henry quirk wrote: ↑Mon Jan 31, 2022 7:30 pmWe're a 170 pages in: mebbe someone could, in a plain way, actually lay out that
metaphysical logic...up to now it's like you guys have been fiddlin' with the silverware...somebody, please,
cut the steak (so we can get to the
eatin')
Well here are a few thoughts. They may help.
First, everything today is in a muddle. It has to do (I will use my terminology) with the breakdown in agreements. What are those agreements? The very terms by which, through which, reality is defined. Now it sure looks to me like these differences, these disagreements, will not and cannot be bridged. Effectively this is what you yourself said some pages back.
So it is in a way more interesting, more revealing, to examine the reasons why agreements cannot be arrived at, or why they do not exist in the first place.
What I notice is that each on who writes here now on this thread expresses what we might describe as 'tendentious view'. It is obvious that IC's view is the most strictly Christian in, well, the strict sense. What does that essentially mean? You must *work out your salvation* through the mediator-ship of Jesus Christ. Salvation is not a number of things, or any number of things, but a specific thing. If one had, say, the Kierkegaardian certainty and commitment to the Christian path one would, as a concomitant, be personally and morally compelled to really live it -- as if one's life and the state of one's soul depended on it.
My position on one had more wishy-washy and somewhat vague, and I cannot but see the needed (and radical) spiritual commitment as being expressed in other religious traditions. So for example it is not hard for me to *see* things through the descriptive lens, which indeed is a solid metaphysical lens, as the outline expressed in the 16th book of the Bhagavad-Gita. It is a question of choices: you either choose to align yourself with 'angelic' entity or, by default if you wish, one aligns oneself with nothing-in-particular, or with the demonic appetite of man (which I believe must be considered very real by all persons with two eyes in their head), which will, according to metaphysical logic, result on becoming more and more bound into these very possessive forces.
Where my position gets, let's say, *dangerous* is that I am not closed to a separation between the Judaic Christian tendency or school and that which I define as Greek and also as Indo-European. That is to say that I seek a sort of bedrock in other levels of being that antecede and perhaps supersede the Judaic revelation. In a sense I feel a need to detach *Jesus* from the historical context. So while the trinitarian concept is comprehensible to me, a Jewish Jesus (I do not know how else to express this) seems absurd. If Jesus is God (and I refer here to doctrinal positions) then Jesus is not Jewish particularly. That is why I tried to float the idea of what form revelation would take in some other *world* of beings like us, in the same condition and with the same basic (metaphysical) problems. But IC would have no part of it.
In keeping with my own (I think) broad research I am just now reading Susannah Heschel's
The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. She is the daughter of Abraham Joshua Heschel. It is my destiny to go right into the heart of the most difficult topics. And in these conversations, as is obvious, since Nietzsche is brought up continually, there is no way around this aspect of the conversation.
(And these are topics that are very difficult to think about, and far more difficult to discuss carefully and fairly, in our present. They are
too hot to handle.)
But turning back to the metaphysical dynamic:
The object therefore is
ascent. And we have an infinite array of sources and examples through which we can define ascent. In spiritual literature, in monastic literature, in the best of our common literature, in religious and ethical philosophy, in art, and simply what any one of us recognizes as 'the higher portion'.
But let's be truthful and also realistic: if you (if one) wants to do down there are an unlimited array of escalators one can jump on. They are closer than your own breath!
So -- and here I just want to try to clarify things -- I am *ultimately* let's say aligned with the set of strict and solid principles that IC outlines. Put another way there is a greater and higher percentage of truth in what he expresses (which has nothing to do with him and he is only the vehicle that expresses it) than in all of those who with such adamancy oppose him.
And in respect to them I say -- more can be got by examining, looking into, and interrogating the reasons why they hold to these positions. Dubious, Uwot are two of the most adamantine. But of course if I looked up names there'd be others. These two, in my view, need to be examined closely and to trace out how they have *arrived on the scene*. That is the social and intellectual processes that formed them. Ultimately, they are *destroyers* (in my lexicon of definitions). And destroyers have to be carefully watched. Let me say that *they* have a great deal of power in our time, but to use this *they* means I associate them with a
particular ideological movement. And I guess I do. (So my *battle* as it were is against this 'class').
Now Nick has a perspective that I can relate to strongly, but all that he is really talking about, and recommending, is a stance that a given person can arrive at. I guess I interpret him as defining an Eastern Orthodox spiritual relationship which is, in my view, somewhat gnostic (but in the general sense of the word). Who can receive this *message*? Perhaps only the one that has already arrived there and *sees*. (I also feel alignment with Nick's position but I am not a very good contemplative Christian).
Belinda has a really bizarre relationship to all of this. I cannot say I very well understand it. Her progressive socialist-Marxist commitments seem to subordinate here Christianesque sense so that her Christianity is non-metaphysical and requires no particular inner commitment, process, or transformation. Hers is a political Christianity and dovetails I suppose with standard social-democratic commitment of our day (which means it veers toward strange forms of political activism inflected with communistic trends or ideation).
And you have a position which I must say I do not understand very well at all. It does not seem to be one of 'definition' and 'exactitude'.
How could I miss saying something about Lacewing?
At times she comes on full-steam. But then when challenged she grows weary and frustrated and seems, like Mélisande in Debussy’s opera, to say
“Je ne suis pas heureuse ici!".
I love it when people trot this old saw out. 
At times she comes on full-steam. But then when challenged she grows weary and frustrated and seems, like Mélisande in Debussy’s opera, to say “Je ne suis pas heureuse ici!".