Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Mon Dec 06, 2021 9:54 pm
Really there are a whole range of things that cannot any longer be believed by people who have been raised up in the new metaphysics (which is sort of a non-metaphysics) unless they make a deliberate choice to believe what cannot be believed.
I don't think that's true at all. But what is true is that people cannot believe much if they've been raised as Materialists, other than that Materialism is true, which they believe without questioning.
Oddly, the will must enter in here to *patch up* the belief-fabric that had been rent.
I think that if the "fabric" was "rent," it certainly wasn't real belief or real faith in the first place. So I'm not too worried.
...they might try (as you seem to try by referring to Adam & Eve as some original mating pair) in a willed act of reconciliation, an attempt to bridge or reconcile two distinct epistemes.
You mistake my point. My interlocutor was saying how "ridiculous" he/she thought it was to suppose there even WAS an original mating pair. I was merely pointing out that that supposition is not at all dependent on one's belief system, but rather was by far the most obvious way to think things were, no matter which paradigm -- Creationist or Evolutionist -- one was taking.
And there, my point stopped.
But we can only deal with Christianity, and the elements of belief, as in a Novel.
I don't see why. Is that the way you deal with history? Is that the way you deal with road maps? Is that the way you deal with a medical prescription? There are many ways of dealing with text: the important thing is to select the right one.
The novel is an 18th Century literary form. It's hardly the inevitable one for anybody to use.
As you know my view is that the Christian Story requires a special exegesis, but that exegesis is necessarily gnostic.
If that's your supposition, that's your supposition. Nobody else has reason to suppose it, unless you provide some.
I think that is what Nietzsche *saw* is just this:
“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!”
In my view this is a description, an overpowering one that must have come on him quite strongly, that has to do with the 'world outside of ourselves'. That is to say the natural and the ecological world of 'life' within a material biological system.
In my view, it's pure speculative fantasy. And there are good reasons to think so, actually. The idea of the Eternal Recurrence, for example is actually contrary to mathematical probability to an infinite degree.
Nietzsche was a rhetorician, really. But this I'll grant you: he saw the sort of nasty, incoherent, power-driven, ethics-bereft world that secularism promised to deliver, and named it for what it was.
What 'God' is, and how God enters this world, only occurs in human persons. I do not see the Christian God as being present in the natural world, because that world is really cruel and amoral.
Open your eyes again, I guess.
You'll see a world which in which cruelty sometimes takes place, and in which amoral people sometimes act; but you'll also see a beautiful world, a majestic place ruled by systems of laws and regularities that defy any explanation in mere "chance" or "time." Look at the probabilites of your own existence, the elegance of mathematics, the rhythms of music, the myriad affairs of mankind, the radiance of light, the cadences of poetry, the delights of love and new life. Look again, and you'll see history laid out, and the works of God in it. And consummately, look again and you'll see God incarnate manifest in flesh.
In other words, don't open your eyes selectively or reductionally. See it all. There is ugliness here, as there is bound to be in a sin-flawed world; but there is tremendous design, aesthetics, life, wonders and coherence. See what makes sense of both, not just of the negatives.
If mankind were subtracted from the picture, there would be no Christian God operating in this material-biological world.
That's not the Christian explanation of things. Genesis says that man was one of the last things God created, not the first. The first words of the
Torah are, "In the beginning, God..."
At a certain point the realization dawns: It is just you & me and here we are stuck in this strangely decorated room, no longer really fitted to us, where we have no choice but to work it out here.
Really? It does not seem so to me.
Rather, I would suggest that if it's just you and me in this "room," then you and I have no means to "work out" anything at all. What are the rules? What are the goals? What are the parameters? What is the purpose of you, me or the room? How will we know who won, and when? Is our relation antagonistic, a matter of power, or is it moral, a matter of ethics? And what's the whole sorry edifice for?
These questions are unaskable and unanswerable in Nietzsche's world... a world so absurd that even Nietzsche couldn't live in it.
