Dubious wrote: ↑Tue Nov 15, 2022 12:07 amAlexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Mon Nov 14, 2022 11:29 pmBe that as it may the attitude communicated in the poem has the most importance. It connects to other attitudes and ideas which ground otherworldliness and thus are of use to us.
It's well-written but I find its sentiments mundane.
Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Mon Nov 14, 2022 11:29 pmMy interest (personally of course) is in those antidotes to the infiltration of eastern ideas and the recovery by a people of those attitudes and elements that can define a new and better modality.
Sorry, but I don't quite get the gist of your meaning here.
Having always stated that "I am here for my own purposes" I mean to say that I am involved in my own project of sorting through everything that we talk about here. There is one important distinction though: I have been, and still am, quite involved with and interested in The Culture Wars. In my view, perhaps I could say ultimately, The Culture Wars are
metaphysical struggles at the base.
Here, in this present thread, we seem to be taking a definitive stance against an Evangelical Christian. The person *Immanuel Can* is not relevant to the struggle we are involved in. What we oppose is the *idea-constructs* to which he has wedded himself. Oddly, that puts me in a position of needing to argue against his metaphysical structures. These are giant assertions about what the world is and about the ruling structure that, in this metaphysics, is understood to rule the entire manifestation. So the Christian, borrowing directly from the Hebrew, defines a world, a cosmos, a ruler, the ruled, the purpose of the existence of All Things in a grandiose metaphysics which is imposed and enforced through the terms that we have been discussing here: You will get with the program, and you will surrender yourself to the Reigning Idea, or through your rebellion you will choose your destiny in a post-existential realm of permanent torture.
This is why, of course, I made an effort to suggest to Henry that here, in this tactic, we can see the ur-tactic of psychological manipulation.
However, standing behind this specific declaration about The Nature of Things, and here we have exposed some of the OT biblical declarations of the Mad Yahweh whose project is about Ultimate Power (that all enemies will be eliminated and the Earth will become the possession of the Tribe who have been selected to rule it), we come face-to-face, or I come face-to-face, with the fact that other and more ancient religious and metaphysical systems have certainly defined a Cosmic Order and have on that basis, or in relation to that Idea, organized social and cultural life into
civilization. I am thinking specifically of Ṛta:
In the Vedic religion, Ṛta (/ɹ̩ta/; Sanskrit ऋत ṛta "order, rule; truth; logos") is the principle of natural order which regulates and coordinates the operation of the universe and everything within it. In the hymns of the Vedas, Ṛta is described as that which is ultimately responsible for the proper functioning of the natural, moral and sacrificial orders. Conceptually, it is closely allied to the injunctions and ordinances thought to uphold it, collectively referred to as Dharma, and the action of the individual in relation to those ordinances, referred to as Karma – two terms which eventually eclipsed Ṛta in importance as signifying natural, religious and moral order in later Hinduism. Sanskrit scholar Maurice Bloomfield referred to Ṛta as "one of the most important religious conceptions of the Rigveda, going on to note that, "from the point of view of the history of religious ideas we may, in fact we must, begin the history of Hindu religion at least with the history of this conception".
We can easily see that the system that Immanuel Can holds to and defends is, in fact, a
commensurate or
comparable sort of System. If one does not get this, if one does not understand that this is what the Hebrew-Christian system actually is, I think that one will miss the crucial point. And that point is that it is inevitable that man define the Cosmic Order. True it is though -- and you and BigMike (and others) can be cited as examples -- that one can try to absent oneself from this endeavor, dismiss the metaphysical notions that come through the human psyche, and attempt to locate *truth* within science facts (
scientism perhaps), and imagine that one is free from the necessity of metaphysical definition . . . But my assertion is that this is impossible. It is an illusion. And it is one not without significant dangers.
So in reference to the poem I said:
"be that as it may the attitude communicated in the poem has the most importance. It connects to other attitudes and ideas which ground otherworldliness and thus are of use to us."
Clearly, and I think everyone here understands this, men like Goethe were
confronting something that we ourselves are also confronting but 200 years later. What is this? Perhaps we could answer this question if we became clear about what, exactly, we are arguing
against, with a good deal of vehemence, in the position that our own Evangelical Christian is holding to, and must hold to, with a corresponding vehemence. This brings us into the realm of
The Culture Wars.
I also said:
My interest (personally of course) is in those antidotes to the infiltration of eastern ideas and the recovery by a people of those attitudes and elements that can define a new and better modality.
Here I can say with surety that the gist of the unfolding conversation will move into a difficult, a fraught, and also a dangerous zone. Simply put the rejection of Christianity is the rejection of Judaism. Now, the rejection of Judeo-Christianity definitely brings one into the zone of
The Culture Wars and directly into ideological, cultural and other sorts of struggles that are playing out today.
But it also means -- that is to say that the rejection of the Cosmic Order on which the Christian vision and metaphysics is constructed means -- that you will either do without any sort of defined order and accept the *erasure of the horizon* with no replacement offered, or you will have to define a new order, a new conceptual order that will become common, accepted and even perhaps universal.
It is obvious to me, and I assume it is obvious to all who write here, and it is certainly obvious to Immanuel Can (as chief representative of the Christian metaphysic) that the rejection of Judeo-Christianity has immense ramifications. But as we see (if we are paying attention to contemporary events) the cultural and the ideological battles rage right in front of us.
So I referred to *the infiltration of eastern ideas* in the form of Judeo-Christianity and to the prospect of *recovery by a people of those attitudes and elements that can define a new and better modality*.
For up against the gods
No man
Should measure himself.
If he raises himself
And touches the stars
With his head,
Nowhere can the insecure
Soles of his feet take grip,
And he will be the plaything
Of the winds and the clouds.
If he stands firm
On vigorous bone
On well-established,
Enduring soil,
He will reach a height
To compare himself
Only to the oak
Or the vine.
It is not merely poetic device to refer to *gods*, it is to take possession of, to repossess, ideas that are more peculiar to Indo-Europeanism in a far larger sense. To dethrone an absolute authority and a rather tyrannical god-concept will inevitably thrust one (that is Indo-European man) back into s set of definitions about
what is but also
who one is. Which is what I take Goethe to be doing here.
To define oneself and one's being within a holistic world, in a world in which
gods exist, is presented as a needed and necessary act. It is a very different way of looking at the World. It is on that *ground* that this man sees himself as recovering himself. And only on that ground and *on vigorous bone* can man become similar to what an *oak* stands for: the Donar's Oak and obviously Thor's Oak (hence the reference to *beneficent bolts of lightning").
And certainly to refer to:
A never-ending stream.
We are raised up by waves,
Waves consume us
And we go under.
A small ring
Is the limit of our life,
And the many generations
Ceaselessly link them
To the endless chain
Of their existence.
Is to re-propose an entirely different definition of
world.
But this is what we have been talking about, is it not? Relinquishing *afterworlds* and worlds that are presented as *truer worlds* and *more real worlds* that stand against
this present world, and
resolving to reside, again, here and within a cycle of life that is defined in radically different terms to that of Christian eschatological vision.
