Meno-- it’s more than conjecture. Taylor documents the historical development of secular society from medieval European society for 776 pages. In the quote he’s talking about the difference between the way we moderns view time in the way it was viewed for the advent of modern science.
Yes, and more of the man behind the mirror stuff, it is my. conjecture I meant.
Come on, Bob, I am not demanding that anyone here react to the OP as I do. I am noting my own subjective reaction and inviting others who might be interested to explore it along those lines as well.
But some won’t accept that because then they can’t make this all about me.
Still, to the extent that we do focus in on a particular set of circumstance, we might gain a better understanding as to the role that human psychology [as I understand it] does play given the gap between those who either are or are not moral, political and spiritual objectivists. Given the further distinction between human interactions in either a God or a No God world. Interactions that revolve more around existential meaning and purpose in our lives as opposed to essential meaning and purpose.
Sigh…
Not only my assumptions. My assumptions only if exploring the OP given those assumptions that are of interest to me.
Note where I ever argue that if others refuse to go there then they are not reacting to the OP as all rational men and women are obligated to. This part, in my opinion, is just in your head.
No, not “several circumstances”, just one. For example, “actual anxiety and self-assurance and ignorance and doctrines relating to the moral complexity of what specific moral conflagration most here will be familiar with” that you have experienced. How that [specifically] is related to your understanding of the OP.
Yes, I hear this all the time. Making it all about my demands in order to avoid steering the discussion toward the complex and convoluted thickets that revolve around the far more problematic interactions of actual flesh and blood human beings confronting conflicting goods. And they can certainly avoid the part where I focus as well on the role that dasein and political economy plays in creating those newspaper headlines.
Tragedies such as this are everywhere. In regard to abortion, miscarriages, stillbirths, terrible childhood diseases that result in deaths and on and on and on. My point is to differentiate those who insist that only their own moral assumptions regarding things like abortion [re conflicting goods] count. The objectivists. Religious or secular. And the extent to which having or not having access to one or another “transcending” font can make all the difference in the world. It’s one thing to have a tragedy in which conflicting goods are not a factor and another thing altogether when they are. And that’s because in regard to moral conflicts any/every human community must enact and then enforce rules of behavior that reward some behaviors and punish others.
Yes, that is basically my point. That embracing a general description intellectual contraption reduced down to a dogmatic, authoritarian objectivism regarding things like gun control is one thing, dealing with the complex, at times profoundly problematic, realities that unfold out in the real world, another thing altogether.
But how is your point not but one more political prejudice derived existentially from the life you lived and the personal experiences you had. Again, here it just comes down to how “fractured an d fragmented” you find yourself when push comes to shove and actual political policies are enacted and enforced.
Again: my point isn’t that essentialist/religious/spiritual/transcendental frames of mind don’t help people or make a difference in their lives. It’s in regard to those who insist that their own path is the One True Path and then assess and judge others through the lens of their own dogmatic sets of prescriptions and proscriptions. Those who become addicted to the One True Path in the same manner as those who become addicted to drugs in order to cope with all of the trials and tribulations life throws out way.
This, in my view, is still no less a general description spiritual assessment. Is it or is it not you given a set of circumstances in which how you construe the material and nonmaterial components of the situation impact on the behaviors you choose. As opposed to how I would root decisions of this sort in dasein. Religious and secular power structures will reward and punish particular sets of behaviors. Why one set and not another? How is that not embedded in actual historical and cultural and experiential contexts…understood by someone depending on the life they live as [an ultimately] unique individual?
Given what historical set of circumstances? There are clearly things in our lives that are material and that interact with other material things given the mechanisms derived from the laws of nature. But in regard to moral and political and spiritual conflicts things can become profoundly more problematic. I have my own understanding of them, others have their own understanding of them.
So, in regard to a situation in which conflicts occurs, I propose that we explore the reasons why we choose these things to do and not other things to do.
