Promethean: That's all childish pseudo-erotic neoplatonism tho, Nick. All the higher self rebirth talk is a nervous idealistic response to the existential dread we feel when we recognize our own meaninglessness. It's the Peter pan syndrome basically.
A couple of preliminary notes
One is that, like it or not, we [Occidental humanity certainly] have entered a new world, a new and different phase. Let us suppose that we understand that what Nietzsche prophesied was not, as IC would say, the ravings of a Satanic lunatic, but rather a high-strung but necessary statement about a new phase of awareness. What statements could be fairly made to describe what this is? This 'new phase'? We have been talking about this for the longest time but how could it be put into clipped statements? The essence of it is just as Nietzsche put it: someone came along and 'erased the horizon'. Meaning, the former picture, which was so inclusive, so dramatically holistic, so necessary for a conscious being to have because it allows for one to conceive of oneself within a *world of meaning* -- this was erased.
Now a statement has to be made about
The Great Chain of Being. This was, and it still is but it is a 'fading shadow', and an excellent example of a *picture*, where the forms and relationships described grow less and less distinct. Is the picture real or is it unreal? Well, if you see the Earth as located at the center of all created things and the planetary orbs as located in great spinning circles which exert an influence down here on the plane of Earth, and if you see human consciousness as a striving, within a cosmic drama, for eventual merging with angelic, godly being (this is s simplified diagram of an immense, complex and beautiful visualization/construction), then I suppose that one could still *see* things through this perceptual model.
But we have to face the facts: the New Way of seeing and of discovering ourselves, and also truth, within the material-scientific reality, has supplanted the old mode of perception and the Picture that made it possible to visualize. I state this as a fact. We did not choose it, I did not choose it, and you did not choose it, it came about. And there is nothing anyone can do to 'go back' or turn back the clock or reverse the emergent perceptual mode.
What does this mean? What does this portend? A great deal. But one of them is that we are *cut off* from a conceptual pathway through which we can ally ourselves with what, formerly, was 'guiding angelic intelligence'. That short 'phrase guiding angelic intelligence' now
means nothing. For the person who now lives in the 'real world' of materialistic science and literal description the phrase cannot mean anything, except if it is understood to be a poem. (I think this is where Walker refers to
emotion and
emotionalism).
Promethean, therefore, is 'making statements' which have the tone of absolutism because, as he sees 'the world' -- he is a disciple of the New Mode of seeing and believes absolutely in it -- there is really no alternative. Thus he defines
TRUTH. And to one degree or another (it is always an issue
of degrees) Iambiguous, Dubious, Uwot, Walker and many others also live in, perceive in, and then make statements about the most ultimate question:
meaning. Trust me on this: when the former Picture collapsed, meaning collapsed with it.
So it is just as Promethean says: when he describes our situation and the "existential dread we feel when we recognize our own meaninglessness". In order to make that statement, he had to have predicated himself within an ultimate description. And if a predicated position is not ultimate it is on shaky ground. So Promethean attempts through the declarative certainty of his predication to say
ultimate things. You have to pay attention to the phrasing.
Nick: Then you believe that the Great Chain of Being is just nonsense. Where Man resides on earth in the great chain of being, the earth is just a machine performing a function of transforming substances. Human meaning doesn't exist on earth and you are right to conclude it to be meaningless for Man. However the conscious evolution of Man reveals human meaning and purpose animal man tied to the earth cannot have. Evolved Man receives from above and gives to below. For animal Man there is only the struggle within the below or the will to power Nietzsche referred to.
Here, the problem is weird. What is the problem? The core of it has to do with one World Picture in a sort of truth-competition with another World Picture. The former on allowed for, and indeed still holds, nearly all of our sense of meaning & value. The New Perception, in fact, destroys the possibility of the former one as being *true*. Thus it collapses, down into ruins effectively, that which made our civilization possible. I am not sure if people recognize the full ramifications of the 'wiping away of the horizon'.
So then the problem is: Is it that everything that the Former Perceptual System pictured, or allowed to come forward through what was pictured -- let's call that simply meaning & value -- has all of this now been nullified? That is one part. Burt the second is Does everything that the former picture allowed to be recognized, understood and lived by, now now longer operative? But this is not quite it, either. Does meaning & value exist, cosmically, in our cosmos, even if the 'picture' through which it is seen and visualized and concretized, is all this 'wiped away' as well? That is, as Promethean proclaims, is all that was formerly true now, really & truly,
false?
