The religions of the world are in tatters. We feel in our hearts that they all have historical spiritual validity, but are conflicted by their contradictory teachings about metaphysical, ethical, and historical doctrine. We are all left wondering if there can be any supernatural truth at all. We fear that all of that heartfelt spirituality was merely delusion, simply wishful thinking by our frightened and confused ancestors. If one teaching is true, then the others must all be wrong. All of the wise men and women of those other religions, their prophets, merely misguided. From a stricter, sectarian perspective, they are worse than misguided; they are heretics, false prophets, liars. And yet, I cannot reject the notion that many of the believers believed from their heart, truly did commune with God, and found a source of strength in their religions, which helped them to be better people, to inspire others to goodness, and to achieve peace.
Globalism, multiculturalism, liberalism, whatever you want to call it; I see it less and less as a chosen ideology, and more as the unavoidable moral wasteland left over due to the death of traditional religious belief, as Nietzsche diagnosed. We are lost sheep in need of a shepherd. I don't think the prophets of the past can satisfy this present day, world-wide problem. This is a task for a new prophet: to unify the religions under God, to pay respect to all traditional beliefs, to recognize that some ideas are from a past revelation meant for an era and place and people, and to provide salvation for mankind from this spiritual desert.
Can this be done? Is it a logical impossibility? What would the teachings be of this New Covenant? I think this is the task theologians of all heritages need to throw themselves into. To decide on what God truly wants of us. The only alternative I see for mankind is widespread atheism -- and therefore widespread despair and sin -- combined with sectarian warfare, the same sort that doomed Jerusalem in 70 AD.
I am not concerned with the politics of this world, so much as I am about the next world. I am not a warrior, I have decided. But I worry about the souls of mankind in this generation and those that follow. And I myself want to know the truth, rather than to succumb to a tradition based solely on my heritage, or rather which one just "seems the most right". I have found inspiration in every religion I have studied. I want there to be God in all the great prophets. I want everyone who fought for God, even in opposing armies, to be understood. And I feel in my bones, that this impulse, this desire to understand and love all people, living and dead, comes from God. It cannot come from the devil.
We must remember that the prophets of the past were heretics to their traditions. All of them greatly respected their past prophets, but they respectfully disagreed as well. For them to flourish, enough time had passed, the world was in enough lack of God, that they drew followings. God revealed something new to them. Jesus was crucified for his teachings, because he chose to listen to God and not the Pharisees. He alluded to Jewish Scripture and history, because he was a Jew preaching to Jews, and it was their reference. But God ultimately transcends any particular people and their history. God is for all people. And this must be the new religious doctrine that carries the world forward.
The great “signs of the times” in 1945 offered themselves in the wrecked cities of Europe and Japan, the “liberated” concentration camps and POW camps, the presence of the Red Army in Eastern Europe all the way to Vienna, and the new omen of the mushroom cloud. The world’s victorious governments and their eager servants, the agencies of the free press, hastened to call the concatenation of these things “peace” – a “verbalism” which when seen starkly against its background becomes suggestive of actual dementia. Guénon had written The Reign of Quantity during the conflict yet tellingly and deliberately the book barely mentions the war. Eschewing the topical, Guénon returns to his patient diagnosis of modern intellectual and cultural degradation, always keen to reveal the origin of modern perversity. Vital – which is to say, traditional – civilizations acknowledge quality as superior to quantity; such civilizations eschew quantity for its own sake and thus often appear to modern people to have lived in material poverty. The modern idea of the Middle Ages corresponds to this prejudice, which in its turn indicates the impoverishment of modern thinking.
For Guénon the idea of “democracy” belongs ineradicably to the mentality that values quantity over quality, so much so that it despises the latter – in the social, moral, and esthetic senses – for being incompatible with the so-called equality. It is this, equality, which supplies that mentality’s overriding desideratum. Guénon steadfastly refuses to allow any dignity to the word “democracy,” which he takes as synonymous with modernity’s mad insistence on equalizing all human achievement at the lowest level, the only level at which such a project could come near to completing itself. Thus in the chapter on “The Hatred of Secrecy,” Guénon addresses the pedagogical folly that tries to bring the totality of knowledge and every associated practice “within the reach of all.” Nowadays conservative commentary refers to such programs under the names of “dumbing down” and “affirmative action,” which it would locate as recent developments. Guénon sees the process as co-incipient with Protestant and Revolutionary spitefulness against constituted authority in any domain. Guénon writes: “The modern mentality… cannot bear any secret or even any reserve,” but “such things appear only as ‘privileges.’” The modern mentality again despises “any kind of superiority” of intellect or mastery because the fact that these things require preparation, capacity, and attunement “is just what ‘egalitarianism’ so obstinately denies.”
