I tend agree with the person who said that spiritual materialism is more or less a means to end. In other words, electric magnetic forces which apparently comprise the essence of our conscious existence [brain activity] is just a medium for spiritual beings (aka our idea of the existience of ghosts, for example).
I remember reading Schopenhauer (sp) years ago and remember his interesting thoughts about the lymbic system and what comprises the Will (the will to be). This tension of existence or otherwise Maslonian ordinary life of striving, is still quite mystery… .
S.S.,
I like your posts. I’m no MCP (male chavenist pig), just a questor of ideas. Most mystics I have read consider the ego to be a very harmful illusion, not an evolutionary plus. I have to give them credit. Mine hurts me often.
The knower is not abstracted from the known, but both the knower and the known are abstracted from the knowing (the knowing is divided in a knower and a known).
As far as I know, Nietzsche did not distinguished between an “I” and an ego. Both words are renditions of the German “Ich”, although sometimes, Nietzsche used the Latin “ego” (usually when referring to Descartes). Where did you get this idea about the ego as a “social concept” as opposed to the “I” as a “knower not abstracted from the known”? From Kaufmann? Surely not from Nietzsche. Or can you provide evidence for such a distinction in Nietzsche?
I do not know enough about any part of the world beyond the United States to accept or reject the writers contention about almost everyone. However, every thing I know about the US indicates that the vast majority of Americans believe in this spiritual reality.
I would be skeptical about the claim regarding the scientist being strongly inclined to accept this proposition but I would not be surprised that the general idea is true.
Both of you are exploiting the burden of proof…tossing it onto my shoulders.
Truth is experienced. You have not experienced death, so you have no idea what happens after death. However, this uncertainty does not change the odds that nothing happens, it only causes the player to place a higher bet; the deliberation and hope that something might happen after death inflicts a subtle opiate upon his mind. He forgets that he is hoping and not reasoning and slightly loses himself in meloncholy.
You cannot consider if God exists without experiencing utter despair, gentlemen. This is no pic-nic, if you haven’t noticed, and the trials man must go through are by no means easy, nor are they over-nite sensations.
Panic is the origins of spirituality; a man in the grips of a saber-tooth tiger, in that brief moment before he was lunch, considered if he might live after he died. Death is the origins of collective spirituality; experiencing anothers death, and having the same considerations…if this person might live on elsewhere.
The complexity of theology is 99.9% lingusitic ambiguity, which is why it appears complex. That remaining percent is the spontaneous consideration when either panicing or experiencing another’s death.
I and ego can be carefully defined so as to separate them for purposes of discussion, but in most understanding, they are interchangable words. I doesn’t have an ego. I is ego. While there is no escaping I on any long term basis, one can notice the lack of I when simply going about activities with no thought of, here I am doing… It is the difference of in being as opposed to as being - if that makes any sense.
S.,
Mea culpa! I apologize for the misquote. Nietzsche did not say postulate or posit. Trying to remember the quote, I seem to recall it as being “minds state (or say) the “I”; bodies live it”. To find the exact quote and it’s place in N.‘s writings, I will have to go back to the library and dig through the three volumes of Kaufmann’s “Discovering the Mind”. Don’t blame K. if my interpretations appear muddled. And I wonder if it is worth the energy to re-research in order to address unfathomable definitions of knower and known and inability to distinguish between what is self and what is ego. "I’ covers a multitude of sins, semantically. So, I’ll yield to the Nieitzche expert; but will not dance on the heads of pins.
Well Mac, I don’t think R.D.Laing can help you now. I don’t think the big chief’ll be able to help you either. I guess your best bet’d be to go for the pre-frontal!
O ye, who see perplexities over your heads, beneath your feet, and to the right and left of you; you will be an eternal enigma unto yourselves until ye become humble and joyful as children. Then will ye find Me, and having found Me in yourselves, you will rule over worlds, and looking out from the great world within to the little world without, you will bless everything that is, and find all is well with time and with you.
What if it were much simpler? I knowa chick by the name of Rosa Lichtenstein who has written extensively against Hegelian Dialectics and arch-bourgeois metaphysics, as she calls them, stating that the last three-hundred years of philosophy has been a manifestation of impractical ruling class ideas; what should be considered aesthetics as opposed to historical materialism (science).
In that case, Idealism is the necessary contrary to realism…but that’s just it. It isn’t anything but a void, a negative debt for science.
Idealism feeds off the failures of science like vultures from a carcass. Its dispicable.
So, if spiritual is non-material (as you have defined it), anything that either does not occupy space or is not made up of atoms, or neither, is spiritual, right?
I onlyknow that which is material, so I can only say that if something called spiritual exists it must be non-material. I am not implying that I know anything about what people call spiritual.
But, according to your definition, you also know immaterial things: light, for example. Light is not made up of atoms. Does it occupy space? Well, maybe. It does affect “material” things. It is possible to make a mill made of mirrors rotate by shining bright light (think sunlight) on it. Does this make light material to you? If it does, then what is immaterial/spiritual? Do you think it is necessary that anything immaterial or spiritual exists?
Sauwelios, It’s still unresolved whether only becoming or both being and becoming are real. Going by the Heidegger quote, both are necessary to experience of reality. It doesn’t seem sensible to label the one real and the other an illusion, especially as an insight, a revelation or the dawn of a plan fall under the being aspect, and thoughts can be called ‘events.’
By “being” we mean “remaining the same”; by “becoming” we mean “changing”; right?
The only thing that remains the same is change, as change never ceases. But this is the being of becoming. This is not what we were talking about. We were talking about the being of “being”.
If “being” is an illusion - and, as far as we know, it is nothing more - then it is not, as the illusion does not remain the same.
Now Heidegger says:
“Creation needs what is fixed, first, in order to overcome it, and second, in order to have something that has yet to be fixated, something that enables the creative to advance beyond itself and be transfigured.”
[Nietzsche’s Fundamental Metaphysical Position.]
“Creation” here is probably a rendition of the German “das Schaffen”. This ties creation to the Greek poiesis. “Creation” here means poiesis, not creation out of nothing. Poiesis is the creation of a new thing or new things out of existing material. Such things do not have being, of course. So the creator needs the idea of being, which is really a falsification: it confuses similarity with “sameness”.