Yes, but he criticizes Hegel and Schelling for accepting the 'optimistic' view of Christianity — Wayfarer

I actually wrote about that via David Strauss in another thread. Humanists optimized Christianity, made it worldly and optimistic, fused it with the Enlightenment. This is in Kojeve too. Christianity is 'realized' in a free society, no more masters and slaves, no more otherworldly slavish-escapist ideologies. (I don't endorse Kojeve fully, but he's fascinating as a certain extreme.)

You mention becoming. Becoming what? What is the goal? — j0e

What a beautiful question! I answer, to become the God that we think that God ought to be. Think about people in your own life. Are there not at least a few whose lives themselves are inspirational, sometimes even extraordinary? The man who notwithstanding the trials and pitfalls of his own life still loves, cares for, and tries to teach his children the importance of right thinking, right choices, right action. The woman who notwithstanding the perils and the courses of horrors she may have run, takes care of her children and so floods them with love that as adults they may face the world with a steady gaze and give his or her best. There are more of these out there than is generally acknowledged. And against them we have the banal evil of a Trump and his kind, and worse.

This not to say that any individual will get there any time soon - I certainly won't. There are so many obstacles in the way and so many problems to solve, not least the problem of being oneself and true. But I try, and many people try, and in the trying is progress. And if that's the Godhead of a man or a woman, to have done their best even in the face of the world's difficulties, then that's not a bad goal and would be quite a lot for anyone to achieve.

I'm a materialist and I feel exactly like when I was a Catholic

What a beautiful question! I answer, to become the God that we think that God ought to be. — tim wood

I agree, and great post in general. The 'divine' virtues are human virtues. It's no accident, I think, that we could only care about a God (view him as other than a tyrant ) to the degree that this 'God' manifests virtues that we already understand and respond to. Hence 'father' metaphors.

I think about the stoics (maybe because of some forgotten line) in terms of trying to carve themselves into a statue of virtue, trying to 'incarnate' the noble, the magnanimous, the serene. In the same way I think 'imitation of Christ' is an attempt to impose a form on dying flesh, a way of life that forgives so as to transcend resentment and selfishness.

But I try, and many people try, and in the trying is progress. And if that's the Godhead of a man or a woman, to have done their best even in the face of the worlds difficulties, then that's not a bad goal and would be quite a lot for anyone to achieve. — tim wood

I agree. I think we can only try but never perfectly or finally succeed, hence the centrality of forgiveness in any free community. I see rationality as a somewhat open & creative enterprise. We bring ideas to one another and try to achieve consensus, but we can't help in doing stepping on one another's toes (preferences, biases, illusions.) Of course sometimes we'll fail because we are greedy or lazy or cowardly. So we forgive as we hope to be forgiven, a specialization of 'do unto others as you'd be done to.'

The worship of God is: Honouring his gifts in other men humans, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men humans best: those who envy or calumniate great men humans hate God; for there is no other God. — Blake

Schopenhauer argues that philosophy and religion have the same fundamental aim: to satisfy “man’s need for metaphysics,” which is a “strong and ineradicable” instinct to seek explanations for existence that arises from “the knowledge of death, and therewith the consideration of the suffering and misery of life”

In Feuerbach's first book, which ruined his gig in academia when it was insufficiently-anonymously published, he rails against the personal immortality taught by the theology of his times.

During one brief decade, Sydney Hook writes, the whole of German philosophy and culture stood within Feuerbach’s shadow, "If Hegel was the anointed king of German thought in the period from 1820 to 1840, then Feuerbach was the philosophical arch-rebel from the time of the publication of his Das Wesen des Christenthums to the eve of the revolution of 1848" (Hook 1950, 220). At a time when Hegel was seemingly marching down the history in all glory, Feuerbach caught him in his nakedness by pointing out the unreal nature of his theory. Hegel’s mistake lies in his tendency to treat "abstract predicates—reason, thought, consciousness, and being—as entities." (Harvey 1987, 317) In the Hegelian system, nature exists "only as the alienation of the absolute Idea, as it were a degradation of the Idea." (Engels 1903, 52) For Feuerbach, Hegel’s system was standing on its head; it must be inverted in order to get the simple truth, namely all the predicates are only predicates of existing individual human beings. "[Feuerbach] placed materialism on the throne again without any circumlocution. Nature exists independently of all philosophies." (Engels 1903, 53)

