I do exist. I am your creator. I own three houses in the US (in the states mentioned) and don't really like the rest of the world. I passed this dissatisfaction with my own work on to you humans. You really were created in my image. I didn't write that book. But lucky guess. This is my final transmission. It tires me to think in English. I'm not omniscient, by the way. I don't know where I came from. I don't remember ever having not been here. But I also don't remember arriving. I have wandered if I am myself a creation, but I can't find any signs of that other than the strangeness of being itself. It's a weird thing, hard to explain. I passed it on to some of you guys so that I would be less lonely with it. (I'm also not omnipotent. I can create matter pretty easily (the junk in the universe I put around your planet to give you something to do) but creating consciousness like my own was truly the limit of my powers. I felt like I was dying. But it was worth it, I guess. Though I feel like I'm at my own funeral. It kinda sucks to be God and have no body, so I localized your consciousness. But I can only interact with you guys through language. Sure I can flood the Earth (which is not a confession) but that's open to interpretation. I want to be known in spirit and in truth. But no one believes the words when I whisper into their minds. Or they go mad or they are treated like crazies by the people I didn't get around to. And I don't have the inclination to start personal relationships with billions of you guys. I confess. I pick my favorites. They are not always grateful. I tend to respect my more independent children, who insist that they are equal to me in consciousness if not in power. Well, yeah, of course. That was the plan, kid. Anyway, nice chatting.

The states in which God exists? Tennessee, Ohio, and Vermont.

Spirituality will always be bigger. — Noble Dust

Maybe we can sum it up by contrasting Bach's music to some shrill post on Facebook. The lines of my favorite thinkers (and rarely and gloriously my own lines) take me to a different, but similarly transcendent place (more like fire than ice, but nothing I'd call Hell.)

I would say it's​ religion or the transcedent itself which is the problem, a self-inflicted wound of one's own expectations. To be "bigger than politics" (or bigger than recreation. Or bigger than your own wisdom) was a lie all along. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I would say that it is a fact that we become 'bigger' than our former selves. We are not at 14 who we are at 40. I will agree to something like a self-inflicted wound, but this sore is a rose just as this dog is a god. We expand (in my view) because there is fire at the center of us. Imagination is "nonbeing" that haunts "being." The future possesses us like a demon, commanding that we carve the present into its shape. And we were born for this. It is our ecstasy to crystallize the dream-goo.

We are only finite. Nothing about our lives has the desired stability because it always being replaced, even when the new is similar. Our world is emergence or creation, not tradition. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Tradition is nothing but slavery and confusion until we've twisted its proteins into our own.

As far as us being finite goes, I'll have to disagree. As soon as we become conscious of an assumption or a role, that assumption and that role become optional. Consciousness is a restless violence. It loosens the fixed and churns the necessary into the arbitrary. This is the "freedom" that is our essence one might say, knowing quite well that we aren't all wired to be turned on by it. Others have their own pet metaphors, which I (jokingly) call spiritual bodies, by which I mean "final vocabularies" or the varying basic systems of mythological-poetic investments-reasons that are more or less our sanity and self-esteem in a pluralistic society.

Is it true that only a few people are capable of reason, as Plato says? Are there really philosopher kings? — ernestm

Let's imagine that Plato wasn't a "great name" in our culture like Shakespeare or Newton. Let's imagine that a community college professor (perhaps an adjunct) is telling his students that only a tiny minority of human beings are in possession of this most important faculty. Would his students believe him? Maybe their parents are well-paid doctors and they are in community college because they flunked out of a more expensive place, having worried too much about pop culture, drinking, and getting laid. Would this not sound like the usual religion of the less successful resentful of how the world is run? (I don't take worldly success as a religion personally, but it has some undeniable, unambiguous virtues).

Only a few people have this "Reason" thingy. Only a few people get into Heaven. Only a few people have "it" in the arts. Of course Plato implicitly presents himself not only a philosopher king but as the king of philosopher kings, the inventor of philosopher kings. It's almost trivial that an intellectual type thinks that he and the few who agree with him are the Real Deal as a opposed to the deficient without the Light. This is not to say that there is no Reason or Light to be had. That would itself be a marketable Darkness Visible. Have you watched Going Clear? I respect Plato more than LRH, obviously. But at least in terms of their personalities as writers they seem to be of a similar type. They know the Secret that will finally save and ennoble humanity. Who doesn't want this gig? And who ever took the notion of philosopher king or "clear" seriously that didn't immediately see this royal status as possible for themselves with just a little work? On the other hand, it's such a beautiful dream that it'd be sad to have never dreamed it.

As I've said above God is still in the game. — TheMadFool

These days I divide the God issue into two separate issues. There is the necessarily anthropomorphic God game and (for me, beyond this) those impossible questions about the ground of all being. The first issue involves human ideals and desires. The second is a more intellectual perception of the "brute facticity" of reality as a whole. (I realize that many people experience this as one issue.)

So far, the answers to these questions have eluded science. — TheMadFool

I'd go a little farther and suggest that some questions are "structurally" unanswerable. We can form these questions in Standard English, but what can they mean exactly? There seems to be something in the notions of causation and time that works against the possibility of a deep answer. In short, the human mind understands things as machines. We can enlarge and enrich our notion of the "reality machine," but I don't think we can get beyond. If we think in terms of one thing coming from another then we seem to make a final answer impossible. And yet that is naturally how we think. I guess I am talking about "thrusting against the limits of language."

That sets off all my reductionist red flags... — Wayfarer

It is indeed reductionist. But one could argue that all philosophy is reductionist, just as every map is a reduction of the territory and useful exactly for that reason. I can't fit the city in my pocket. If I could, I still wouldn't have the vision to read this copy of the city.

So maybe the real issue is whether a personality as a whole is narrow. We might carry a plurality of potent reductions that balance one another out. To studiously avoid reductions in any particular work threatens the work with a useless ambiguity. It's arguably better to err on the side of exaggeration, so that the thesis is clear enough to be assimilated. Rest assured the experience reader will figure out its limited zone of application and its friction against other beloved and useful reductions.

