This is the key idea on which the entire edifice of Hegelianism was to be constructed: there is no absolute difference between the human nature and the divine. — https://mises.org/library/hegel-and-man-god
God is nothing but.... — Feuerbach
As a speculative theologian, Eriugena concerned himself with the question, why did God have a need to create, or, “why is there something rather than nothing?”...
The answer to the question of 'why God creates' constitutes a theodicy that anticipates what must logically follow as the reason d’être of the hidden principles in nature that the natural philosopher seeks to uncover. Eriugena’s answer to the question of 'why God creates' is that, before God created, He Himself had no existence; thus, God and his making, or His creative action, are not distinguishable, but come into being co-constitutively. Whatever is understood in Him is actualized and participates in Him. Creation, in the orthodox sense of an ontological wedge driven between God and nature, is for Eriugena only metaphorical because the creator does not transcend nature, and therefore the creation is not dependent on the creator, nor does the creator depend on the creation — the creator and His creation are of the same indivisible substance. (Note this anticipates pantheism, although that is a term which did not exist at the time.]
Accordingly, the metaphysical speculation of Eriugena pre-supposes no radical separation between the creator and the creation [however, see note below]; hence, his supposition that the creation is of the same substance as that which is created, as in the case of Plotinus’ order of metaphysical entities emanating from the One. All things, events, and their consequences, are rationally and logically connected. According to Eriugena, there is reason and purpose inscribed in the order of nature because the source of nature is itself rational and purposive. The motives of human beings, then, are the motives of God; furthermore, the rational nature of the human subject allows the rational mind of man to access and become one with the rationally intelligible object. In terms of nature achieving final stability and perfection, the cycle of the return of nature to its divine source crowns Eriugena’s conception of God as the beginning, middle, and end of Himself.
According to Hegel, the act of the World Spirit coming to know itself through human history is likewise a dialectical process that culminates in the manifestation of universal freedom [here is where you can see the indebtedness to Eirugena]. The Hegelian contribution to the conception of 'God becoming man' plays out in his conception of the progress of world history, which is moved through a series of punctuated events involving what are referred to by Hegel as “world historical individuals.” These individuals, of which such men as Caesar and Napoleon are exemplars, are the tools of the World Spirit, the means by which history is moved forward. Great leaders, while believing themselves to be in command of their own will and actions, are in reality guided by the World Spirit towards the achievement of its necessary end, which is the coming to a knowledge of itself through history.
an affirmation concerning the lower (order) is a negation concerning the higher, and so too a negation concerning the lower (order) is an affirmation concerning the higher. (Periphyseon, I.444a)
According to this mode, the affirmation of man is the negation of angel and vice versa. This mode illustrates Eriugena's original way of dissolving the traditional Neoplatonic hierarchy of being into a dialectic of affirmation and negation: to assert one level is to deny the others. In other words, a particular level may be affirmed to be real by those on a lower or on the same level, but the one above it is thought not to be real in the same way. If humans are thought to exist in a certain way, then angels do not exist in that way.
The unity of thought and being has meaning and truth only if man is comprehended as the basis and subject of this unity. Only a real being cognises real things; only where thought is not its own subject but the predicate of a real being is it not separated from being. The unity of thought and being is therefore not formal, meaning that being as a determination does not belong to thought in and for itself; rather, this unity depends on the object, the content of thought.
From this arises the following categorical imperative: Desire not to be a philosopher if being a philosopher means being different to man; do not be anything more than a thinking man; think not as a thinker, that is, not as one confined to a faculty which is isolated in so far as it is torn away from the totality of the real being of man; think as a living, real being, in which capacity you are exposed to the vivifying and refreshing waves of the ocean of the world; think as one who exists, as one who is in the world and is part of the world, not as one in the vacuum of abstraction, not as a solitary monad, not as an absolute monarch, not as an unconcerned, extra-worldly God; only then can you be sure that being and thought are united in all your thinking. How should thought as the activity of a real being not grasp real things and entities? Only when thought is cut off from man and confined to itself do embarrassing, fruitless, and, from the standpoint of an isolated thought, unresolvable questions arise: How does thought reach being, reach the object? For confined to itself, that is, posited outside man, thought is outside all ties and connections with the world. You elevate yourself to an object only in so far as you lower yourself so as to be an object for others. You think only because your thoughts themselves can be thought, and they are true only if they pass the test of objectivity, that is, when someone else, to whom they are given as objects, acknowledges them as such. You see because you are yourself a visible being, you feel because you are yourself a feelable being. Only to an open mind does the world stand open, and the openings of the mind are only the senses. But the thought that exists in isolation, that is enclosed in itself, is detached from the senses, cut off from man, is outside man – that thought is absolute subject which cannot or ought not to be an object for others. But precisely for that reason, and despite all efforts, it is forever unable to cross over to theobject , to being; it is like a head separated from the body, which must remain unable to seize hold of an object because it lacks the means, the organs to do so. — F
It is as a universal, too, that we(3) give utterance to sensuous fact. What we say is: “This”, i.e. the universal this; or we say: “it is”, i.e. being in general. Of course we do not present before our mind in saying, so the universal this, or being in general, but we utter what is universal; in other words, we do not actually and absolutely say what in this sense-certainty we really mean. Language, however, as we see, is the more truthful; in it we ourselves refute directly and at once our own “meaning”; and since universality is the real truth of sense-certainty, and language merely expresses this truth, it is not possible at all for us even to express in words any sensuous existence which we “mean”.