You see -- we have to come to the point where we can really see our present situation. Because this is the real
depth-problem.
Walker wrote: ↑Mon May 23, 2022 12:26 pmI feel the need for e-prime.
In the Great Chain, everything causes any particular thing, any link connects to all links.
In order to persist as it has, Christianity resonates with emotions. Emotion drives Christianity. Forgiveness, or behaving as a Christian, activates human emotion that causes Christian actions.
When needed, forgiveness for his own dark deeds awakens Man’s emotional capacity to forgive others for their hurtfulness. Man’s need for forgiveness, for what no human can forgive, causes emotional torment that burns like hell.
This is not a clear enough statement. True, TGCOB visualized an interconnected cosmos of 'as above, so below'. It is true as well that something in the *below* -- for example a diamond -- we understood to correspond to something *up above* (sol but also to the angelic band in which the sol moved). All of this allowed for perception through relationships of correspondence.
But to say that emotion drives "Christianity" is simply false. Very false in fact. But what Christianity are we referring to? Are you positing, say, Immanuel Can's modernist version of Christianity? Or the 'real' Christianity which has been part and parcel of the Occidental perceptual world for 1,000 to 1,500 years? That Christianity is really, and I say this fairly, another world.
It is more proper and truthful to say that Christianity (as understood previously) was ultra-intellectual, except the terms of intellection (the world that was perceived) was utterly different than it is now. Yet
traces remain.
Henry: Pro, and others like him, in-forum, think we're all just animals, that morality is a joke, and that people like you, Mannie, me, Walker, etc., are fools.
They have nuthin' but contempt for us.
But let's make a more fair and more true statement: they are only doing what their 'core predicates' dictate must be done! They can't do anything else once you understand, and can recite, what their predicates are. From their perceptual position, their stance, their location, if you start talking about *angelic intelligence* and concomitantly of *meanings & values* that were born in another temporal modality, literally another perceptual order of signt, understanding and relationship, what else could they do but laugh at you?
The irony is that we are *all animals*. It is really a question of how Man defines, even now, within the perceptual model of ultra-modernity and scientific rationalism, his distinct and different awareness (*consciousness*) as compared to the world of biology and the ecological systems of Nature. In that world there is nothing but animality, plant-live, and the circulation of matter in flowing energy-systems.
The more interesting thing, I'd say, is to step back to a place, a locality, where the drama between inividuals who are *stuck* within competing and antagonistic perceptual models rages. Allow me to quote from Lucretius in
De Rerum Natura (The Way Things are):
'Tis sweet, when, down the mighty main, the winds
Roll up its waste of waters, from the land
To watch another's labouring anguish far,
Not that we joyously delight that man
Should thus be smitten, but because 'tis sweet
To mark what evils we ourselves be spared;
'Tis sweet, again, to view the mighty strife
Of armies embattled yonder o'er the plains,
Ourselves no sharers in the peril; but naught
There is more goodly than to hold the high
Serene plateaus, well fortressed by the wise,
Whence thou may'st look below on other men
And see them ev'rywhere wand'ring, all dispersed
In their lone seeking for the road of life . . .
Nick: True, but what is it about being attracted to the truths above the world attracts so much hostility? Being aware that Man is not the ultimate intelligence is too hard to admit
My suggestion here is to follow and become aware of the strategy and the
manoeuvre that became ncessary when Modernity crushed the meaning & value that formerly enlivened the world and man's world of perception. It will sound trite perhaps, or is it cliché? but when the Outer World can no longer reflect sufficiently all those levels of meaning & value that formerly *existed*, the only manoeuvre open (and that makes sense and renders profit) is a shift-inward. Essentially, this is what CG Jung did.
To see all the elements of the Picture as being expressions of (projections of) the psyche. Therefore, the 'psyche' and the inner world of man's soul lights up as the realm of all possible adventure and discovery. And this goes on which the Outer World falls prey (as Jung did assert) to the *other side of the divine coin* which is chaos and the demoniac.
Ad hominem. Not relevant, both for reasons of logic and for empirical reasons. You neither know what I am, nor is it relevant in the slightest.