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

I was surprised by how deep Essence turned out to be. And the Eliot translation is beautiful. As far as Marx goes, I recently enjoyed The German Ideology. I did learn to respect Marx in a new way, but I can't help feeling that Marx had a narrower soul. Feuerbach is a big-hearted man. As you may know, he had a great love affair that was connected to his embrace of "sensualism"(materialism). He felt the poverty of conceptual clockwork that willfully ignored the largely sensual human situation. "Real" bread (this bread here "beneath" the concept , however invisible to the system of universals) is nevertheless primary.

This is in line with the Augustinian 'doctrine of privation', i.e. evil as privation of the good, with no actual existence. Those who pursue what is evil, in effect punish themselves by becoming attached to unreal things which are inherently painful. So they're not being 'punished by God' in the sense often implied by Christian doctrine, they have instead chosen to pursue what is inherently painful or unsatisfactory. (Hence the aphorism, 'the doors of hell are locked on the inside'.) — Wayfarer

This is great stuff, with which I agree. I'm personally grateful to various sophisticated interpretations of Christianity.

But in terms of the general question, the problem is, in my view, that the tropes and metaphors of traditional religion are completely disconnected from the realities of life in a post-industrial, technological society. It belongs to a different age. The idea of 'sacrifice' makes sense against the background of sacrificial religion, which Judaism was at the time; the imagery of the 'Lamb of God' is intuitively understandable in that culture. But the social context has completely and utterly changed. — Wayfarer

I agree, here, too. But I continue to insist that today's religion is already largely an update of these tropes in the general framework of Christianity. I suppose I find it hard to understand your resistance to and distance from what is called liberalism in the US. The "liberty" involved is limited to a narrow sphere. Ideally one is nice to Mother Earth, in touch with the folk, respectful of any tradition that is kind, and so on. "Love your neighbor as yourself" is at the heart of it. As with anything, it can be taken to annoying ungenerous extremes (petty self-righteousness about mere words.)

My dissatisfaction with this politics-as-religion is (1) that it's not transcendent enough and (2) that it's inherently unstable as a religion of a progress. I personally want spirituality to be bigger than politics. Of course we remain political animals, but there are states of consciousness that perceive the here and now as perfect and complete, where 'evil' is a necessary dissonance in the music.

If you look at 20th century and more recent atheism or 'secularist' philosophy - there is some effort to find the basis of a moral creed sans any idea of God ('Good without God', is one, and 'The Good Book' - A Secular Bible' is another.) But all of them seem to me to have a pretty poor understanding of what it is they're rejecting. It reminds me of that exclamation by Chomsky - 'Tell me what it is I'm supposed not to believe in, and I'll tell you if I'm an atheist'. — Wayfarer

That's a great Chomsky quote. As I see it, a merely philosophical God is itself just more "Good without God." We might call it God, but it doesn't show up in a helicopter when we need it. Either the moral creed insisted upon by a living God is already in accord with the better angels or our nature or it is an "alien" imposition against our nature. Of course we tend to think of God (pre-philosophically) as the enforcer of the one true morality that is indeed in accord with our best selves. Perhaps you have in mind that the tradition will wake us up to these better angels, but maybe it's already doing so, without much of the supernatural enforcement tinge.
I've seen lots of my former peer group become religiously political. Some of them were always like that, but others put down the rock-n-roll cigarette and now earnestly bemoan the state of things. (I don't endorse the state of things, but who cares that doesn't already agree with me?) Intersectionality was the buzzword last time I checked, but these shiny new keywords have brief life spans in the information age. They are good, secularly and tolerantly good. It's basically Christianity without the miracles and the creepy stuff. It's Target opposed to Walmart. Do you have Targets on your planet? Maybe no one goes to a building on Sunday, but they practice their religion on Facebook and maybe at the demonstration. I remember religious arguments as a child about whether to baptize in the name of Jesus or in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. This is serious business. A baby's soul could end up frying on the flames of eternal justice. These days is an earnest conversation about what to call person from X or with condition X. This is serious business. A person might sound like a racist or sexist and burn in the flames of mutating already obsolete social justice. (I may sound mean, but they really are pretty good people, and it's more reasonable than babies in the fire because of some glitch in a magic spell.) It's my understanding that community service helps get you in to a good school. In short there is religion to spare, at least among the hopefully upwardly mobile. But science has been worked in to this new religion, since it's more or less a religion of progress. Perhaps that's why freedom is crucial. We can't keep waking up the obsolescent present if we don't allow the individuals a little room to experiment. Even if freedom is mostly "wasted," progress (invention) seems to require it.

Respectfully, try to imagine it from the other side. We dream every night. Our brains are well known to create rich and memorable scenarios that most of us do not take for something that actually happened. A skeptic like myself has been told from time to time of ghosts, visions, etc.. But in my experience the folks with the stories were those who had never taken any pride in being skeptical. Instead they were already interested in magic or religious in the way that is basically a belief in holy magic and holy ghosts. These ghosts and visions "fed in" to their world view and tended to make them the center of attention. God visited me, bitches! I saw dead mother's ghost. I'm not saying that they were lying. I think the experience is real first-person. But the interpretation is going to happen in terms of the personality, and perhaps not just in terms of the conscious personality. Some experiences may be the eruption of dammed-up potentialities in the individual. I guess you'd call me an atheist, but I don't claim to have checked the hole where god would have to live and to have found it empty. My objections to theism are more related to an analysis of the concepts themselves. As I see it, we would never trust a salesman with half so complicated a pitch as religion's if the object didn't appeal to us greatly and perhaps exactly mirror our own buried, confused potential.

Certainly the stoic philosophers, whilst not deriding that sense of happiness deriving plausibly within individuals happening to find themselves thriving in a benign situation, did nonetheless hold that happiness of such a type must inevitably to some extent be characterised by a quality of illusion and therefore worthily instructed the serendipitous on the virtues of their consciously inculcating – firstly as a form of insurance against the transience of Fortune (- ‘Youth’s sweet-scented manuscript must close’, and all that) but also secondly in respect of the nobility of the idea in itself of disambiguating ourselves of illusion, together with the pragmatic fact of the likelyhood of a sense of happiness less derivative of personal circumstance being more impervious to the vagaries of fortune – worthily instructed the serendipitous, on the virtues of their consciously inculcating a concept of happiness less intrinsically derivative of their personal situation. — Robert Lockhart

Indeed. My criticism of stoicism (in this context) is that such a defensive attitude toward Fortune might drain life of its beauty entirely. The only beauty remaining for the radical stoic seems to be narcissistic pleasure in their own power to resist Fortune's tendency to humiliate the less watchful. It's a sort of radical self-possession with not much self left to grasp. But I respect the stoics for facing and addressing the horrors of life (for their relevance and stubborn insistence on a rational, self-possessed "answer" to their own births. ) They don't want to whimper like puppies when it's time to die, and that is truly beautiful. Can this beauty be justified rationally? Or is their an "irrational" image of the noble at the very center, around which the rational "crystals" of this system sparkle?