capitalism posted:Guénon
died a muslim
Edited by babyfinland ()
Just as Kafka intuited in his extraordinary parable on parables (“Von den Gleichnissen”), the messianic is the simultaneous abolition and realization of the as if, and the subjeect wishing to indefinitely maintain himself in similitude (in the as if), while contemplating his ruin, simply loses the wager. He who upholds himself in the messianic vocation no logner knows the as if, he no longer has similutdes at his disposal. He knows that in messianic time the saved world coincides with the world that is irretrievably lost, and that, to use Bonhoeffer’s words, he must now really live in a world without God. This means that he may not disguise this world’s being-without-God in any way. The saving God is the God who abandons hims, and the fact of representations (the fact of the as if) cannot prtend to save the appearance of salvation. The messianic subject does not contemplate the world as though it were saved. In Benjamin’s words, he contempaltes salvation only to the extent that he loses himself in what cannot be saved; this is how difficult it is to dwell in the calling.
A quote from Chesterton's lovely apologetic, Orthodoxy:
I was brought up a Liberal, and have always believed in democracy, in the elementary liberal doctrine of a self-governing humanity. If any one finds the phrase vague or threadbare, I can only pause for a moment to explain that the principle of democracy, as I mean it, can be stated in two propositions. The first is this: that the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men...
And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common... In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves -- the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. This is democracy; and in this I have always believed...
But there is one thing that I have never from my youth up been able to understand. I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. The man who quotes some German historian against the tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. He is appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob. It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad. Those who urge against tradition that men in the past were ignorant may go and urge it at the Carlton Club, along with the statement that voters in the slums are ignorant. It will not do for us. If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable. Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father.
(edit: bolding mine)
Edited by Alyosha ()
Superabound posted:Malcolm X truly was the last and greatest hope America ever had
Ideas never die
capitalism posted:Ideas never die
sometimes they live just long enough to see themselves become the villain
i remember in high school thinking X was too "violent" and racist lol
just a little snapshot into my early life as a milquetoast white liberal dweeb
HEIDEGGER: Those questions bring us back to the beginning of our conversation. If I may answer quickly and perhaps somewhat vehemently, but from long reflection: Philosophy will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all merely human meditations and endeavors. Only a god can still save us. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god.
shennong posted:SPIEGEL: Fine. But now the question of course poses itself: Can the individual still influence this network of inevitabilities at all, or can philosophy influence it, or can they both influence it together in that philosophy leads one individual or several individuals to a certain action?
HEIDEGGER: Those questions bring us back to the beginning of our conversation. If I may answer quickly and perhaps somewhat vehemently, but from long reflection: Philosophy will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all merely human meditations and endeavors. Only a god can still save us. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god.
in the One in the sense that we intend, we find the most immanent and most real radical unity of man and knowledge. Radically individual or finite man as finite for intrinsic reasons and as the subject (of) science - this is the content of the non-unitary One and the criterion against which we measure Difference and philosophical Decision in general. Science, so we make of it our hypothesis against its unitary philosophical reduction, is a thinking of two principles: what in Le Principe de Minorite we called - in memory of the forgotten martyrs on whose altar Greco-Occidental philosophy was invigorated and reborn -,gnosis, which is to say, a thinking that recognizes a certain irreducibility (still to be evaluated) to the existence of two principles and that separates what the Greco-Occidental fact has always united - here, the One and Being - what, for its account, Difference has tried one last time to reunite, allowing the failure or arbitrariness of this forced unity all the better to be seen.
