Dubious wrote:You responded: "I can’t say I agree with this assumption or why you would make the correlation. Plato was a philosopher, a brilliant one which does not imply that everything he thought or wrote was of equal value. The same goes for Nietzsche and everyone in between.:
To what I said: "Well, in that vein, one of the stupidest men of all time was Plato, no? I think that Plato's ideas were intricately -- inextricably -- bound up in metaphysical ideas, right?"
Certainly Plato was a philosopher, but he was also in essence a theologian: a theist or perhaps a proto-theist (?) In his works he gives form to what appears to me to be a highly metaphysical understanding of the
Kosmos. He certainly 'believed in god' in the sense of understanding that there was a profound Order that stood behind, perhaps one could say,
the world's manifestation.
It seems to me that Chesterton's declaration, to be fully understood, has to be taken more from a metaphysical angle. Obviously, Chesterton had personalized his statement through his own Catholicism and apology for Christian view generally. But his statement (at least in my mind) has a larger application.
“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
When
the or when
a 'metaphysical order' that is a description of 'the world' and of the
Kosmos and of life is undermined, and keep in mind that every religious structure presupposes such an order (is a description of 'the world', what it is, what it means, and then where human being came from, how it got here, what it must and must not do, et cetera), when the metaphysical order is undermined the structure through which men and society 'visualized their existence' within a system of meanings
collapses. Or becomes broken, if you will, in certain parts. Falls into chaos. Or to concretize it: becomes
postmodern. (A mishmosh of competing views).
When men can no longer believe in that Order (the metaphysical order) it seems that this has come about because a new Order of View is being suggested or, perhaps, insisted on. An older order of view is being replaced or displaced. And for us what has replaced it, or what is supposed to replace it, is what we might simplistically call the 'scientific material paradigm'.
Obviously, Chesterton had a 'pony in the race' and felt that when the Christian structure of belief was supplanted (he would say by
intellectual error and, ultimately, by
demonic influence -- I mention this to be entirely honest about the structure of his views), there is still very much a 'need to believe', which means to still have and still use (if you will) a general metaphysical structure through which 'the world' and Life is explained and understood.
If one understands this as, say, a fundamental need of man (of any man, of any person), it would mean that we can, in our own postmodernism, understand why people become 'obsessive' in their replacement-strategy. Without the 'structure of a religious view', attached as it is to a metaphysical order, and to all sorts of ethical rules and regulations, people are cut off from a sense of a larger Order, and careen, as it were, into other, obsessive activities. I think it is fair to notice this even if we do not accept the Christian (or any other metaphysical view, even say Buddhism) as a proper metaphysical structure through which to see ourselves and 'the world'.
Sorry that this is rather long-winded, I have never written it our before. This is my understanding of the present world that we live in: the cultural, social, media, intellectual world.