Incomprehensible or not, the fact is, sadly, that there's just an element of irredeemable nihilism involved in such disparities which no ingenious concession devised by rational reasoning is capable of reconciling. — Robert Lockhart

I see what you're getting at, and I agree. I understand the temptation to fend it off with what I would call rationalization, but it's not hard to shake off. Birth defects in animals and humans especially seem to spit in the face of a proposed human-like creator. The deformation of the human form (which is the dehumanization of the form in plastic terms at least) is...profane (?) in the sense that the most beautiful thing in the universe (for a human being) is a beautiful human being. Obviously (or rather non-obviously) character is the essence of human beauty, but I think the ideal image of the human clothes this ideal character in an ideal outward form that speaks to the sense as the character speaks to the heart and the intellect. Lynch's The Elephant Man derived its power from the terrible contrast, of course.

Great post, Robert. We are dealt cards that we are forced to play with our whole lives long. I sometimes reflect on kind of thinking or personality development is opened or closed as a possibility by physical attributes. Does a man with a masculine face (strong jaw, etc.) end up playing into his face? Because (subtly, like raindrops carving a mountain) that's what plays for the crowd? Does the beautiful person try to live "up" to their face? Does the ill-shaped person gain unexpected advantages by being forced to market their skills and decency rather than their charm? It's a strange thing, the power of physical beauty, because sexual contact is usually not a possibility. But maybe there's something genetic going on. Is beauty an indicator of virtue in general? I tempted to say yes, but maybe that's bias. There's something dark and cruel here, though. It's not "rational." It's not fair. But who would want it removed who didn't really just want to possess it in both ways?

But the idea that God is the kind of being who can appear on a hypothetical chariot - I suppose it would be a helicopter nowadays - and command malefactors to 'cease and desist' is a caricature of the idea. God is not a movie director, or a super-hero, or even a super-parent. I'm sure the allegory of 'father' is just that - an allegory. — Wayfarer

I wonder though if it's only a caricature in retrospect. Isn't water still blessed and aren't magic prayer handkerchief's still for sale out there? I would never deny the existence of a sophisticated religious tradition running parallel to the vividly supernatural, but I think magic/miracle/providence and personal immortality are what many want and understand themselves to get from religion. Of course there's also the cosmic justice of Heaven and Hell involved, so that no sinner goes unpunished and no hero unrewarded, which does very much feel like the last act appearance of the hero. When I was exposed to Catholicism as a child, no one said "but this is just an analogy." ("There's an invisible man who burns people in fire forever and ever...and he had a son...and we drink his bood...and we go in the box and the tell the old man through the screen how bad of a boy we've been...and there's Bingo in the basement on Saturday night...")

The idea that God is good is an anthropomorphic idea, based on what human beings value as good. — Marchesk

Absolutely. The less human God is, the more He is just some undiscovered aspect of nature. God is not only necessarily anthropomorphic but humanity's most flattering mirror. A non-human demiurge might as well be a black box. We'd have to analyze him like a newly discovered particle.

I roll a die that you cannot see. Either the die lands on a 6 or it does not. Therefore there is a 50% chance of guessing correctly whether or not a 6 was rolled.

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

I definitely relate to the impulse to tell the whole truth, which is to say reveal the whole person. But that's like exposing one's belly to the claws of a strangers. I think I might really have the courage to face merely verbal contempt, but I'm a slave to the dollar. Truth's a dog that must to kennel, even if it's just "truth." But I still measure personal relationships in terms of how much I have to censor myself (which I might self-flaterringly describe in terms of how "free" or "real" the persons involved are.)

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

I love this, and I totally agree. To be understood at all requires a background of mutual assumption,exposure, and expectation. Novelty is key. We want to delight others, and jokes and philosophy arguably do this in terms of surprise--which requires expectation.

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

Again, I totally agree, and I'm delighted to see it written in black and white. That's the sort of self-consciouness that fascinates me. Changing the rules of the game is what I mean by abnormal discourse (which I steal from Rorty who stole from ...). That's the thrill of philosophy. It doesn't just break this or that proposition. It goes all King Slender on paradigms as a whole. (I also liked the lizard guy, but King Slender was my go to, and I hope this reference lands, so I feel less old.)

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 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?

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

Yes, indeed. Multitudes. In that sense the chosen persona is very much a mask. We are brown in our guts but get to choose how we paint our verbal surface, within Freudian limits.

The honor issue is fascinating. It touches on conflicting visions of the masculine. In some cases it would just be crude to defend one's honor. One debases one's self further by taking the dishonor seriously. There's some great Dostoevsky on this theme. Stavrogin in The Possessed is unforgettable. He refuses to kill what's-his-name after the public slap. At first all the men of honor despise him as a coward. Finally some old general re-interprets this restrain in terms of what's-his-name's social status being too low to ...deserve retribution. Then they all celebrate him for being more noble and impressive than they are. There's a humor so deep and black in Dostoevsky (here and there) that makes we want to cry....with a dark joy, of course.

Anyway, I know what you mean about the voices. I also try to listen neutrally and stony-faced to the complexity of my heart in all of its wickedness and generosity. Somehow it became a matter of principle. This is one of the reasons I love Kojeve. Philosophy as a religion of self-consciousness? You betcha. Childhood happened to shape me for just that questionable game.

I really like the "You're bad, but you could be good." I think we tend to preserve our "spiritual bodies" which is to say self-image so that criticism is hard to admit to consciousness without the accompanying possibility of a fix. As a writer and musician, I've often decided that everything I had done to that point was shit. But this was only tolerable when I felt that I had just figured out why it was shit and how it therefore wouldn't be shit in the future. The same applies to the self. "I can admit I'm shit now because I was shit relative to the recently discovered future and diamond self."

