Dubious wrote: ↑Wed May 08, 2024 2:02 amIt's like you said:
And all of this in man’s imagination.
In the confrontation with your thought, which is I think an entrenched ideology, I am clear that I have an object. My
a priori is, fairly obviously one could say, not so much to prove the *existence* of metaphysics and the realness I refer to -- this is not possible -- but to keep open what I call 'conceptual pathways' to those
realnesses. I believe I understand on what your ideology is grounded: the realness of sensual categories; the objective and practical existence of the tangible world; and a style of reasoning that, first, posits that what is tangibly apprehensible is where realness really is, and second that those categories I refer to as metaphysical do not have (
real) existence.
As children get older it's not uncommon to question what they once imagined or visualized; also historically true for entire civilizations.
Working with this metaphor, which is of course more than a mere metaphor, that a believing child becomes a doubting adolescent and rejects the superficial structure of a childlike belief-structure -- and becomes, say, atheist, disbelieving, and simultaneously ungrounded from the (according to the adolescent's view) falsely-conceived platform of certainty. That I would suggest describes you and quite a few others who appear on this forum. But there is a further development it seems to me: that rebellious, cocksure adolescent may grow to be a more profoundly thinking man. Allow me to borrow Seed's Heisenberg quote:
“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
Now, I fully grant you that all problems, all roadblocks, all doubts, all contrary arguments -- everything that we deal with in what I believe is a civilizational metaphysical crisis where we do not -- cannot! -- any longer believe in metaphysical categories -- is utterly real. In the sense that (for example me in relation to you) every objection of yours, each ideological stance that you hold to as if it is *realness* itself and also truthfulness, has to be confronted and counter-proposed. That is why I stay within these conversations. But I am aware that my link to those metaphysical realnesses that I refer to, and which I cannot deny, have been realized and internalized long ago, and that they were not arrived at through someone presenting me with a *rational, convincing argument*.
So the way I respond to you is by playing back your own argument: the adolescent, to be responsible to himself
and to his civilization, must choose mature growth and
not to remain holed-up in comfortable ideological position that actually (and
really) produces dissolution, the breakdown of the intellectual integrity of the individual, and the undermining of valuable categories of
knowing.
When the image dissipates, being the container of meaning, what remains is it's abstraction being no-longer contextually relevant and therefore without anchor, doomed to dissipate rather quickly especially when new visualizations offer new perspectives...a slow torque process often containing interludes of nihilism.
Here, I suggest, is the core of your ideological position. Examination of it, and added (responsible) thought in relation to it, opens up the possibility of renovating it; correcting it.
You actually and really live in a world where
the image has dissipated. That adolescent went to work and, applying certain reasoning means, undermined what we mean when we refer to *image*. Then you go on to refer to the
meaning that erstwhile had had power and sovereignty as having been transformed into an *abstraction* with no *contextual relevance*. My view is that your error is here. And it is a serious, consequential error. It has become for us a civilizational error. It captures millions and those millions, just like you, do not have alternatives to its determining power.
For you there can be no existent idea, nor a metaphysical principle, that can and does function
as an anchor functions. In your world -- certainly in relation to ideas, metaphysically defined principles, morals let's say and ethics -- there is nothing *real* in these. All of them are *inventions* and all of them are therefore
arbitrary. You are a man in which
the dissipations have become established. You live within
platformlessness. And then you refer to *new visualizations* (the Ubermensch and the New Man) as if to say -- what alternative is there? -- that in you these
new formulations are evident.
I do appreciate the image of
slow torque and I would infer agonizing processes of being molded by and into these New Formulations ...
However I have a feeling that you may be to some degree deceiving yourself. And that really we all deceive ourselves when we employ these evasive intellectual tools (and that is how I interpret you: as evasive and avoiding). In the end -- even with your New Formulations -- it will involve the metaphysical realm of conception, idealization, and action in response to these. So you have in no sense negated metaphysics! But that was your object, was it not? To posit a more real realm of the real?
The way that I interpret modern disbelief (though all of it has understandable reasoning) is to simultaneously understand it as -- to use your metaphor -- the rebellion of a headstrong child. This does not mean that genuine critique is invalidated, not at all. But I think the psychological element has to be examined more closely.
At the core of the old-school Catholic religion -- as expressed in a catechism -- is an entire world of
obligation and
duty. Ultimately, the end is the service offered to a metaphysical principle. Without the metaphysical principle the *belief system* collapses. There is the disappearing horizon that Nietzsche warned about. And there too is the dissipating image that you mentioned.
All well and good as far as this reasoning goes. But there, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat, the
meaning that stands behind it is still there, just as real, just as compelling, just as motivating as it ever was. That meaning and what it connotes
will never dissipate.