Rather than saying that the Absolute Spirit achieves self-realization by actualizing itself in the finite world, Feuerbach argued that the human spirit obtains self-knowledge by objectifying itself in the idea of God. "Religion is not, as Hegel thought, the revelation of the Infinite in the finite; rather, it is the self-discovery by the finite of its own infinite nature. God is the form in which the human spirit first discovers its own essential nature." (Harvey 1995, 27)
— link

http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/bce/feuerbach.htm

Here's a passage from F's first book (not much is online, but I have the paperback and it's a fascinating, young-man's work, sort of Feuerbach's TLP, him at his most almost-mystical.

Accordingly, once all that is truly actual, universal, substantial, once all Spirit, soul, and essence have disappeared from real life, nature, and world history, once everything has been massacred, has been dissolved into its parts, has been rendered without being, without unity, without Spirit, without soul, then, upon the ruins of the broken world, the individual raises the banner of the prophet and stations the abominable sacred watchman of the belief in his immortality and in the pledge of the hereafter. Standing on the ruins of the present life, in which he sees nothingness, all at once there awaken in the individual the feeling and consciousness of his own inner nothingness; and in the feeling of this double nothingness there flow from him, as from a Scipio on the ruins of Carthage, the compassionate teardrops and soap bubbles of the world of the future. Over the gap that lies between the present life as it really is and his perception and representation of it, over the pores and gaps in his own soul, the individual erects the fools’ bridge of the future life. After he has allowed to wither the fruit trees, the roses and lilies of the present world, after he has sickled away grass, cabbage, and corn and has transformed the whole world into a desiccated field of stubble, there finally springs up, in the empty feeling of his futility and the impotent consciousness of his vanity, as the weak semblance and faint illusion of the living, fresh time when flowers bloom, the nondescript, pale red, faded autumn crocus of immortality. Because nothing exists in the subject but the truthless subject itself, and because nothing exists outside of the subject but the temporal and the transitory, the finite, nothing but that which is false and unreal in the real world, it stands to reason that for the subject the real world is an unreal, future, otherworldly world. For the hereafter is nothing but the mistaken, misconceived, and misinterpreted real world. The subject knows only the shadow, the superficial external appearance of the real world, because he is only shallow and hollow in himself. He mistakes the shadow of the world for the world itself; and his idea of the really true world must be only a shadow, the illusion and fantastical dream of the future world. — F

https://materialreligions.blogspot.com/2015/01/thoughts-on-death-and-immortality.html

Fitche, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer all held the same philosophy after you put unnecessary details away. They are materialists and turn their mind to idealist psychology and *will* over the brute reality, although they could not deny that their life was purely biological. It is good to insist on a soul and all the idealist stuff is fascinating in its own way. The only trust idealists thinkers are people like Berkeley who came from a truly religious perspective. I imagine Hegel was happier than materialista who were more blunt ( "honest") who rejected him as con act. If you like, you could say he had more faith.

Lastly, Kant was a little different. He seemed to have a mind like Descartes but more into logic than math and incapable of finding a logic to believe in the way Descartes did.

Fitche, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer all held the same philosophy after you put unnecessary details away. — Gregory

Those details are also known as their philosophies. I think I'll trust Schop when he implies a significant difference.

Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who thus joined into as perfect a chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption of a whole generation. — Schopenhauer

http://afreeleftblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-flat-headed-insipid-nauseating.html

FWIW, I think Schop is a great stylist but too hard on Hegel, envious as he was for similar recognition (weep and you weep alone.)

Adding to what Wayf mentioned (H's optimism versus S's pessimism), there's also their treatment of time and history. For Hegel, history matters, is going somewhere bigger & better. For Schop, not so much. He thinks it's enough to have read Herodotus, cuz things just repeat.

German idealists are different in some respects from each other, but there is a reason the four greats of that tradition are of one school in the eyes of academia. They pounded their tables in rhythm as they forced themselves to view the bland world of matter in novel ways

"One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive." ~F.N.