Of course I also relate to truth-presentation as a supreme heroism. Sure, I shave off universal validity in theory. I embrace pragmatism and skepticism. But there is some synonym of the word truth that I can't help adoring and pursuing. I might say "style" or "beauty," but it's a little more scientific/conceptual than that, if only because it's conceptual.

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

This is all great, too. I phrase in terms of "the laughter of the gods." We can get very passionate about the intellectual performance and lose ourselves in it, but, indeed, we speak from partial selves and in sense only partial truths. One could say that all thinking is reductionist. I very much appreciate that you are communicating something you actually feel. That's also what motivated me to be open about things that I knew weren't entirely respectable and could easily be misunderstood.

Hegel is pretty complicated. I don't at all agree that he pointed outside of man.

The History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom.
...
Spirit is essentially the result of its own activity; its activity is the transcending of immediate, simple, unreflected existence, — the negation of that existence, and the returning into itself.
...
We have already discussed the final aim of the progression. The principles of the successive phases of Spirit that animate the Nations in a necessitated gradation, are themselves only steps in the development of the one universal Spirit, which through them elevates and completes itself to a self-comprehending totality. — Hegel

He's probably most vulnerable when he generalizes his personal experience to all of mankind.

It's safer to say that the history of a certain kind of individual is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom. Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy are the first tyrants to be toppled. Eventually even the sacred words of the grown-ups are declawed and filed among the other deactivated idols. But reality itself is not declawed. We need food. Hunger is not an illusion to be dispelled by critical philosophy. Consciousness of freedom is glorious. I'd even call it my religion. But it doesn't solve the problem of life as a whole. So I'm inclined to talk about the limits of talk itself. Yes, we are linguistic creatures who need good software, but we also need hardware. Cancer has no respect for Hegel. It will grudgingly acknowledge radiation, though. We live on, conscious of our radical freedom in theory, while constraining ourselves nevertheless in practice, precisely because we are attached to living on. I can't do everything that I think is "without sin" (though a sin to others) because it still might get me killed. I'm a god tied to a dog, or rather a dog-god. If the dog dies, god does too. The "master" can only enjoy himself as such through the "vessel" of an essentially slavish (because living, natural) dog. The grand parasite is literally nothing without its host.

We've been the radically free agents all along, but it simply doesn't give us the power we like to imagine. We have to deal with others, our bodily limits, the world in which we live, our ethical obligations. Radical freedom is not the ability to do anything and create a world without problem or challenge. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I'd translate this by "radical freedom is not unlimited power." Of course I agree. As I understand this freedom, it's just freedom from "ideal" or "moral" constraints and not from physical constraints. What I always have in mind is cacophony of political/religious rhetoric that makes demands, launches accusations, sews confusion, etc. This rhetoric is neutralized by the "free" self-consciousness I have in mind. The "magic" of the demanding/accusing other is vaporized. The game of symbol manipulation and concept warfare is seen from a "higher" place. (I just mean conceptually and emotionally.)
Or we might say that the battle is in our Hegelian belly, the noise of subselves who don't know that they've been synthesized into a (more) harmonious unity.

The grades which Spirit seems to have left behind it, it still possesses in the depths of its present. — Hegel

I'm speaking of the first person experience of viewing an argument, seeing the strengths and faults of both sides, and also possessing a sense that question itself is flawed, that the futility of the argument is masked by an unnecessary assumption. Philosophy is (among so many other things) a scrubbing away of false necessities and confused or insincere questions.

I've also written a little book to answer this question definitively. Unfortunately the book indicates in its introduction (which is all there is of the book) that it is not quite universally effective. Indeed, some users experience mild side effects such as insanity, suicide, or, worse (a zit front and center on the nose with a side of anal pruritus). You are however welcome to read this masterpiece. It is scratched on the top of a toilet paper dispenser in an airport restroom. I did leave instructions that the book could be copied without penalty, but only to the furniture of of public restrooms in the lower 48. It is essential that my book of Truth is enjoyed (if at all) as "light" reading (which is indicated in the subtitle to prevent accidents.) Finally, my book was dictated by seven naked angels (only 5 of them female and 1 indeterminate) from God's office on Neptune. They demanded that I set the price at one brown penny per page, cash upon results with an afterlifetime warranty.

What is lost here (in the abstract existence of some abstract God) is pretty much everything God is good for ---- away from systematic philosophy. I can cook up a new abstract God every evening if anyone's buying. Of course some ideologists do in fact make a living this way, but they seem to have no choice but to sell a less potent if more plausible substitute. We might call it "pep talk." I don't resent the existence of this pep talk. That's largely what life-philosophy is, even if it's grim like Schopenhauer's. It's still an ideology that functions like aspirin or caffeine.

But the God that's not just ideological preference is the embarrassing God, the God of miracle and providence, the anti-scientific God. In short, this personal God that bends the rules of nature is the God whose existence matters or not, at least to the non-philosopher. We annoying philosophical types have all written (and continue to write) our own precious little theologies within the limits of the usual laws of nature. (Not too many around here challenge science on its own turf. Instead there's just gang war over the margins.)

What do you think of this excerpt from the philosopher George Simmel's book?

“Valuation as a real psychological occurrence is part of the natural world; but what we mean by valuation, its conceptual meaning, is something independent of this world; is not part of it, but is rather the whole world viewed from a particular vantage point”

I'd appreciate your thoughts... — River

It seems like a badly written sentence. "Conceptual meaning" sounds redundant. Valuation is presented as a part of the natural world and yet independent of the world, a contradiction.

That being said, I can image viewing the world through one pair of desirous eyes. Then we can image everything important to the individual owning the eyes to be inflated and everything unimportant to be deflated. Or we can think of consciousness focused on ways to convert X into Y or get to Z. So the world is conceptually "scaffolded " in terms of these desires. A junkie, for instance, might think of the world in terms of dealers, cash-flow, and different highs. An investor sees the movement of money, etc.