Thus in the same gesture we show how the problematic of Difference, including here Heidegger or Derrida, accomplishes and assembles the Greco-Occidental style of thinking, and how this latter cannot constitute itself except through an absolute forgetting - more than a 'repression' - of another way of thinking, authentically scientific, that had its effects, only effects, poorly engaged and quickly annihilated, in the dualists and gnostics. A forgetting without remainder, without offspring or 'slip', of a mode of thinking that would be specifically 'heretical', or denounced as 'heretical' by ontology and theology reunited. The examination of Difference is made from this point of view that we have elsewhere called radically'minoritarian'. While contemporary thinkers - those examined here - think it impossible to repeat, in return for adjustments in the whole of metaphysics, anything but a gesture that has had antecedents at the interior of metaphysics and which is exacerbated through the appeal to alterity, we attempt a heteronomous destruction, scientific and not philosophical, of the Greco-Occidental style.
More profound or more superficial than the forgetting of Being (and its contemporary avatars: the forgetting of Writing, the withdrawal of the essence of the Text, the repression of Desire, of Language, etc.) and the forgetting of this forgetting, is there not, at the very foundation of the question of Being and its vigilance, a 'forgetting' of the One that is a much stranger phenomenon, that is not a double, repercussion, or outbidding of the 'Forgetting of Being'? Yet would not the awakening to this, this other vigilance to the essence of truth, be immediately the destruction of the illusions of philosophical decision in general?
The One in its essence is not transcendent, it is absolutely separated from beings and from Being and is so solely through its real immanence in itself. This means: in reality it is not the One that is separated from Being, it is Being that is separated from the One; it is not the One that is the Other of Difference, it is Difference that is the Other of the One.
Truly immediate givens cannot take any form other than transcendental; they cannot also be metaphysical or still use the inaugural and supreme operation of philosophy, transcendence. The real does not tolerate any operation and is not an operation itself: we do not exit from philosophy into the One; we describe the vision-in-One of philosophy.
On the other hand, if there is difference or distinction in general, if for example Difference is the Other of the One, then this very distinction must be experienced and tested from the One. Also, we do not rise back here from Difference to its foundation in or its requisition of the One, but instead we follow an irreversible order going from the One, which in any case we are, to Difference, which we are not.
Difference produces, as we know, such transcendental tautologies as 'Nothingness nihilates' or 'desiring machines desire' or 'Difference differentiates', etc. Yet these are never - despite their most secret hope, which they remain capable of denying locally but outside of which they would possess neither life nor thought nor movement - immediate experiences of essence, absolute or absolutely irreducible experiences or tests of essence (of Being, Desire, Text, etc.). Difference is a game of paper and ink postulating the most non-reflexive immediateness by drawing a balance from the One, but without placing itself in any state where it could possibly repay. We find here, reaching up into its ideology of the debt, of debt rather than exchange, the profound irresponsibility of Difference. Difference requires the One, but the One is not recognized as the true 'differentiator' of Difference; Difference claims to be its own differentiator and to form a process capable of an auto-production and reproduction that would no longer be merely ontico-ontological but also unary-ontological. Yet without the One as susceptible to being used for grounding the unicity and co-belonging, the continuity and multiplicity of the throws or gifts of Being to thought, without this transcendental factor, universal Being would founder, as essence itself, in the contingency of empirical or intra-mundane plurality. We thus do not criticize Difference for failing to assume a supreme Identity in order to bind together the disparate - it necessarily does assume such an Identity and in any case cannot do otherwise - but rather for assuming that this function of unification exhausts the One's essence.
It is not an originary differentiator that Difference lacks, since Difference does require the One, but the transcendental truth of the One itself inasmuch as this truth is in no way constituted by and as Difference. More precisely: Difference is ultimately 'grounded' as such in the One - which is to say, in the non-reflexive transcendental experience of immanence - but Difference makes use of the One in such a way that this experience is denied; Difference is thus obligated to render itself infinitely 'iterable', to become its own stakes in its own game, the becoming-difference of Difference that must 'be' itself as Self (das Selbige) since it has after all taken up the mediation of the One, the Self's source. That 'Being itself' (Seyn) would be its 'own' process and the process of its becoming-its-own at any rate presupposes the One in its truth, but it still denies this.
