Philosophy Now Forum

Immanuel Can wrote:

Belinda wrote:The use of Nietzsche is that he points to how we were no longer empowered by faith. This was and is true. We, the weak, have to find and employ our own sources of empowerment.

You've got him wrong: he didn't care a fig for the weak. Nor for women, for that matter; in fact, he didn't provide for their "emancipation"; he advised men to take "the whip" to them.

Check it out for yourself, if you're not sure I'm telling you the straight goods.

Your slight misunderstanding is that , if you read a little more carefully you will see that I did not say that N cared for the weak; I said only of N that he "points to how we were no longer empowered by faith" .

Belinda wrote:Your slight misunderstanding is that , if you read a little more carefully you will see that I did not say that N cared for the weak; I said only of N that he "points to how we were no longer empowered by faith" .

Sort of. He actually just said that we (i.e. modern people) THINK we can get along without God. But in the very same speech, he pointed out the problems...no morality, no objective meaning to life, no justice, no truth...and so on (See The Madman's Speech, for example.) But he thought that was just the price we were going to have to pay the Nihilistic "piper."

Notice, though, that Nietzsche never proved, or even tried to prove, that God doesn't exist, or that we have to live that way. He just took it for granted, and said, if we realize it is so, then X, Y and Z follow. With faith presumed to be gone, we're all in a jam, he said. But because he dismissed God for himself, he blithely assumed everyone else must do so too. Kind of foolish, yes; but Nietzsche was nothing if not a hyperbolical roarer.

However, whether people who HAVE faith CAN still be empowered by it is, of course, quite a different question from any that Nietzsche gave us reason to consider.

Immanuel, I doubt if religious faith in a supernatural order is empowering in this day and age when all the movers and shakers are cynical or downright unbelievers. The Godly people are struggling to persuade an ever-increasing body of unbelievers to accept that God is wholly immanent, and not some big personality above the skies.

Immanuel Can wrote:

Greta wrote:Immanuel, based on your logic, it is philosophically invalid and an ad hominem to attribute greater weight to a surgeon's opinion than to your opinion as regards how to best conduct an appendectomy.

False analogy. Another fallacy. Gandhi was probably a fine man, in many ways...it did not make him a surgeon or an expert in Hindu theology. Nor does his reputation as a human rights advocate tell us anything about his grasp of the fundamentals of the faith he nominally practiced.

We know he was a sort of practitioner of it, and a rather unconventional one; but whether or not his Hinduism was "real" Hinduism by the standards of genuine Hindu experts, we do not have reason to know.

One thing for sure: if he believed the Gita, he did not believe in the Western God. That we can know. We just have to look. Again, that's what I recommend you to do.

Hmm ... yes ... I think my care factor at this stage is exactly zero. I also think you underestimate the importance of living within a culture in understanding the nuances of its works. The easterners use metaphor freely, and westerners are always making fools of themselves by taking eastern poetry literally.

People with any level of enlightenment don't denigrate and bully the vulnerable, but rather try to understand and give them the space in which to operate without being under siege from people who know diddly squat about their lives.

Immanuel wrote:I'm simply asking you how you know what YOU claim to know...namely, that "cruel and predatory" behavior is "wrong." It must be according to some ideology...but why you won't name it is mystifying, unless...

a) you're ashamed of that ideology...but that seems unlikely, so more likely,

b) it's never occurred to you that you HAVE an ideology in which you ground your morality, so you can't even imagine what one would look like, or possibly...

c) your morality isn't grounded in anything at all.

But if it's c) or b) then how would that differ from being propagandized? For then you would be asserting as "moral" things which you perhaps have been convinced by someone in the past to identify in that way, but you don't have the faintest idea on what basis that assessment has been advanced to you, and so believe without understanding the justification for them at all.

Have you ever had a mystical experience, Immanuel?

Greta wrote:Hmm ... yes ... I think my care factor at this stage is exactly zero. I also think you underestimate the importance of living within a culture in understanding the nuances of its works. The easterners use metaphor freely, and westerners are always making fools of themselves by taking eastern poetry literally.

Well, I can see that you won't know unless you read it; but as you say, you don't care, so I have to assume that means you won't.

Well, where do we go from here? Nowhere, really. Your supposition that the Hindus are playing in the same ballpark as the rest of the world is verifiably incorrect, but I see you are not allowing yourself the chance to see that you are incorrect. One cannot really defeat the ironclad determination not-to-know.

But ironically, think of how dismissive that supposition would be to the Hindus: that their experience of "the god" as they call it, is essentially the same as everyone else's...no better, just different? That's kind of insulting to Hinduism, don't you think?