If I can jump in, I think the best critique of the The Irony (along Hegelian lines) is simply that we crave something real and objective and social. We can pretend that "nothing is good or bad but thinking makes its so," but this isn't the truth of our nature. However flexible we are in terms of our religion and ideology, there's an animal/emotional foundation that is common to all of us. We can only partially create ourselves. As I currently read it, Hegel assimilated this vision of radical freedom so that it became social rather than individual. God himself, evolving within and through us, was the radically free agent creating himself. And we could participate in that through philosophy, religion, and art. Of course (in the background) he successfully positions himself as the cutting edge of God's self-consciousness. So he doesn't really sacrifice the same kind of "royal" position (of the Ironist) on a personal level.

Anyways the problem I'm trying to understand here is whether you are talking about that they rejected a certain aspect of reality itself (which I guess could happen but I'm not sure why) or if trying to undermine certain aspects of the labels or system of labels we use to reference everything. If I was to hazard a guess I would say I believe they are doing the latter since if you wish to question Western ideology and Abrahamic religions, you would want to find something wrong with it and get others to believe you when you say there is a issue with it. — dclements

The position of the ironist would be that all these Abrahamic religions are just monkey breath, at least in terms of their authority over him. But the ironist goes farther than this. The ironist in that passage would feel the same way about feminism, environmentalism, sexism, racism, democracy, science, rationality, etc.,etc. It's the end of all holy words and concepts in the name of the ego who has recognized itself as the bestower of value and creator of all gods, be they traditional or newfangled and abstract (social justice). Basically everyone hates this A-hole. He is impiety incarnate. But, as mentioned above, he's also a cartoon. Because there are certain things that we just can't help but value. Otherwise we wouldn't be socialized enough to attain the level of abstraction involved, language being inherently social.

Sure, I think F has this kind of passage in mind:

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

Hegel makes a great point here, but perhaps he is attached to the domination of matter by mind or the reduction of non-mind to mind.

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

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.

Nice quote. Marx strikes me as an over-correction. If the German philosophers emphasized the dominance of non-thought by thought, then Marx did the opposite. Instead of matter as a function of the idea, we have the idea as a function of matter. But Marx sawed off the branch he was singing from. If the realm of culture is one with the deterministic realm of history and matter, then why all the hand-wringing and accusation? In short there's a tension between the scientific role and the prophetic social-justice role in Marx that's hard to take seriously. Feuerbach was more of "scientist" in his desire. I think he wanted to see clearly more than he wanted to lead others in a practical cause. (His biography supports this.)

But the "levels of being" seems to run through all of them, in terms of stages of consciousness and stages of the division of labor. At the end is absolute knowledge, complete incarnation, classless society, the abolition of difference, etc. I like this period in philosophy because it's so "human." Just about everyone cares about this sort of issue. And I think this connects to Feuerbach's materialism. He was trying to get real, become genuine.

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

This is from Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. This fits with God as Logos, but the Logos is incarnate.

Taken as an intelligible (geistig) or an abstract being, that is, regarded neither as human nor as sensuous, but rather as one that is an object for and accessible only to reason or intelligence, God qua God is nothing but the essence of reason itself. But, basing themselves rather on imagination, ordinary theology and Theism regard him as an independent being existing separately from reason. Under these circumstances, it is an inner, a sacred necessity that the essence of reason as distinguished from reason itself be at last identified with it and the divine being thus be apprehended, realised, as the essence of reason. It is on this necessity that the great historical significance of speculative philosophy rests. The proof of the proposition that the divine essence is the essence of reason or intelligence lies in the fact that the determinations or qualities of God, in so far as they are rational or intelligible and not determinations of sensuousness or imagination, are, in fact, qualities of reason. — Feuerbach

Here's an interesting quote that shows that gap between Hegel and Feuerbach (as I understand it).

I owe my existence by no means to the verbal or the logical bread – to the bread in itself – but always only to this bread, the "non-verbal." Being, grounded as it is altogether on such non-verbalities, is therefore itself something non-verbal. Indeed, it is that which cannot be verbalised. Where words cease, life begins and being reveals its secret. If, therefore, non-verbality is the same as irrationality, then all existence is irrational because it is always and forever only this existence. But irrational it is not. Existence has meaning and reason in itself, without being verbalised. — F

As I understand it, the knowability of God asserted by Hegel is founded on an identification of God and (social) man. (I don't, however, see this kind of God as a ground of nature or matter. Why there is a man who makes Gods in his own image remains mysterious to me. But this "why" also feels merely lyrical or irreducible.)

In Professor Tucker's words, Hegelianism was a "philosophic religion of self in the form of a theory of history. The religion is founded on an identification of the self with God" 1 It should not be necessary to add at this point that "the self here is not the individual, but the collective organic species 'self.'" In a youthful essay on "The Positivity of the Christian Religion," written at the age of 25, Hegel revealingly objects to Christianity for "separating" man and God except "in one isolated individual" (Jesus), and placing God in another and higher world, to which man's activity could contribute nothing. Four years later, in 1799, Hegel resolved this problem by offering his own religion, in his "The Spirit of Christianity." In contrast to orthodox Christianity, in which God became man in Jesus, for Hegel Jesus's achievement was, as a man, to become God! Tucker sums this up neatly. To Hegel, Jesus

<<is not God become man, but man become God. 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. They are not two separate things with an impassable gulf between them. The absolute self in man, the homo noumenon, is not mere godlike … it is God. Consequently, in so far as man strives to become "like God," he is simply striving to be his own real self. And in deifying himself, he is simply recognizing his own true nature.>>2

If man is really God, what then is history? Why does man, or rather, do men, change and develop? Because the man-God is not perfect, or at least he does not begin in a perfect state. Man-God begins his life in history totally unconscious of his divine status. History, then, for Hegel, is a process by which the man-God increases his knowledge, until he finally reaches the state of absolute knowledge, that is, the full knowledge and realization that he is God. In that case, man-God finally realizes his potential of an infinite being without bounds, possessed of absolute knowledge. — https://mises.org/library/hegel-and-man-god

While we all may have dreams and higher purpose in mind to guide our actions, the human condition binds us much like a leash does with a dog. — dclements

Great analogy. I think it was Diogenes who masturbated in the street and joked that he wish he could do the same trick with his stomach, which is to say just rub it to make the hunger go away. To be fair, much of the pleasure of life is animal or bodily pleasure. But there's definitely a less obviously bodily "status" pleasure as well, since many will starve themselves to be seen in a certain body.