Buddhism is not theistic in the Western sense, but it's not atheist in the modern sense. In the Buddha's day there were philosophers called carvaka who were strict materialists, just like today's. The Buddha rejects materialism because it implies that there is no continuity of karma, that at death, there are no consequences of actions in life. Anyway there's a thread on Buddhism, this conversation ought to move to there. — Wayfarer

For what it's worth, folly or not, I've always interprered "karma" as habit-action, "death" in Buddha"s sense here as (the inevitable fall into deep) sleep and "reincarnation" as waking-up from sleep (i.e. another new day to try again to cultivate right / better habits by performing right / better (while refraining from wrong / worse) actions —> today's dukkha are the "consequences" of yesterday's karma (re: each Buddhist's daily experience of "the wheel of rebirth"... "samsara-nirvana")) so that, therefore, Buddhist practice can, in this way I think reasonably (pragmatically), be interpreted as consistent, or compatible, with Carvaka (i.e. 'atoms-in-void') materialism. I suspect that "the Buddha rejects materialism" was just his followers' apologetics appended much later to the Buddhist canon just like St. Paul's propagandistic "Letters" centuries after they were "written" were used by the Bishops at Nicea to (filter-out and) repurpose the "Gospels".

Also, like Buddhism, ancient atomists like Epicurus were neither theists nor atheists in the contemporary sense. (He) taught that in so far as there were any "gods" they too were made up of atoms and void, but in perfect atomic configurations, and therefore extremely far away from – in their perfect "bliss" oblivious of – imperfect atomic configurations such as "mortals" and "the cosmos" (re: the Tetrapharmakos).

. 'Transcendence' is the impossible idea of concept without soundbody. 'Immanence' is recognizing what was thought to be transcendent as a 'form' that cannot be isolated from its 'flesh' (the breath or the ink in which we signal.) — j0e

I'd have to do some reading to be certain of what you mean, but would agree that the concept of "transcendence"--of something apart from the universe, like a transcendent God--is unreasonable if not impossible. We're part of the universe and incapable of even imagining something beyond it. When we purport to do so, we're saying that there's something outside the universe which is like something we've encountered in the universe, but better or greater in some sense. What we are, know, do, think, imagine and communicate are all "confined" in the universe.

:100: :fire:

I suspect that "the Buddha rejects materialism" was just his followers' apologetics appended much later to the Buddhist canon just like St. Paul's propagandistic "Letters" centuries after they were "written" were used by the Bishops at Nicea to (filter-out and) repurpose the "Gospels". — 180 Proof

There is a character called Prince Payasi in the earliy texts, who was indeed a textbook materialists. One of the anecdotes relates how he would seal prisoners in a large jar and weigh it before and after they died to see if the supposed departure of the soul could be weighed. (It couldn't.)

On the broader topic, Buddhists reject atomism, on the grounds that if a particle was divisionless, then it would have no sides, because sides are parts. And if it didn't have any sides then it couldn;t come into contact with anything. (That's from memory, I'm hazy on the detail.)

Buddhist 'atomism' was characterised by the belief in momentary elements of experience (another meaning of 'dharma') which arise and pass away in imperceptibly short periods of time. But they never agree with the concept of an enduring material point-particles on dogmatic grounds. There has been quite a bit of discussion between the Dalai Lama and physicists on philosophy of physics (e,g, here.)

"transcendence"--of something apart from the universe, like a transcendent God--is unreasonable if not impossible — Ciceronianus the White

Ordinary numbers are transcendent, because they don't come into or go out of existence. ;-)

Numbers go out of existence when no one is thinking of them. Either you are affirming pure Platonism or what you say makes no sense. Truth is not a substance "out there" but instead the proper formation of a soul that emerges from biology

I find presiding over all reason. The capacity to use tools to determine knowledge and winnow it from the chaff of unreason. — tim wood

Quite honestly I find this utter nonsense. After reading the somewhat incoherent text, and providing no references, I'm not really sure you know what you're talkin about. Can you explain the nature of reason? (This will be one question of many.)

Quite honestly I find this utter nonsense. — 3017amen

If you're being honest then I cannot help you, because you, appearing to lack even basic understanding of the words, are beyond what I can help. If you're being dishonest, then the words don't matter, nor you for that matter.