Now, maybe in one sense, it's not quite as harsh as what I say, i.e. that they're simply wrong about their view of God; and I'll admit that. But in another sense, it's maybe worse. After all, it's pretty insulting to imply they're the same as everybody else, essentially, and thus that they have nothing special to offer the world. And since you don't see them as having anything more to offer than anyone else, are you more respectful of them, or less, when you say it? I mean, at least I take their uniqueness and their truth claims seriously; so seriously, in fact that I've read their book, even if I disbelieve in what it says; but if I take your words above as a true reflection of your disposition on them, you don't seem to imagine their faith or their book is even worth a look.

Okay, I guess.

Have you ever had a mystical experience, Immanuel?

I put little stock in experience. It can easily be misinterpreted. But I can say I have had some extraordinary experiences which, if I were inclined to experientialism, I might be inclined to characterize that way. But the problem with experience is that it's often very ambiguous. Like Ebenezer Scrooge puts it, "...a little thing affects [the perceptions]. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheat...an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato..."

So perhaps there is often "...more of gravy than of grave about [them], whatever [they] are!"

As for me, I am suspicious of them, and take a good deal of convincing before I would take one seriously. They are certainly not the basis of my faith.

And you? What are your experiences in that area? Or what is your disposition toward reports of such things? Are you inclined to believe them, or to be suspicious of them?

Belinda wrote:Immanuel, I doubt if religious faith in a supernatural order is empowering in this day and age when all the movers and shakers are cynical or downright unbelievers.

Statistically and historically untrue, actually. I wonder who you can possibly mean by "movers and shakers" -- it might be politicians and celebrities, but it's certainly not philosophers, scientists, or ordinary folk. Among them, the percentage of Theists has been -- and remains -- is quite high. Certainly the adjective "all" is not defensible...not even, perhaps, "most," in some cases.

Nietzsche thought faith would disappear with time and modernization. It turns out he was wrong about that. But by now, Nietzsche should be used to being wrong, I suppose.

The Godly people are struggling to persuade an ever-increasing body of unbelievers to accept that God is wholly immanent, and not some big personality above the skies.

Which "godly" people are those? And what's their value in being "godly" if, as Nietzsche suggests and you repeat, "God is dead"? Surely there is no more value in an immanent God than in a personal One, if both were, as Nietzsche thought, fictive in the first place.

But if Nietzsche was wrong, then it isn't the "godly" who are campaigning for an immanent view of the Creator.

Immanuel Can wrote:

Have you ever had a mystical experience, Immanuel?

I put little stock in experience. It can easily be misinterpreted. But I can say I have had some extraordinary experiences which, if I were inclined to experientialism, I might be inclined to characterize that way. But the problem with experience is that it's often very ambiguous. Like Ebenezer Scrooge puts it, "...a little thing affects [the perceptions]. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheat...an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato..."

So perhaps there is often "...more of gravy than of grave about [them], whatever [they] are!"

As for me, I am suspicious of them, and take a good deal of convincing before I would take one seriously. They are certainly not the basis of my faith.

And you? What are your experiences in that area? Or what is your disposition toward reports of such things? Are you inclined to believe them, or to be suspicious of them?

Many mystical experiences involve love and understanding, and this necessarily precludes any possibility of knowing cruelty to the vulnerable. It would be akin to kicking puppies.

My experiences weren't ambiguous so much as almost entirely inscrutable to me - bizarre and remarkable - but they were followed by periods of unusually clear insight.

Greta wrote:Many mystical experiences involve love and understanding, and this necessarily precludes any possibility of knowing cruelty to the vulnerable. It would be akin to kicking puppies.

My experiences weren't ambiguous so much as almost entirely inscrutable to me - bizarre and remarkable - but they were followed by periods of unusually clear insight.

I don't get the logic there: people have visions, and some of them are about love and understanding, so that proves that cruelty is wrong? I can't follow the connection there.

I guess I should ask again: what ideology gives you the precept, "cruelty to the vulnerable is wrong"?

In your visions, or dreams, or whatever they may have been, what did you "see" or "experience"?

Immanuel Can wrote:

Which "godly" people are those? And what's their value in being "godly" if, as Nietzsche suggests and you repeat, "God is dead"? Surely there is no more value in an immanent God than in a personal One, if both were, as Nietzsche thought, fictive in the first place.

By "Godly people" I mean theologians of good will.

The value in being Godly as I define above is to explore and promote ideas of God which don't defy reason.

The value in in an immanent God is that human aspiration towards the good exists and is available to everyone.

The idea of a God who is a supernatural person (which is what 'personal' God means) is not acceptable to most thinkers nor to many non-thinkers who value common sense. Nietzsche pointed out that this personal God idea was dead.

This 'personal' God represents order in the universe which predates and is prior to the advent of human reason and understanding. Just as the proverbial Geni cannot be put back in the bottle, once the humanist idea gets around that man, not eternal God, makes meanings the idea cannot be rescinded. Thus "God" is dead. N was clearing the way for a viable concept of God for a humanist age.

Belinda wrote:By "Godly people" I mean theologians of good will.

"God" and "good" being synonyms?