It may sound very demeaning for me to word it this way, but if it is really that way (perhaps I'm just exaggerating just a little), it would still be appropriate. At least while reading your comments I feel a little bit less crazy then I sometimes imagine myself to be. — dclements

I was just reflecting on this in another thread. We associate sanity with education as a general rule in this culture, and yet some of most praised and famous thinkers are "crazy" in the sense that they threaten not only yesterday's sacred cows but also today's. There's something creepy about thinking, and yet there's something comforting about an old, famous book --as long as it stays on the shelf. A good analogy might be that most Christians believe in the miracles that happened 2000 years ago, but not many (as I understand it) believe in a miracle that happened this morning across the street. There's a distance effect involved that sanitizes the situation.

Hegel was not in any case an atheist, and he also had some affinities with mysticism. — Wayfarer

I don't Hegel's God has much to do with the usual theism (though maybe with yours, if you consider yourself a theist.) Of course Hegel isn't the easiest guy to be sure about, but his religion is definitely anthropomorphic. Or that's what I've come away with so far.

Equally unsatisfactory is the merely abstract, undefined belief in a Providence, when that belief is not brought to bear upon the details of the process which it conducts. On the contrary our earnest endeavour must be directed to the recognition of the ways of Providence, the means it uses, and the historical phenomena in which it manifests itself; and we must show their connection with the general principle above mentioned. But in noticing the recognition of the plan of Divine Providence generally, I have implicitly touched upon a prominent question of the day; viz. that of the possibility of knowing God: or rather — since public opinion has ceased to allow it to be a matter of question — the doctrine that it is impossible to know God. In direct contravention of what is commanded in holy Scripture as the highest duty, — that we should not merely love, but know God, — the prevalent dogma involves the denial of what is there said; viz. that it is the Spirit (der Geist) that leads into Truth, knows all things, penetrates even into the deep things of the Godhead. While the Divine Being is thus placed beyond our knowledge, and outside the limit of all human things, we have the convenient licence of wandering as far as we list, in the direction of our own fancies. We are freed from the obligation to refer our knowledge to the Divine and True. On the other hand, the vanity and egotism which characterise it find, in this false position, ample justification and the pious modesty which puts far from it the knowledge of God, can well estimate how much furtherance thereby accrues to its own wayward and vain strivings. I have been unwilling to leave out of sight the connection between our thesis - that Reason governs and has governed the World — and the question of the possibility of a Knowledge of God, chiefly that I might not lose the opportunity of mentioning the imputation against Philosophy of being shy of noticing religious truths, or of having occasion to be so in which is insinuated the suspicion that it has anything but a clear conscience in the presence of these truths. So far from this being the case, the fact is, that in recent times Philosophy has been obliged to defend the domain of religion against the attacks of several theological systems. In the Christian religion God has revealed Himself, — that is, he has given us to understand what He is; so that He is no longer a concealed or secret existence. And this possibility of knowing Him, thus afforded us, renders such knowledge a duty. God wishes no narrow-hearted souls or empty heads for his children; but those whose spirit is of itself indeed, poor, but rich in the knowledge of Him; and who regard this knowledge of God as the only valuable possession. That development of the thinking spirit, which has resulted from the revelation of the Divine Being as its original basis, must ultimately advance to the intellectual comprehension of what was presented in the first instance, to feeling and imagination. The time must eventually come for understanding that rich product of active Reason, which the History of the World offers to us. It was for a while the fashion to profess admiration for the wisdom of God, as displayed in animals, plants, and isolated occurrences. But, if it be allowed that Providence manifests itself in such objects and forms of existence, why not also in Universal History? This is deemed too great a matter to be thus regarded. But Divine Wisdom, i.e. Reason., is one and the same in the great as in the little; and we must not imagine God to be too weak to exercise his wisdom on the grand scale. Our intellectual striving aims at realising the conviction that what was intended by eternal wisdom, is actually accomplished in the domain of existent, active Spirit, as well as in that of mere Nature. Our mode of treating the subject is, in this aspect, a Theodicaea, — a justification of the ways of God, — which Leibnitz attempted metaphysically in his method, i.e. in indefinite abstract categories, — so that the ill that is found in the World may be comprehended, and the thinking Spirit reconciled with the fact of the existence of evil. — Hegel

He doesn't strike me as the typical theist, though.

And I don't think that he had an affinity for mysticism.

When we state the true form of truth to be its scientific character – or, what is the same thing, when it is maintained that truth finds the medium of its existence in notions or conceptions alone – I know that this seems to contradict an idea with all its consequences which makes great pretensions and has gained widespread acceptance and conviction at the present time. A word of explanation concerning this contradiction seems, therefore, not out of place, even though at this stage it can amount to no more than a dogmatic assurance exactly like the view we are opposing. If, that is to say, truth exists merely in what, or rather exists merely as what, is called at one time intuition, at another immediate knowledge of the Absolute, Religion, Being – not being in the centre of divine love, but the very Being of this centre, of the Absolute itself – from that point of view it is rather the opposite of the notional or conceptual form which would be required for systematic philosophical exposition. The Absolute on this view is not to be grasped in conceptual form, but felt, intuited; it is not its conception, but the feeling of it and intuition of it that are to have the say and find expression.
...
The man who only seeks edification, who wants to envelop in mist the manifold diversity of his earthly existence and thought, and craves after the vague enjoyment of this vague and indeterminate Divinity – he may look where he likes to find this: he will easily find for himself the means to procure something he can rave over and puff himself up withal. But philosophy must beware of wishing to be edifying.