For example: if Difference knows how to distinguish the One from the Idea, it is still in its necessary unity with the latter, in its role as limit. It has not reached the point of founding itself upon a terrain other than that of the Greco-Occidental and Neo-Platonizing, on a non-reflexive = indivisible immanence that would have as 'object' Indivision itself as essence. Difference does not know how to 'reduce' the One to the state of non-thetic given or lived immanence, but has always experienced it at worst in its melange, at best in its co-belonging, with the Idea - in the pure mixture of Being. It has known not only how to draw out the maximum effects of Being as of the most fundamental Greco-contemporary mixture, but it has known how to 'intensify' this and place it in the position of continuously augmenting its critical effects. No more however than with the Dialectic or with Structure, no more than with the entirety of Occidental thought, has Difference been able either to dissolve or simply to ground the mixture of Being itself. It would be content to purify Being of the inferior forms of Representation, to generalize or universalize it as supra-historical, supra-mundane, supra-logocentric, etc. But a purification is nothing other than a universalization; it is not a real and positive destruction, but is quite nearly the contrary. As soon as the One in its essence is no longer confounded with its effect within ideality, with a superior form of ideality, with the unifying system of Ideas or of the plural a priori, as soon as the One is no longer an idea superior to the others or is no longer a mode of transcendence in general, it is freed also from the historico-global, supra-human, supra-political, supra-logocentric labours to which Difference, after the Dialectic and so many other epochs of thought, has dedicated it.
(Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference)
gyrofry posted:can you sum that up in a sentence or two tom
la ilaha ilallah
babyfinland posted:gyrofry posted:can you sum that up in a sentence or two tom
la ilaha ilallah
can you sum it up in words
Crow posted:
finally.
Each man stands on the tightrope between the Beast and the Overman. If only it were that simple! Every man stands pulled between 6 dimensions! You cannot see them now, but the light of my Resentment will reveal it!
A line, a line, and a line! Man exists as three orthogonal lines! 3 Dimensions his Being in Space! But is this all he is? is he not Deasin? A Being in Time? Another set of orthogonal lines, one on one on one. 4, 5, and 6 to match the three dimensions below.
Daesin! I call you forth! reveal yourselves! What is your true form? Ahah! A creature of the 5th dimension, but cruelly hampered. look upon your pitiful form.
look back! do you not see yourself as a tunnel of past selves. an undulating snake of crystalized reality going behind like a line in the 4th dimension? look forth! do you not see the lattice of obstacles and possibilities streching out before you like a map in the 5th? Can you not feel your own Self as a constant Becoming? Do you see now the cruel joke of life as Daesin, to experience a Being-inTime, but only in time that is a River! always forwards, as inexorable as the clock! a 4th dimensional self continuing by inertia to consume the 5th dimension.
look up! do you not see our salvation from this? the 3rd orthogonal, God, a 6th dimensional flagpole, who lifts us above our map and lets us navigate this world with unearthy Skill and Grace. See the Joy of those who move with their God, the WIll to Harmony, and the Sorrow of those who cling to their illusions of Power.
DogTown posted:Before I was too soon! But now, the Joker has returned! Behold, Zarathustra's child, Rebecca, Pond, Reborn! Behold the might of my words!
Each man stands on the tightrope between the Beast and the Overman. If only it were that simple! Every man stands pulled between 6 dimensions! You cannot see them now, but the light of my Resentment will reveal it!
A line, a line, and a line! Man exists as three orthogonal lines! 3 Dimensions his Being in Space! But is this all he is? is he not Deasin? A Being in Time? Another set of orthogonal lines, one on one on one. 4, 5, and 6 to match the three dimensions below.
Daesin! I call you forth! reveal yourselves! What is your true form? Ahah! A creature of the 5th dimension, but cruelly hampered. look upon your pitiful form.
look back! do you not see yourself as a tunnel of past selves. an undulating snake of crystalized reality going behind like a line in the 4th dimension? look forth! do you not see the lattice of obstacles and possibilities streching out before you like a map in the 5th? Can you not feel your own Self as a constant Becoming? Do you see now the cruel joke of life as Daesin, to experience a Being-inTime, but only in time that is a River! always forwards, as inexorable as the clock! a 4th dimensional self continuing by inertia to consume the 5th dimension.
look up! do you not see our salvation from this? the 3rd orthogonal, God, a 6th dimensional flagpole, who lifts us above our map and lets us navigate this world with unearthy Skill and Grace. See the Joy of those who move with their God, the WIll to Harmony, and the Sorrow of those who cling to their illusions of Power.
dats fukken gay science
Edited by babyfinland ()
tpaine posted:Hi Tom
i got me a smartphone now