Nick_A wrote: ↑Sat Feb 19, 2022 12:22 amIf Nietzsche is right, the universe and Man within it is a machine. The meaning for a machine is revealed by what it serves. He can wipe away the horizon, but is there anything within the machine that can consciously evolve as suggested in the GCoB and did the Christ and his sacrifice bring the Spirit necessary to make it happen? If Man is dual natured, it is only the higher part originating from beyond the world that can return to its source. The animal or lower part can only serve the needs of the earth.
I did make an effort to get through the rather long essay you submitted. I think I have a sense of what it wants to propose. I can understand the idea of the 'included middle' as an alternative, of sorts, to a hard dichotomy. Interesting, in Jain philosophy, they have the
Seven-Valued Logic (seven predicates that expand as it were the Aristotelian A=A that excludes a middle).
Is it really a question of whether Nietzsche was *right* or *non-right*? It seems to me that our perspectives have a somewhat contrived aspect. We align ourselves with one view but we are aware that other views or stances are possible (here I invoke Lacewing!) So the view that Nietzsche expressed in that dynamic paragraph is, as far as it goes, true for anyone who reads it, wouldn't you say? It surely does not express a lie or a deception. It definitely expresses a (Heraclitesque I gather) view of 'reality' which is really quite compelling, it seems to me.
The way that I understand Nietzsche (to the degree that I do understand him) is of a man torn between very powerful perspectives. This is likely my own emphasis and why I focus, I hope not too reductively, on the sense that what we are dealing with, really, and what also tears at us, is the contrast and incommensurability between the Old Metaphysics and the New Metaphysics. As Basil Willey stated, and I thought quite poignantly, in order to make sense of what is going on in us, and thus around us, we need a 'master metaphysician' to explain it. We cannot very well
see our situation.
I am interested in what you are trying to present but I cannot say that I grasp it. I mean in respect to the rather long, and rather dense, essay you submitted which I did read through rather quickly (at 5:00 AM). I cannot say that I understand what he or they are doing with these ideas. But if I bring up the words *do* and *use* I refer to *the function of ideas* that we hold. There always seems to be a reason and a purpose.
So if yours, for example, is to define the possibility of a 'will' that can and does grow and evolve and can also
self-direct I don't think I would attempt to oppose your sense of will (though I am pretty sure that IC, for example, has deep suspicion of man's will if it is not somehow operating under the aegis of surrender to God).
But you would have to understand that in my own case *spirituality* had for me, and from the early days, a peculiar
function. It was extremely personal and had most to do with making my own way through the world. I would describe it as a sort of 'magical religiousness'. It was not Christian. And it also was influenced a great deal by authors such as Carlos Castaneda among numerous others (I am a product of California!) So when I think back to those years in the 80s and 90s when I and my friends were forging our *spiritual* paths I do not in any sense condemn us for what we were attempting -- and this might be supposed if I am not seen as some hyper-conservative defender of Christianity (as I suppose Lacewing perceives me) -- and in fact I have a good deal of admiration for the sincerity and integrity that we held to.
So really we were 'post-Christian' and really pretty deeply involved in and also extending pre-existent American traditions (this would all require a good deal of explanation but I can say that even, and especially, an event like the famous Woodstock of my parent's generation, was in its way an octave of a previously defining event:
the Great Awakening. It was Harold Bloom in
The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation who helped me to understand the historical line, which I certainly did not prior to reading him).
You ask: "He can wipe away the horizon, but is there anything within the machine that can consciously evolve as suggested in the GCoB and did the Christ and his sacrifice bring the Spirit necessary to make it happen?"
Have you ever read Ulysses *degree speech* in Troilus and Cressida? In it is expressed the Elizabethan worldview or *world-picture*. It is interesting to understand this view and compare it, say, to Richard Weaver's ideas about our
metaphysical dream of the world.
In this *picture* it is the 'glorious planet Sol' and its 'medicinable eye' that
corresponds to Christ.
The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre
Observe degree, priority and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office and custom, in all line of order;
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
Amidst the other; whose medicinable eye
Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,
And posts, like the commandment of a king,
Sans cheque to good and bad: but when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents! what mutiny!
What raging of the sea! shaking of earth!
Commotion in the winds! frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixure! O, when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
Then enterprise is sick! How could communities,
Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenitive and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make a sop of all this solid globe:
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead:
Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.
Great Agamemnon,
This chaos, when degree is suffocate,
Follows the choking.
And this neglection of degree it is
That by a pace goes backward, with a purpose
It hath to climb. The general's disdain'd
By him one step below, he by the next,
That next by him beneath; so every step,
Exampled by the first pace that is sick
Of his superior, grows to an envious fever
Of pale and bloodless emulation:
And 'tis this fever that keeps Troy on foot,
Not her own sinews. To end a tale of length,
Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength.
In musing on the soul, Sir John Davies wrote:
This substance, and this spirit of God's owne making,
Is in the body plact, and planted heere,
That both of God, and of the world partaking,
Of all that is, Man might the image beare.
God first made angels bodilesse, pure minds,
Then other things, which mindlesse bodies be;
Last, He made Man, th' horizon 'twixt both kinds,
In whom we doe the World's abridgement see.
So I think the answer to your question (which I realize is not so much related to the Great Chain of Being as it was formerly conceived, but rather to the possibilities you understand to be under exploration, for example in the essay you submitted) the answer to your question as to whether in the machine there is something that 'can consciously evolve' and was Christ understood to be that force or *quickening* power -- the answer is definitely yes. What can evolve is just that aspect of God that is expressed in the soul. It is there.
And I will also point out that the 'included center' is sort of expressed in "Man, th' horizon 'twixt both kinds, / In whom we doe the World's abridgement see." (The bridge between two 'realities').
This is one of the reasons why I say that to understand Christianity -- which is a religious form developed over 1,000 years in a specific time-period in Europe, one must have a general sense of how the metaphysical system was understood.
Then, it seems to me, we can better understand that this *system* still operates today and yet all around it, and fencing it in, and 'denying' it, another metaphysics has arisen. They are in
absurd competition and conflict (and here I mean
absurd in the postmodern sense).