Those reasons embedded here in the components I zero in on in my signature threads. As opposed to the reasons of others.
Let’s focus in on a specific case of your choice and examine it in terms of how we ourselves differentiate the material and non-material components involved.
Iambiguous --I think the idea of a secular world dovetails with your trope of the God/no God world. In other words we live in a society where religion is an option not a requirement.
To get the idea of Transcendence out of the psychologism category would require us to identify experiences that we’ve had to which that term would reasonably apply.
That would mean we would be having an inter-subjective dialogue. Each of us would have to describe what it’s like to them and be understood by the other.
The difference between essential and existential is that essential is vital to daily life, while existential is about or relates to existence and has a directional importance. We can theorise all we want, in the end though, we need to know what is essential for existence on this planet. That requires a moral, political and, in my view, spiritual basis, because although there are pragmatic decisions to be made, these decisions need direction – which I believe is of spiritual nature. The earlier I have found the right direction in which to travel, the easier the journey becomes, whether on the road or existentially, and the fewer detours I have to make. This makes the moral and political decision making easier. The traditional hero’s journey may be entertaining as fiction, but it can be an excruciating experience in reality.
Having transcendence as a direction, knowing myself and understanding the complexity of life, going beyond myself and my restrictions, having a basis of peace and connectedness, means that I can cope better with the chaos that comes at me in our confused world. God remains a mystery and a mature faith will realise that people give that mystery a variety of names and their experiences are recorded in numerous cultural contexts, so the basic assumption that we live in either a God or No God world is simplistic. One woman I admire said that God was simply “not me”! One could see that as a simple expression of the “I-Thou” relation. I accept that as much as the anthology of religious experience in the Bible or other traditional scriptures.
I have given examples and you have disregarded them. I still am not sure what you expect – certainly you expect from others more than you give.
I’m not avoiding anything. You are the person who sees “the complex and convoluted thickets that revolve around the far more problematic interactions of actual flesh and blood human beings confronting conflicting goods.” However, you give no examples. You expect others to play your game whilst you sit on the side and judge.
You are not reading what I am writing. You have ignored my example and state your “point” that, frankly, doesn’t even make sense. To differentiate you need different cases. What can you expect from single people’s experience? When I present to you my position, which I believe to be open and balanced, you ignore it and move on to make a demand that nobody will be able to comply with.
What are you talking about? I tell you my position on an issue, which I believe takes the problem into consideration and tries to find a balanced reaction and you talk about prejudice. To discriminate is to differentiate. It can also mean bias. It is a situation that you can’t get out of. The complexity of such issues offers no simplistic answers, there are so many aspects to take into consideration that no-one can be sure of giving the right reaction in every situation for everybody involved. That is why humility is important, the ability to accept this circumstance and be prepared to let go of rights and claims for the best decision for all.
Honestly, that is bullshit. You seem to be the dogmatic person, continually returning to a utopian expectation, revolving around issues without engaging, expecting things from others that you don’t supply yourself, accusing people of “becoming addicted” who are seeking the least harming way ahead. The escape of drug addiction is an escape into the jaws of Moloch, whereas the path of transcendence is an engagement with the world from a contemplative and meditative beginning. Drug addiction is the way of the uninterested, fleeing personality. The way of transcendence is inquisitive and keen.
I always get the feeling of being in a quagmire when replying to your posts, which is also the feeling you can get when dealing with depression. You get the feeling that the depressed person wants you to feel his or her emptiness, wants to draw you into the void so that you feel what he or she feels. Perhaps you should think about that.
There’s a history of philosophers who viewed transcendence as possible while at the same time rejecting the idea of God as Absolute.
Contemplating the causes of order in the world, Hume has Philo suggest that the deity could be an infant pondering his first work, an inferior deity or the result of dotage in a superannuated deity. It’s a throwback to the Gnostic idea of the World created by a demiurge.