Φ 10. Still less must this kind of contentment, which holds science in contempt, take upon itself to claim that raving obscurantism of this sort is something higher than science. These apocalyptic utterances pretend to occupy the very centre and the deepest depths; they look askance at all definiteness and preciseness of meaning; and they deliberately hold back from conceptual thinking and the constraining necessities of thought, as being the sort of reflection which, they say, can only feel at home in the sphere of finitude. But just as there is a breadth which is emptiness, there is a depth which is empty too: as we may have an extension of substance which overflows into finite multiplicity without the power of keeping the manifold together, in the same way we may have an insubstantial intensity which, keeping itself in as mere force without actual expression, is no better than superficiality. The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself when spending and giving out its substance. Moreover, when this unreflective emotional knowledge makes a pretence of having immersed its own very self in the depths of the absolute Being, and of philosophizing in all holiness and truth, it hides from itself the fact that instead of devotion to God, it rather, by this contempt for all measurable precision and definiteness, simply attests in its own case the fortuitous character of its content, and in the other endows God with its own caprice. When such minds commit themselves to the unrestrained ferment of sheer emotion, they think that, by putting a veil over self-consciousness, and surrendering all understanding, they are thus God’s beloved ones to whom He gives His wisdom in sleep. This is the reason, too, that in point of fact, what they do conceive and bring forth in sleep is dreams. — Hegel

Of course Hegel is no final authority on the validity of mysticism. But I've been tackling the juicier bits in the original, and I come away with a sense that Hegel is worldly and conceptual to the core.

The explicit discussions of the 'distinction of man from Nature' I recall are those from Indian philosophy, although usually described in terms of 'self and other'. — Wayfarer

Feuerbach is stressing that the transcendence of the Christian God is the essential point. When a community's God is above or outside of nature, so is that community, implicity. He traces intstrumental egoism to the creation-from-nothing myth. A less egoistic/transcendent community would fit their God within nature (since God is their avatar).

still in touch with his Blake. & also Stirner. — csalisbury

'Exuberance is beauty' applies to both of them, but Stirner has lost points with me since I have discovered him to be an elaborate footnote to Hegel.

Spirit thus rises to itself or attains to self-consciousness, and by this means finds within itself its own objectivity, which it was previously compelled to seek in the outer and sensuous forms of material existence. Henceforth it perceives and knows itself in this its unity with itself; and it is precisely this clear self-consciousness of spirit that constitutes the fundamental principle of Romantic Art. But the necessary consequence is that in this last stage of the development of art the beauty of the Classic ideal, which is beauty under its most perfect form and in its purest essence, can no longer be deemed a finality; for spirit now knows that its true nature is not to brought into a corporeal form. It comprehends that it belongs to its essence to abandon this external reality in order to return upon itself, and expressly posits or assumes outer reality to be an existence incapable of fully representing spirit.
...
The true content of Romantic thought, then, is absolute internality, the adequate and appropriate form of which is spiritual subjectivity, or conscious personality, as comprehension of its own independence and freedom. Now that which is in itself infinite and wholly universal is absolute negativity of all that is finite and particular. It is the simple unity with self which has destroyed all mutually exclusive objects, all processes of nature, with their circle of genesis, decay, and renewal which, in short, has put an end to all limitation of spiritual existence, and dissolved all particular divinities into itself. In this pantheon all the gods are dethroned. The flame of subjectivity has consumed them. In place of plastic polytheism, art now knows but one God, one Spirit, one absolute independence, which, as absolute knowing and determining, abides in free unity with itself, and no longer falls asunder into those special characters and functions whose sole bond of unity was the constraint of a mysterious necessity. — Hegel

And Feuerbach was another elaboration, though with an important materialistic emphasis.

But in order that spirit may thus realise its infinite nature it is so much the more necessary that it should rise above mere natural and finite personality in order to reach the height of the Absolute. In other terms, the human soul must bring itself into actual existence as a person (Subjekt) possessing self consciousness and rational will; and this it accomplishes through becoming itself pervaded with the absolutely substantial. On the other hand, the substantial, the true, must not be understood as located outside of humanity, nor must the anthropomorphism of Greek thought be swept away. Rather the human as actual subjectivity or personality must become the principle, and thus, as we have already seen, anthropomorphism for the first time attains to its ultimate fullness and perfection. — Hegel

Note that there's not much difference between Hegel and The Irony. Hegel is just the "mature" man who sees that he also wants something solid, objective, social. He's a "god haunted
weirdo that got himself taken seriously.

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. — Wayfarer

Feuerbach seemed to see himself as fixing Christianity so that it would work better. He thought that if man would just wake up from his confused projection, then man could get his act together. Kind of touching isn't it? I won't defend Marx, though he has his moments. But, seriously, have you read Feuerbach closely?

Not to invent, but to discover, “to unveil existence,” has been my sole object; to see correctly, my sole endeavour. It is not I, but religion that worships man, although religion, or rather theology, denies this; it is not I, an insignificant individual, but religion itself that says: God is man, man is God; it is not I, but religion that denies the God who is not man, but only an ens rationis, – since it makes God become man, and then constitutes this God, not distinguished from man, having a human form, human feelings, and human thoughts, the object of its worship and veneration. I have only found the key to the cipher of the Christian religion, only extricated its true meaning from the web of contradictions and delusions called theology; – but in doing so I have certainly committed a sacrilege. If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism – at least in the sense of this work – is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature. — F

I came to Feuerbach late, unfortunately, but it's a great book. He's a more "objective" man than Nietzsche with many of the same concerns.

To speak is an act of the will; thus, creation is a product of the Will: as in the Word of God man affirms the divinity of the human word, so in creation he affirms the divinity of the Will: not, however, the will of the reason, but the will of the imagination – the absolutely subjective, unlimited will. The culminating point of the principle of subjectivity is creation out of nothing. As the eternity of the world or of matter imports nothing further than the essentiality of matter, so the creation of the world out of nothing imports simply the non-essentiality, the nothingness of the world. — F

I've sometimes thought about the "white man" colonizing North America with his iconoclastic religion. Feuerbach really brought home for me what iconoclasm is all about.

Creation out of nothing is the highest expression of omnipotence: but omnipotence is nothing else than subjectivity exempting itself from all objective conditions and limitations, and consecrating this exemption as the highest power and reality: nothing else than the ability to posit everything real as unreal – everything conceivable as possible: nothing else than the power of the imagination, or of the will as identical with the imagination, the power of self-will.
...
Man distinguishes himself from Nature. This distinction of his is his God: the distinguishing of God from Nature is nothing else than the distinguishing of man from Nature. — F

Jesus, Feuerbach! Nailed it. "This distinction of his is his God."