Can you explain the nature of reason? ( — 3017amen

Second time, please answer the question.

Tim woods go to argument is "you don't understand words"

You are a fine writer but don't or can't draw conclusions. Having a phobia about conclusions doesn't mean you are best at understanding words.

I mean reason to be the application of logic to various things in various ways as appropriate to those things and ways, to the end of understanding them. The particular application being just the argument itself. I hold reason to preside because at the most fundamental level the details of understanding should make sense. And if sense cannot be made of them, then it is hard to see how they're reasonable.

The world, of course, from time to time shows us phenomena the facts of which seem neither sensible nor reasonable. But so far that has been just a challenge to adjust/refine the understanding itself to make it again reasonable. And where for the moment that seems impossible, then reason dictates we say we do not know.

My goodness it's as if you don't understand philosophy at all? Don't take this the wrong way but that's incoherent gibberish. I'll ask you for the third time:

Explain the nature of human reason?

I have other questions too, with your thesis, but for now please answer the question.

If we go back a ways, we will find at least a few questions I asked you that you ducked away from and never answered even as I asked you several times. Even now in another thread I asked you, you did not answer but asked me something instead. I answered, but you refused and have continued to refuse answer. And now here I have answered you again, but you make no coherent reply, but just repeat your question, now itself rendered incoherent.

Clearly you're exhibiting some kind of mental illness. I request you stop. As it is your behavior is vicious and toxic, a sign of illness. But this is not a therapy site. Best for you and all others concerned if you get your help elsewhere.

I mean reason to be the application of logic to various things in various ways as appropriate to those things and ways, to the end of understanding them. The particular application being just the argument itself. I hold reason to preside because at the most fundamental level the details of understanding should make sense. And if sense cannot be made of them, then it is hard to see how they're reasonable.

The world, of course, from time to time shows us phenomena the facts of which seem neither sensible nor reasonable. But so far that has been just a challenge to adjust/refine the understanding itself to make it again reasonable. And where for the moment that seems impossible, then reason dictates we say we do not know. — tim wood

:100: :fire:

My goodness it's as if you don't understand philosophy at all? — 3017amen

:rofl:

Explain the nature of human reason?

:point: ; or see quote with emphases above, 3017.

This is a philosophy site mr. Wood. I will ask you for the 4th time:

What is the nature of human reason?

How offer you an olive branch:

What is the nature of human belief systems?

Perhaps that will come easier to you.

I mean reason to be the application of logic ... — tim wood

If by logic you mean bivalent logic then you run into problem with its application to the world since the world does not divide neatly into either/or determinations.

by logic you mean bivalent logic then you run into problem with its application to the world since the world does not divide neatly into either/or determinations. — Fooloso4

:up:

Yet another problem with mr. Wood's thesis:

What is the nature of human belief systems?

This is the second time I've asked you please answer the question.

What is the nature of human belief systems? — 3017amen

The overwhelming evidence shows that most "human belief systems" are a jambalaya of (irreflective) cognitive biases, in/formal fallacies & placeholder narratives. (Yours for example!)

The “stop baiting” warning should carry over here.

Would it set a record, that the same group of children are responsible for the closing of two separate threads, at practically the same time, and for the same reason?

(Sigh)

The overwhelming evidence shows that most "human belief systems" are a jambalaya of (irreflective) cognitive biases, in/formal fallacies & placeholder narratives. — 180 Proof

Good point 180! We're patient, we'll wait for mr. Wood to reply

We're patient, we'll wait for mr. Wood to reply — 3017amen

Just what is it about his definition of reason that you are unable to comprehend? He did give one, you know. It was this:

I mean reason to be the application of logic to various things in various ways as appropriate to those things and ways, to the end of understanding them. The particular application being just the argument itself. I hold reason to preside because at the most fundamental level the details of understanding should make sense. And if sense cannot be made of them, then it is hard to see how they're reasonable.

The world, of course, from time to time shows us phenomena the facts of which seem neither sensible nor reasonable. But so far that has been just a challenge to adjust/refine the understanding itself to make it again reasonable. And where for the moment that seems impossible, then reason dictates we say we do not know. — tim wood