Contemplating the attributes of God, Mill asks
“What attributes are we warranted, by the evidence which nature affords of a creative mind, in assigning to that mind? It needs no showing that the power if not the intelligence, must be so far superior to that of man, as to surpass all human estimate. But from this to Omnipotence and Omniscience there is a wide interval.”
William James observes that:
“We may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries seeing the books and hearing the conversation but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.”
And further…
“Only one thing is certain and that is the result of our criticism of the absolute the only way to escape from the paradoxes and perplexities that a consistently thought out monistic universe suffers from is to be frankly pluralistic and assume that the superhuman consciousness however vast it may be has itself an external environment and consequently is finite.”
These modern era philosophical positions regarding transcendence are open to it’s existence while rejecting the idea that is absolute. They can’t accept Anselm’s definition of God as that which no greater can be conceived. They see the leap to that view as unjustified by the facts on the ground.
But they don’t absolutely deny all transcendent phenomena. “The more” as James called it.
Why doesn’t Anselm see what they see? I posit that it’s because he was living under a different conception of the cosmos than they.
And in view of the scientific discoveries of the 20th and 21st centuries, so are we. The advances of science over this time have opened a new world of metaphysical possibilities for us to entertain.
Borges posited that the world was a product of “a committee of bungling demiurges,” or something to that effect. Perhaps it is the product of Swift’s “confederacy of dunces.”
I agree.
Einstein posited something similar, though believed that unlike dogs and cats, we had the capacity to eventually understand the books in the library. See also, the Library of Babel, by the aforementioned Borges.
Gods as nested Russian dolls.
Anselm presented a formal deductive proof for the existence of God, the ontological proof. Kant later noticed the flaws in it. In the 20th century Kurt Godel presented his own modal ontological proof of God.
Agreed.
Pood–
I’ve read Anselm’s ontological argument and Kant’s refutation of it. We also have Aquinas’s cosmological argument. These are perhaps the most famous arguments for a theistic conception of God. They put too much emphasis on human conceptual ability. If we consider theism to be strictly dependent on the human capacity to conceptualize God, then call me an atheist, cuz I can’t do that. But then neither can apophatic theology.
The turn of discussion really does remind me of Borges’ short story Library of Babel, which can be found online. It may have been taken at least in part from James’s bit about dogs and cats in a library.
Yes that library is a labyrinth. It is the secular world in which we are nested. The religions lie behind doors in that world. Transcendence is said to lie behind the doors. Or it may be accessible without passing through one of the doors. That’s what I started this threat to discuss.
Or, as the story contends, it may be possible that the library is all that there is, and that there is no outside. And if the pilgrims travel far enough, they will return to where they started, a finite but unbounded library in the same way that it has been posited that our universe is finite but unbounded (though recent observations suggest that it is in fact infinite). There is a heavily religious/transcendental aspect to the story as library inhabitants seek enlightenment or transcendence in all sorts of ways but are continually frustrated. Yet their efforts, however unavailing, nevertheless give rise to certain sects with various dogmas. The idea seems to be that the library is ultimately unknowable, but perhaps can be known subjectively in a Kantian way, and maybe that is good enough.
From a traditional standpoint, the library points to something beyond itself greater than itself. Yet if an intelligence could read all the books in the library they still wouldn’t know the reality beyond the library walls.
Thus one quantum theory tells us there is no reality. All is contingent upon the parameters of the experimental situation including the observer.
Cognitive science suggests that our selves too are illusions. Although I know it is an illusion from another point of view, the sun still rises every morning in my phenomenal world.
How people integrate the findings of science with their conscious first person perspective is an individual matter. Until recently radical behaviorists rejected consciousness. The flat earthers reject basic astronomy.
Within the secular world Christianity itself is a labyrinth. Christians are often not considered Christians by each other. A Muslim is more likely to recognize a liberal Christian as Christian then a Conservative Christian is.
But I’m proposing that we think outside our perspectival silos. Why can’t an atheist experience self transcendence at a rock concert?