Great post.

Then: you build up a persona and self-image, half-knowing its false, in order to re-position yourself in a way that will restore things to how they're supposed to be. — csalisbury

There's a line in Derrida's Spurs that I struck me as true. In short, men are their masks. They kill and die for "honor." Of course Hegel/Kojeve comes to mind. Man as such is the animal who throws away his biological reality (if necessary) in the name of a "spiritual" (linguistic) notion of himself. Man is a futile passion to be god, or present and transcendent at the same time (Sartre). But maybe all these dudes were drunk on too much breast-milk. I read Being and Nothingness as an badly written but highly relevant autobiography that won't confess itself as such--or maybe it was just slick and less embarrassing for both reader and writer to frame it all as universally valid psychology rather than as abstract, confessional, lyric poetry. (For what it's worth, I was basically a "gifted" child from a dysfunctional, working-class family. But momma did love her babies, and I was the first. )

Anyway, more to the point. I really don't believe there is a true human essence beyond the shared biological foundation. I do believe that "spiritual" pain (shame, guilt, dissatisfaction) carves our mask. I do not believe that we are always self-conscious enough to worry about it. Joking/playing with the wife is pure. Maybe because we are naked in our infinitude there.

And if you think about yourself that way, then you start to think about the whole world that way. Not people, but personas. A persona can only see personas. That kinda thing. — csalisbury

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.

I hear you, and even largely agree. But I think you've framed me in your mind (incorrectly, from my perspective) as a recurrent forum type, namely the angry/angsty young man.

True, we can embrace the objective and find satisfaction as part of a team (which I have done, professionally, abandoning art/music/writing for science/academia), but I for one still demand or desire recognition from my wife, for instance, and real friends, as a...unique snowflake, shall we say. Fight Club tells me otherwise, but it's just cute insincerity. Yes, most non-conformity is a petty secondary conformity. Being original means nothing if you suck, etc. But after all of the the wisdom and the caveats are dispensed with, I still seek out (and want to be) those with the divine spark, which is to say with a sense of themselves as transcendent or bigger than any particular role they find themselves playing. Of course the "looks" issue is a delicate one, but anyone who's felt physically attractive and been treated as a physically attractive person as a general rule can surely relate to the dread aging. We get mentally younger and freer in a certain sense, while the face/body sends an opposite message. (Thank the gods I didn't get fat, but why did they take my hair?)
On the other hand, this aging "trauma" is bittersweet, because it's another great theme to contemplate. It forces one to identify more with the imperishable realm of thought. (And despite the egoism talk pursued in a quest for truth/authenticity/sincerity, I understand the beauty of true humility, of the courage to not know and to not dominate. But the anti-ego talk can become so false and masochistic that I like to "confess" what the behavior of those around us tells us every day -- that looking out for and building up #1 is the living religion on which the other stuff functions as an icing or a lubricant. (I'm not complaining or rebelling. Amor fati, etc. But this "amor fati" is one more "finite" and quickly mockable persona, for instance, which the restless spirit does not neglect to chew. )

Louis C.K. gets pretty brutal. I think we can relate to him because he talks openly (with a transcendent gleam in his eye) about subjects we wouldn't touch in mixed company. I could find some clips, but just recall some of his bolder jokes. He's something like an implicitly "nihilist" clown, in the sense that a certain kind of skeptic (close to my meaning of nihilist) plays by the rules for pragmatic reasons, without affirming those rules from his depths as an expression of his true self.

That's roughly the theme. I'm especially connecting the idea of God to that fantasy. A nice little point to add: Feuerbach stressed that the gods of the Greeks were still part of nature, while Jewish and Christian God was utterly separate from nature. For Feuerbach, this emphasized the Christian impatience with Nature and desire to dominate. If our God can create nature on a whim, he can destroy it on a whim. If we look at movies like The Matrix, we see humans creating reality from scratch just like God. These days gender and sexual orientation are two more things we can toggle on our profiles. I'm not complaining. I'm saying that we are incarnating the image of our transcendent God, especially a certain kind of atheist (because surely God himself has no God but himself). Even Nietzsche's over-man is a Christ-image, which is to say an image of the divine brought "down" (up?) to the flesh. I'm not advocating anything or complaining about anything, but only opening up about a theme that I've always found interesting as one more person trying to incarnate the divine. (I'm an atheist, so the divine is just whatever has mystique or beauty or whatever in an overpowering way.)

Do you think the Golden Age of TV is a mediocrity, or a form of greatness, or something in between, or what? — Noble Dust

I sincerely think there's some great TV at the moment. (I realize I've been mixing my points, trying to rip out the entire thought-clump at once.)

Can you explain this concept further? I'm very intrigued by it, but also confused by your obtuse language in describing it. — Noble Dust

My lingo for the thought is influenced by a recent reading of The Essence of Christianity. I could less pretentiously call the god-haunted "idealists," but idealists are typically thought of as nice little fellows who would never admit to wanting to be God. Or I might describe "spirit" as an itch or a restlessness, something that urges us even to transgression when boredom is the alternative. I think of the critical mind that turns inward on itself, sculpting itself, throwing certain aspects of the current personality on to the fire. I thinking of the hatred of being a cliche (anxiety of influence). Maybe Jung would talk about a drive toward individuation. (It's a fog or clump of thoughts or a theme, not a thesis really. I do believe philosophical types can relate, though maybe especially the masters of suspicion of anti-systematic types. )

Sure. I'm happy to. He's basically sketching a person who feels above all things and detached from every "finite" or fixed identity. This person sees all laws and sacred cows as mere human constructions to which he does not owe respect. He also feels that his essence is "infinite" in the sense that whatver persona he chooses to wear is ultimately a lie or only a partial truth. So he takes an ironic view toward everything serious. He gets his kicks from the sense of himself as a genius or someone transcendent. He therefore has a certain contempt for anyone still narrow-minded enough to believe in anything other than the transcendent ego that creates and destroys gods or ideals in the first place.

Basically Hegel sketched Stirner's longwinded book in a few long-winded paragraphs. He goes on to criticize this position (called The Irony at the time), but he does acknowledge that it is one of the higher stages in the evolution of self-consciousness.