Well, Nietzsche would never have conceded that, however, more importantly, absent an objective, morality-backing God, what does it mean to call anything "good" at all? The word no longer has any referent.

Anyway, I have to ask what the value of a "theologian" is, once one has declared the Object of his study -- i.e. God -- to be "dead."

The value in being Godly as I define above is to explore and promote ideas of God which don't defy reason.

I'd certainly agree that our ideas about God must not "defy reason," as you say. But that is precisely what any idea of an immanent God does. For a reasonable view of God, one needs Him to be distinct from the Creation. If you meld Him into the whole, he ceases to have any distinct identity, and thus cannot be known by reason. No predications can any longer be made of Him, and logic is irrelevant. That is why Eastern traditions tend to rely on mystery and cyphers, on koans and mantras, on austerity to the body and "blank-mind" meditation...the destruction of reasonable faculties...in order to locate their "god." For them, "it" cannot be known at all by reason.

The value in in an immanent God is that human aspiration towards the good exists and is available to everyone.

Quite the contrary: if God is immanent in all of the Creation, it means that even evil is part of Him, and thus it is not evil anymore. This is why the Eastern views also have no strong distinction between good and evil...they are part of the whole. Just think of the yin-yang symbol, and you'll see what they really think about that: two zones in balance, one white, one black, both encircled. There's blackness in the whiteness, and whiteness in the blackness, because these two aren't genuinely distinct, only superficially so. And the black isn't, per se, "evil" in the Western sense. It's not considered bad, but necessary to the balance.

In other words, immanent "god" makes evil an illusion. NOBODY then has access to good. Everybody's equal, but equally confused on that issue. But that's to be expected, because the world itself is a vale of illusion, in the Eastern way of thinking.

You see, when you drill down to the particulars, your hope in that regard proves dusty.

The idea of a God who is a supernatural person (which is what 'personal' God means) is not acceptable to most thinkers nor to many non-thinkers who value common sense.

Ad hominem, and totally untrue. Would you accuse Francis Bacon, the father of the scientific method of "lacking common sense"? Or how about Oxford mathematician John Lennox? Or perhaps you had in mind Alvin Plantinga? C.S. Lewis? Who?

Nietzsche pointed out that this personal God idea was dead.

Well, yeah, but Nietzsche lied. He offered no proof for that claim. He just took it for granted and ran with it. We can do better than that.

This 'personal' God represents order in the universe which predates and is prior to the advent of human reason and understanding. Just as the proverbial Geni cannot be put back in the bottle, once the humanist idea gets around that man, not eternal God, makes meanings the idea cannot be rescinded. Thus "God" is dead. N was clearing the way for a viable concept of God for a humanist age.

This is a humanist myth; it doesn't reflect anything that actually happened. Just as Nietzsche did, Humanists just did an end-run around the whole idea of God. They proved nothing: they just took it for granted and went their own way. And people who wanted to believe them believed them. That's the danger of not looking at the evidence.

Finally, "a humanist age," as you call it, has killed more human beings than in all of recorded history before...mostly in wars, persecutions, prison camps and purges. So if that's progress, maybe we'd best not jump in too quickly, no?

When all the fruit is so rotten, don't be so sure the tree is any good -- even if it "sounds" good at first.

Immanuel, how would you identify a man of good will?

Belinda wrote:Immanuel, how would you identify a man of good will?

In what context?

Do you mean, someone who means well (but perhaps doesn't always succeed in doing well), someone who does well (but may not mean to have done it), or somebody with Kant's kind of "Good Will" (i.e. someone who is staunchly rational in his/her moral judgments)? Or do you mean, "somebody who would believe in and practice the same sorts of moral values I (Belinda) would find congenial"? Or do you mean, "someone who follows conventional moral practices"?

I'm not sure exactly what you are asking there.

Immanuel, I was asking you to identify a man of good will, if you can, not to lob the ball back into my court.

Belinda wrote:Immanuel, I was asking you to identify a man of good will, if you can, not to lob the ball back into my court.

Well, if the whole thing seems "out of court," then maybe the fault isn't in the "lob" but perhaps in the "serve."

Honestly, I don't know what you are asking me. I would like to answer, but can't tell what "good will" means in your frame of reference.

Belinda wrote:Immanuel, I was asking you to identify a man of good will, if you can, not to lob the ball back into my court.

I have the same problem with him in reverse. Instead of dodging and weaving from a straightforward question he is asking me an impossible one. I am finding him to be more lawyerly than authentic, more into creating an impression of "being on top" than anything else.

He's asking me how a peak experience that inextricably floods one with a sense of love and understanding can make one more kindly and less cruel. An impossible question. I just know that that's what it does, from my own and many others' reported experiences. It's not well understood, if understood at all. How do particular dynamic neuronal patterns come to represent particular thoughts and emotions? We don't yet understand the link between the physical and the mental, only that they are connected.

I can at least say what a person of goodwill is not - one who would knowingly harm or disparage the vulnerable.