Iambiguous–
Help me to understand your position. Is it not true that the subjectivism in which you see every moral conflict embedded is a mode of being which has become the prevalent way of seeing things in the modern era? That is to say, that traditionally prior to the thought of people like the Descartes and Hume and Kant, the classical view of moral thought was objective. Or at least objectivity was what people like Plato’s Socrates sought in their pursuit of wisdom.
So that the concepts of goodness, truth and beauty were thought to have objective ontologies and not be mere subjective judgments.
Do you then agree that the subjectivist view which you hold is then the outcome of a way of thinking which developed over the past four centuries and has become prevalent in the late modern period especially following Nietzsche?
And you will want a down-to- earth context for this question. So let’s talk about friendship. In Plato’s dialogues Socrates addresses it in terms of substantial good. Whereas Derrida says “Oh my friends, there is no friend.” thereby negating the concept at the outset.
Research shows that after transcendent experiences, people feel more satisfied with their lives and rate their lives as more meaningful.
This article supports my thesis that not only are experiences of self-transcendence valuable in giving individuals a sense of purpose, meaning and well-being, they are experienced by non-religious people as well as religious people in secular society.
Again though:
“…to the extent that we do focus in on a particular set of circumstance, we might gain a better understanding of what on Earth you mean by this general description intellectual/spiritual assessment.”
Perhaps we have a different understanding then of what an “example” is. Note what you construe to be the best example of this, and, given a particular context, we can focus the discussion in on that.
Again, your own personal tragedy is either as a result of something that happened which was basically beyond your control or it happened because of a behavior you chose that others will insist resulted in the tragedy. That a tragedy would have been averted had you chosen the behavior that they would have opted for instead. A couple loses a child at birth due to circumstances beyond their control. Beyond anyone’s control. Everyone has great sympathy for them. There is no “moral issue” here. But if they choose abortion or the woman does hard drugs or smokes or drinks heavily during the pregnancy some will make it a moral issue and the sympathy is lost.
That’s the distinction that I am making here in a philosophy forum.
And I tell you that, from my frame of mind, the positions that any of us take in regard to issues like gun laws are likely to be derived more from the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein than from anything ethicists using the tools of philosophy can come up with to “resolve” it philosophically. And, as well, that the moral and political objectivists among us take my arguments and [in fact] your arguments here and flush them right down the toilet. Why? Because they’re not interested in “balanced reactions” are they? No, they insist that unless you share their own point of view you are scum. A liberal scum if you’re a conservative. A conservative scum if you’re a liberal. Meanwhile those who make the big bucks manufacturing and selling the guns are smirking all the way to the bank.
This part:
Note to the objectivists among us:
Set him straight. In regard to gun control and abortion and any and all the other conflicting goods that generate newspaper columns such as this…
washingtonpost.com/opinions … vely-sick/
…explain to him how the One True Path/Coalition of Truth mentality works. And not just here at ILP.
We’ll need an actual context of course.
And how a “fractured and fragmented” point of view in regard to conflicting goods can actually be construed as dogmatic, well, that escapes me. Utopian expectations?! Moi?!!
Depending on how you construe the meaning of transcendence of course. If it revolves around a God/the God/my God, or a No God spiritual path, or around a political ideology, or deontology, or a genes > memes Satyrean assessment of Nature, others are “inquisitive and keen” only when they agree to become “one of us”.
As I noted to Maia a while back, my aim here is to either find an argument that might allow me to yank myself up out of the hole I have dug myself down into philosophically…
…or to persuade others that my own argument is one that they themselves might come to share.
Win/win.
I’m up out of the hole or I persuade someone to come down into it with me.
Salvation or empathy as it were.
How about this…
1] You note a moral conflict that all of us are likely to be familiar with
2] You note what you construe to be a reasonable assessment of friendship
3] We then focus in on a set of circumstances in which good friends find themselves deeply divided over conflicting value judgments…a situation in which much is at stake
Thus, a substantial good friendship as opposed to a postmodern negation of friendship itself given this set of circumstances.
