or destruction. Just as it is not now nor will it be possible to simply do away with 'Rome' in the sense of civic structure. Or even 'capitalism'.Skip wrote:Mapping alternatives, along with mitigating the damage of the past is a proper work of the present, if there is to be a future.
)uwot wrote:You missed the point Plato is making, he is in fact talking about two different worlds.
Here:
"...and if his nature were able to bear the sight, he would recognise that that is the true heaven and the true light and the true earth."
he is talking about the world beyond Earth's atmosphere, heaven, the world we can only imagine is there.
Whereas here:
"For this earth and its stones and all the regions in which we live are marred and corroded..."
he is talking about the sublunary world, the one that Skip describes so well, the one that can be seen, heard, touched, smelled and tasted, the one that doesn't have to be imagined.
M: Thanks, uwot, for this clear explanation of the differences; Plato I don't know well, at all...
You say my assessment of your vanity is inaccurate. The evidence you provide for your musings, where there is any, is appeal to authority, others minds, people whose opinion matches yours. It is breathtaking vanity to delude yourself that you can know more about the world than people who actually engage it, no matter who agrees with you.
You say you sense an undercurrent of anger, then let me make it explicit: people's lives continue to be fucked up by self-righteous pricks who think like you.
M: You say it so well; a piercing explicitness.
But all of this would not be possible without the Other side; so necessary to be aware of...and to which, happily, some can respond sensibly, with real, cool knowledge and wonderfully warm wisdom.
This forum is a rewarding place to be, right now. Hope it lasts...
Don't worry m, there's plenty more where Gustav comes from, besides, he hasn't gone yet.marjoramblues wrote:But all of this would not be possible without the Other side; so necessary to be aware of...and to which, happily, some can respond sensibly, with real, cool knowledge and wonderfully warm wisdom.
This forum is a rewarding place to be, right now. Hope it lasts...
I think it stands as a possibility that you may have missed the point that I was making, Plato aside. What I have observed is that each person lives in, operates from, deals with 'the world' from, and processes the world from within his 'imagined world'. It is our 'psyche' that does this and this is one more reason, I think, to understand it better.uwot wrote:You missed the point Plato is making.
It certainly does seem to be true that the world in which we live is and remains a substantial world whether it is thought about---'imagined'---or not. But it is also true that, no matter what, men (and perhaps animals to some degree) also 'imagine' their world. My own position or orientation in these questions stand somewhere between a pure 'realistic' view and an understanding that, shall we say, incorporates both a higher and a lower metaphysic. I don't think it is a question of personal will or choice so much as it is a 'natural disposition of the soul'. I guess I think that it is always wise to orient oneself, and reorient oneself from time to time, within the 'tangible real' of physical body within physical existence. In any case, it is within a concrete physical existence that we demonstrate the sanity or insanity of whatever it is we hold to in our 'imagined world'. I suppose that one difference, perhaps between you and I (and others) is in what I will allow as far as tolerance, or perhaps understanding is the word, of the varieties of man's 'imagined worlds'....he is talking about the sublunary world, the one that Skip describes so well, the one that can be seen, heard, touched, smelled and tasted, the one that doesn't have to be imagined.
I appreciate your rhetorical parries, I hope you appreciate mine!Just as you are, Plato was contemptuous of the "marred and corroded" world we find ourselves in, the world of bodies and their functions and just like you, Plato dreamed of a world of a higher dimension, a world in which the mind is unencumbered by sublunary matter.