...
Pure being, then, remains as the essential element for this sense-certainty, since sense-certainty in its very nature proves the universal to be the truth of its object. But that pure being is not in the form of something immediate, but of something in which the process of negation and mediation is essential. — H
Of course I think they're both great. Hegel is spectacular. His critics often take and use more than they object to. They sacrifice the husk to save the kernel.The most important thing to realise is that absolute thought, that is, thought which is isolated and cut off from sensuousness, cannot get beyond formal identity – the identity of thought with itself; for although thought or concept is determined as the unity of opposite determinations, the fact remains that these determinations are themselves only abstractions, thought-determinations – hence, always repetitions of the self-identity of thought, only multipla of identity as the absolutely true point of departure. The Other as counterposed to the Idea, but posited by the Idea itself, is not truly and in reality distinguished from it, not allowed to exist outside the Idea, or if it is, then only pro forma, only in appearance to demonstrate the liberality of the idea; for the Other of the Idea is itself Idea with the only difference that it does not yet have the form of the idea, that it is not yet posited and realised as such. Thought confined to itself is thus unable to arrive at anything positively distinct from and opposed to itself; for that very reason it also has no other criterion of truth except that something does not contradict the Idea or thought – only a formal, subjective criterion that is not in a position to decide whether the truth of thought is also the truth of reality. Ale criterion which alone can decide this question is sensuous perception. One should always hear the opponent. And sensuous perception is precisely the antagonist of thought. Sensuous perception takes things in a broad sense, but thought takes them in the narrowest sense; perception leaves things in their unlimited freedom, but thought imposes on them laws that are only too often despotic; perception introduces clarity into the head, but without determining or deciding anything; thought performs a determining function, but it also often makes the mind narrow; perception in itself has no principles and thought in itself has no life; the rule is the way of thought and exception to the rule is that of perception. Hence, just as true perception is perception determined by thought, so true thought is the thought that has been enlarged and opened up by perception so as to correspond to the essence of reality. The thought that is identical, and exists in an uninterrupted continuity, with itself, lets the world circle, in contradiction to reality, around itself as its center; but the thought that is interrupted through the observation as to the irregularity of this movement, or through the anomaly of perception, transforms this circular movement into an elliptical one in accordance with the truth. The circle is the symbol, the coat of arms of speculative philosophy, of the thought that has only itself to support itself. — F
I didn't much like Feuerback, or Marx, for that matter, or any of other European atheists intellectuals. My view always was, they're reacting against the extreme pressure to conform that characterised the Western and European religious tradition. In European history, the Church was for a long while the only central authority and political power. The various wars of religion and other conflicts, engendered a massive counter-movement, exemplified in Enlightenment rationalism, of which the secular intelligentsia are a product.
But this reaction was based on a particular type of religous mentality and an authoritarian conception of God. It is not at all like the understanding of the mystics, the spiritually illuminated, and many other forms of religious sensibility that existed inside, outside and along side the Church-dominated authoritarianism of the West.
I take your point. Still, when we speak as "philosophers" (or present a crystallization of our living personality in a blog post), we are indeed (like it or not) carving a persona, which is to say an image of ourselves in the mind of another. We do not have direct access to one another. We do tend to attempt at least to control this image. And this makes sense, since we largely define ourselves in terms of the inferior other (liberals versus conservatives is an easy example). We know all too well (from our own dark hearts) how quick to stereotype and categorize that pesky, self-preserving Other can be.
Maybe some of the moral stickiness of this stems from the Romantic idea that a work in any given medium can - and ought - to express fully the person who creates it. — csalisbury
One way to sidestep this dynamic is to view any expression, in any medium, as operating within an (inherited) genre. It's impossible for a work, within a genre, to express the whole, and there's no way to escape genre into the Genre of all Genres. Literature's 'realists,' for example, quickly, helplessly, developed their own set of conventions (and also half-consciously imported a whole bunch of old ones.) — csalisbury
his is a kind of language-game type view. A blog post (or anything else) would consist of 'moves' within a game. In addition to object-level moves (just the shit you talk about: Recipes maybe or thoughts on Hegel or Hillary's being implicated by Benghazi etc.) there are also meta-moves which
- communicate your own credentials to make certain object-level moves ('hell I was THERE at Benghazi" "I went to a prestigious culinary school" etc.)