Okay so we start with with the proposition, “oh my friends, there are no friends” which Derrida says is him quoting Montaigne who attributed the saying to Aristotle. Nietzsche reversed the saying to “Enemies, there are no enemies.”
Then there is my assertion the pre-moderns would have presupposed an objective basis for friendship. Whereas, I asserted that among us moderns, friendship would be understood as subjectively constructed.
For the moral conflict you requested, I choose the issue of truth telling. Does a friend always tell a friend the absolute truth about everything? If so, under what circumstances? Or does friendship depend on keeping silent on certain things in order to remain friends? Again, if this is ever the requirement of true friendship, under what circumstances? And, however we parse the matter, what does it say about the objectivity vs. subjectivity of the issue? And further, are our conclusions, should we ever arrive at them, merely a result of the worldview in which we are embedded, e.g. secular vs. traditional?
In keeping with the theme of this thread, I ask whichever of these cases is true, has anything changed about it between the traditional society and the modern secular one?
How, if at all, this relates to the experience of transcendence, I do not see. Any suggestions?
Any way, does the way I’m set this up satisfy your specifications and meet with your approval?
Exactly right, I had my first key transcendental experience before I was old enough to be considered religious in a formal sense.
As a child I was always very impressed by natural events, by theatre and by classical music. There is a video on the internet of a child of about 3 or 4 listening to a piece by Mozart, and you can see the emotion on his face. That child could have been me when I was that age. Of course, the sound reproduction was not what it is today, but I remember when I hit puberty that in a wave of sensuality music touched me tremendously - so much so that I had to move. During that time, I had key transcendent events in a storm in the Irish Sea, or whilst reading books, or when going to the theatre, and especially on the beach where the sea somehow carried me away, even though I was still sitting on land. These trance-like situations were common then.
These experiences slowed when I had to move towns with my parents and was suddenly in a town where nature seemed far away. I yearned for the sea, played truant to go out into the fields outside town, and the music appreciation group that my mother took me to wasn’t happy about my trance-like swaying when the music played. I still had literature though and poetry spoke to me deeply, so that I had to get some ideas out of my head and on paper, but novels took me away as well, especially the more classical type. School just got in the way back then, and neither the teachers or my parents found a way to contain or encourage that time of creativity.
Consequently, I went through a phase of estrangement to myself, was lost and amputated. I went through years of insecurity and knew somehow, that I had turned off the road I had been on and was stranded in a creative desert. The army tried to drive my creativity out, tried to make me something that I wasn’t, and finally people started telling me to get out and do something else.
It was when I started rethinking my life in Germany, reading again, listening to music, and meditating, that transcendent experiences returned. Finally, finding Christianity, I also found religious transcendent experiences, but they weren’t welcome amongst the conservative group I’d joined. The fact that I found a way to take these experiences into meetings, in which we would embark on a journey, which moved people, especially young people and women, so that we had a distinct feeling that the room moved, was too eerie and some even said it was “demonic”.
I put my energy into nursing, and connected with the patients well, especially with the dying. I was intending to move on to therapy, but it never happened. In the end, the empathy that had developed in me became overpowering, and although I was able to find the way for so many people, I had to move out of direct nursing, because I had to concentrate on the basics of nursing and had no time for the (in many cases more pressing) needs of terminal patients. Although in management, I never lost this ability, but I was out of the front line, and had staff that I could delegate to those needs.
I think that this illustrates that transcendent experiences can enhance lives, given the space that they require. Our problem in my opinion is that our society is on a different road. The sensibility that transcendence creates is often neglected, as we are suffering because of it. Many people with various psychological disturbances just have no connection with their spiritual side, or perhaps with the child inside (there are many ways to describe it) and are forced to become a cog in a machine. It is the machine that is fundamentally wrong; it is the materialistic worldview that is destructive.