version

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no, it is logically and objectively true, unless you want to bypass language as the mode of communication entirely. That's the only way you could deny what I'm saying. In which case, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. To postulate a zero in time is to postulate nonexistence.

Language is something which frustrates me, yeah.
 

version

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You're only ever playing a game of chess with a chess set though. There's a possibility there's something beyond the rules, the board and the pieces but there's seemingly no way to escape them.
 

thirdform

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You're only ever playing a game of chess with a chess set though. There's a possibility there's something beyond the rules, the board and the pieces but there's seemingly no way to escape the game.

There's no way to escape language either though.
 

thirdform

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Yeah, I'm referring to language using your metaphor.

no but this is the fundamental discovery of psychoanalysis. that the subconscious plays a large part in the structuration of language.

Hence why the tripper is not much different to the psychotic. the symbolic order structuring the protocols of existence and authority in the world as the archetypical subject breaks down.
 

version

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no, it is logically and objectively true, unless you want to bypass language as the mode of communication entirely. That's the only way you could deny what I'm saying. In which case, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. To postulate a zero in time is to postulate nonexistence.

Something being logically true goes back to what I was saying re: the Sugrue lecture on Barthes, that the best you can hope for is to create an internally coherent system. You may be able to say something's logical but it's only logical according to a framework someone's built.

the only way you could postulate a zero in time is to argue that god is outside of time and space, but then you will never be able to explain that without appeals to faith and clerical authority.

That doesn't mean it couldn't be true though, just that we can't explain it.
 

version

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Wouldn't someone who believes in God claim God created space and time? How could God create them if God were already within them?
 

thirdform

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Wouldn't someone who believes in God claim God created space and time? How could God create them if God were already within them?

exactly, you have now hit on the fact that religion can be criticised from within itself. For what is God but a conceptual framework of certain virtues we have estranged from ourselves? If God had no worldly import, then we simply wouldn't be able to speak of belief in a God.
 

version

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I was reading Bakunin ranting about God early this morning. The main bit I remember is him saying something about materialism obviously being correct and something about idealists being unable to explain the point at which God comes down to the material level and why, whereas if you start from the bottom you can explain your way up.
 

thirdform

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I was reading Bakunin ranting about God early this morning. The main bit I remember is him saying something about materialism obviously being correct and something about theologians, etc. being unable to explain the point at which God comes down to the material level and why, whereas if you start from the bottom you can explain your way up.

You need to read Feuerbach, that's where Bakunin got his idea from. And Feuerbach got it from Hegel (albeit Hegel was no atheist.) In fact, I like to joke that Hegel was the last true Christian. If the substance of your dialectic is the incarnated world spirit which gradually becomes conscious of itself as the absolute idea, then what else is this but a synonym for God?
 

thirdform

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And of course Hegel owes a large debt to Spinoza. Spinoza famously saw God in the totality of nature, which is the level biscuits is still stuck at. He cannot see that nature's geological memory records the class struggle.
 

version

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You need to read Feuerbach, that's where Bakunin got his idea from. And Feuerbach got it from Hegel (albeit Hegel was no atheist.) In fact, I like to joke that Hegel was the last true Christian. If the substance of your dialectic is the incarnated world spirit which gradually becomes conscious of itself as the absolute idea, then what else is this but a synonym for God?

That seems to be a running thing with a bunch of philosophers, that they end up constructing a secular theology. There's a lecture on Heidegger I watched a while ago which emphasised his background as a Jesuit seminarian. I was discussing it with @dilbert1 in the Hegel thread whenever we did that one.
 

version

Well-known member
I was reading Bakunin ranting about God early this morning. The main bit I remember is him saying something about materialism obviously being correct and something about idealists being unable to explain the point at which God comes down to the material level and why, whereas if you start from the bottom you can explain your way up.

For anyone who hasn't read him...

The gradual development of the material world, as well as of organic animal life and of the historically progressive intelligence of man, individually or socially, is perfectly conceivable. It is a wholly natural movement from the simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher, from the inferior to the superior; a movement in conformity with all our daily experiences, and consequently in conformity also with our natural logic, with the distinctive laws of our mind, which being formed and developed only by the aid of these same experiences; is, so to speak, but the mental, cerebral reproduction or reflected summary thereof.​
The system of the idealists is quite the contrary of this. It is the reversal of all human experiences and of that universal and common good sense which is the essential condition of all human understanding, and which, in rising from the simple and unanimously recognized truth that twice two are four to the sublimest and most complex scientific considerations — admitting, moreover, nothing that has not stood the severest tests of experience or observation of things and facts — becomes the only serious basis of human knowledge.​
Very far from pursuing the natural order from the lower to the higher, from the inferior to the superior, and from the relatively simple to the more complex; instead of wisely and rationally accompanying the progressive and real movement from the world called inorganic to the world organic, vegetables, animal, and then distinctively human — from chemical matter or chemical being to living matter or living being, and from living being to thinking being — the idealists, obsessed, blinded, and pushed on by the divine phantom which they have inherited from theology, take precisely the opposite course. They go from the higher to the lower, from the superior to the inferior, from the complex to the simple. They begin with God, either as a person or as divine substance or idea, and the first step that they take is a terrible fall from the sublime heights of the eternal ideal into the mire of the material world; from absolute perfection into absolute imperfection; from thought to being, or rather, from supreme being to nothing. When, how, and why the divine being, eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect, probably weary of himself, decided upon this desperate salto mortale is something which no idealist, no theologian, no metaphysician, no poet, has ever been able to understand himself or explain to the profane. All religions, past and present, and all the systems of transcendental philosophy hinge on this unique and iniquitous mystery.​
 

thirdform

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That seems to be a running thing with a bunch of philosophers, that they end up constructing a secular theology. There's a lecture on Heidegger I watched a while ago which emphasised his background as a Jesuit seminarian. I was discussing it with @dilbert1 in the Hegel thread whenever we did that one.

Of course, because philosophy is the dominant class' acquisition of its self-consciousness, although, to a degree, this consciousness will always remain unhappy.
 

version

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Touches on the discussion in the Irishness thread re: how deeply embedded religions are in people and their novels too.

 

version

Well-known member
And of course Hegel owes a large debt to Spinoza. Spinoza famously saw God in the totality of nature, which is the level biscuits is still stuck at. He cannot see that nature's geological memory records the class struggle.

That last line is the kind of thing I'm talking about, tbh. It sounds cool and it's interesting, but how would anyone know and surely the class struggle's just another framework laid over things?
 
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