- anticipate and prevent undesired countermoves ( "I know DMT has a reputation, but I'm not one of those Joe Rogan bros, my experience with it stems from my background in chemistry" "One objection to what I've said is x, but this is why x doesn't apply here" etc.)
- change the rules of the game itself (Having trouble thinking of a good example at the moment, but basically reframing things in a way that disrupts the way one's audience has grown to expect how one move will lead to another.)
- facilitate a transition from one game to another ( "OH YEAH, how bout you come down here and say that to my face!" — csalisbury
I agree with all of this. But I feel compelled to clarify my own position. I try to avoid thinking in terms of oughts (beyond simple prudence). Instead I think in terms of desire. I desire to create the genre or game if necessary to express myself fully, but really this already exists partially in my best relationships. Occasionally one bumps up against limits and greedily fantasizes about a yet more circular ellipse. For instance, I'm "alone" with my favorite books in real life. Part of my reason for appearing on a forum like this is simply the desire to share affection for certain glorious ideas or realizations, which for me is more or less synonymous with friendship in a highly sublimated form. Anonymity is beautiul. We are "pure spirit." We are word-streams. Of course the bodiless god of the OP comes to mind. I experience my own name as a toe-tag. I didn't choose it. Of course that's silly and eccentric, but I associate it with what I respect about myself. History is a nightmare from which we continuously awake. (It's not that dire of a situation, but who doesn't wince as their stupid, former selves?Anyway, the whole idea is that, if you get rid of the notion that you can or ought to express yourself fully in any one game, then the authentic/inauthentic dialectic and the language of masks no longer applies. An attack on one's honor isn't an unmasking, but an assault on one's right to participate in this or that social or political game. Of course that doesn't make it any less emotionally charged.
& of course, things don't break apart that easily. We contain multitudes, right, and we're animated by different forces that are all jostling to play different games, often at the same time. Many different uses can be made of the same game. So, for instance: talking about an alternative reading of Sartre's Being and Nothingness can be both an analysis germane to the topic and hand and a way of signalling that you have the capacity to not only comprehend difficult texts, but to also understand it at a level that goes beyond simply grasping what the author is trying to communicate. — csalisbury
I still can't meditate very well, but I started to get better when I realized the point wasn't to shut up my inner dialogue, but to watch it without identifying with it. (That's a truism, but it took me a long time to realize what that really meant.) But the neat part was seeing how my inner chatter consisted of a bunch of different, like, voices, each with very different goals. One would talk about how much I fucked this up, and that that meant I was BAD . One would talk about conceivable fantasy futures where I'm recognized as really great for x, y or z. One would talk about reasonable, practical ways to do this or that. One (instantly shouted out by the others) would try to get me to remember this or that memory from childhood.
One in particular though, was (is) super obsessed with stating novel truths. It's an end-in-itself for this voice. It's always on the prowl for new material to do this. But it's also kind of dumb in that it seems to think that the next truth will be the final one, despite that (obviously) never having happened in the past. This voice likes to team up with the voice that says I'm BAD and the voice that talks about fantasy futures. Or rather, the fantasy future voice and the let's-say-a-truth voice are constantly fighting with the bad voice, in a futile sisyphean tug-of-war. 'You're Bad.' 'But you could be very good!' 'And one way to do that is to find a truth, and say it!' — csalisbury
To go back: while the dialectic is useful, it seems to unfold by drowning out most of the voices, in order to highlight a select few. And when those voices have the stage, they like to pretend they're the only ones.
This seems impossible to escape if you're (half-consciously) identifying with any given voice (and so assenting to what it says). It takes effort - for me at least - to remember that anything I happen to be thinking at any time is only a small part of the actual situation.
So, there was a time when I would have written this whole thing goaded on by the 'future fantasy' voice, only to realize that I was looking for recognition for stating a final truth, which would make me feel bad.
But like, Idk, its part true, part not. I'm trying to convey something I actually feel, and, probably, some of the other voices, or tendencies, are gonna try to get their cut, but that's only a small part of the whole.
(Also NB these aren't 'real' voices.) — csalisbury
Still, I'm amazed you two get all this from Feuerbach, whom I've tried, but to me he's only seemed a footnote to Marx on the one hand and George Eliot (his first translator) on the other. Maybe I need to give him another go. :) — mcdoodle
That sets off all my reductionist red flags... — Wayfarer
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