attofishpi wrote: ↑Fri Jun 10, 2022 9:48 amI am not sure if I previously mentioned that I was raised through a Catholic school upbringing (just to put my perspective on the table). My parents were not particulary religious, and in fact the school teaching regarding the 'faith' thing, other than normal schooling was really very simple. If I could sum it up, mostly were were taught turn the other cheek, the golden rule type stories.
I read your post with interest. I'll comment on a few points.
My sense is that the only way we can really understand each other (that anyone can understand anyone else) is through revealing of
context. The actual and rather blatant fact is that all of us writing on this thread come from very very different contexts and for this reason, and try as we might, at the most essential points we cannot agree. The reason I keep focusing on this is because it is my understanding that -- and certainly within the cultural context I am most familiar with (the US) -- 'agreements are breaking down'. I am never sure (speaking of this thread) how or even if others here focus on current events, but this is really my central interest and concern. I abbreviate that by reference to 'the Culture Wars'.
So the more that we contextualize ourselves, and the clearer we get about the 'causal chains' that have informed us, and at the same time the causal chains that have informed others, at the very least we will be able to have, say, more toleration for the ideas of others, but more than that the essential existential (and metaphysical) orientation of others. Note that this does not change, and likely cannot change, that we have headed already into 'war' (the conduct of politics by other means) and that different forms of disaster impinge and have made their presence evident.
I am not fully certain how to express what my own 'trajectory' has been in a clear manner. I was not raised in
any religious tradition and am the product of a mixed marriage (post-Christian and post-Jewish). The first influences I received were exotic and counter-cultural. And that defines my own 'trajectory'. It became apparent to me at a certain point that in order to understand myself I would have to understand just what 'trajectory' means, in the sense of having been propelled into motion'.
I believe that the term
dasein must refer to this among other things. The primary 'impetus' that I received was that my hippy-esque parents sold everything and the family went to live in India for a significant time when I was thirteen. It was all pretty radical of course and it involved, obviously, a 'breaking with traditional context'. Thus the 'trajectory' established was always of that general sort and order. Luckily, I attended a liberal arts college with emphasis on 'the classics' of the Occidental canon. That helped to initiate what I might call a 'reversal' (of radical trending).
And within the last say 7-8 years it became necessary to dive deeply into even more traditional and reactionary modes. This explains my chosen and in a sense willed decision to investigate the Christian (and Catholic) form in more detail. I would describe it is a kind of 'intellectual solidarity' with traditionalism. I've mentioned both Robert Bork and Richard Weaver. Bork wrote a trenchant polemic against *Sixties radicalism*. Weaver wrote a conservative opus based in Platonic conservatism. Oddly, these influences set in motion a sort of 'repudiation' of exactly what had been the impetus in the background of my entire trajectory.
I would say that this, in general, more or less explains 'what I am up to'.
It was when I read
The Destruction of the Christian Tradition by Rama Coomeraswamy --- that I was made aware of what was being destroyed, and why it was being destroyed. See the 'publisher's note' in the first few pages to get a sense of what his and their 'orientation' is. The 'sense' that was opened up through this and other reading was that all the traditions and traditionalism generally that was under attack by Modern trends needed first to be seen and understood, but then arrested (if it were possible). And that the trends in the 'bewildering world' represent, indeed, a 'staggering variety of possibilities' for the modern person.
Now I want to
contextualize what this conversation with Immanuel Can has meant for me, given the general orientation (trajectory) I have just described. It is not, and not in any sense, an issue of desiring or needing to 'make something personal' (which is how I take the ad hominem accusation) but of localizing and explaining the intense importance of a grounding within traditional ideas. It is the Christian form, within our own Occidental culture, where 'traditionalism' of a metaphysical sort is still found. The Catholic religion -- and definitely in comparison to the Protestant forms (which are rebellious and radical in their own ways and have themselves set the stage for 'metaphysical ungrounding') -- is the form that is bound up with and most expressive of Platonic traditionalism of an
intellectual sort.
What must appear odd (it came about unexpectedly) is my
apparent opposition to the 'traditionalism' of Immanuel Can. But actually I am trying to define, and feel a need to define, something that is even more radically traditional than his modernist Christian and Protestant 'return to the Bible' type of reactionary opposition to the radically ungrounded trends of Modernity and Postmodernity.
What Immanuel Can represents to me -- that is his religious choice -- is a forced return to something that is ultimately stultifying. It is not that I do not understand the desire to 'locate oneself' within an anchored tradition, all this in fact makes sense. So what is it that made the shift away from the Christian form a
necessary turn within Occidental culture? I reduce it to a simple phrase 'And the truth shall set you free" as a way to illustrate what I think. Of course this is a Nietzschean idea or in any case that is where I first encountered it. Seeking the truth, seeking to see and understand clearly, the Bible narratives were undermined. Seeking to understand really & truly what 'God' is, entire theological constructs were undermined. The world we live in was not made and organized by the Christian God. The Christian God is 'remote and abstract' and, moreover, reduced in a distorting way to a personality. The child's vision was punctured and it deflated (is deflating).
But this does not mean that the metaphysics which traditionalism deals in has been made unreal. But rather that the vessel or the picture that represents the metaphysics has become, let's say, inadequate. That is one aspect. The other is, like it or not, that God cannot any longer be conceived, and should not be conceived, as a remote abstraction. And going further:
the world cannot be divided into strict poles between Good and Evil. That is to say that man's personality and his existential self cannot be divided through that
model. The 'return to the body' and the 'return to the earth' involve a whole other way of interpreting ourselves and our existence.
I guess I would have to summarize by suggesting that 'the Christian form' has acted like an imposition on and also against 'reality' -- the reality of who and what we actually are. In and of itself though, and at this point, there are dozens, hundreds and thousands of modalities that have come on the scene which a strict and stultified Christianity cannot conceive of. And as I alluded those 'modalities' have opened up whole arenas of understanding, knowledge and also self-discovery.
