Absolutist Atheism..(?)

I find it baffling that the first philosopher to be an outspoken atheist should describe the entire inner being of our world as will. For those of you who don't know, I'm referring to Arthur Schopenhauer: 19th century "pessimist" philosopher, who believed that the reality we are aware of is merely an "appearance" (and that derived from Immanuel Kant), and that the other side of things - the reality of which we're not aware - is a seething, undifferentiated mass of will.

What's so puzzling to me is this: to be called an atheist, one must have renounced the idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful totality of being that would normally be called "God." Granted, Schopenhauer did describe that underlying "will" as blind (i.e. it is not "all-knowing") - but the implications of the way he describes reality are in a very obvious sense theistic.

This all brings to mind an idea that I and many others have had, namely that human nature is actually incapable of true atheism. It may be that Schopenhauer outgrew the idea of "God" in the Judeo-Christian sense of the term, or that Richard Dawkins renounces the idea of "God" in any of its multi-cultural manifestations - but did not Schopenhauer simply replace God with will? Has Dawkins actually conquered the metaphysical need for absolute reality - or has he simply filled this need with science instead of God? Considering the nature of what we call "God," it's easy to see that one "God" has simply been replaced by another: no man can do without.

I suppose the real purpose of writing this down is to warn my fellow men: the idea of a "practicing atheist" is truly absurd. Try and find one - at best, you will find some decadent excuse for a neo-nihilist that wants some good-old-fashioned attention. In all honesty, an "atheist" is nothing more than someone who has replaced the Christian "God" with some other absolute principle or ruling idea - in other words, someone who has found a new God. Unfortunately for us (and them), they've yet to find anything better.

Demystification: Phase One

Scientific atheists and Christian theologians alike contend that the crux of Christianity rests on the belief in Christ's resurrection - it's become the modern day litmus test that will once and for all establish whether someone is a Christian or not. 

I, for one, pose to both parties this question: since when did belief in someone's teachings require belief in said teacher's immortality? The first Christians - those who accompanied Christ before his death - were obviously oblivious to the "fact" that he would rise from the dead - and yet they were still Christians. Similarly, your present-day Cartesians, Darwinists, Marxists and Maoists entertain no illusions concerning the death of their respective idols - must we then say that Cartesians are not "true Cartesians," because they have not enough faith in Descartes to believe that he transcended death? Must the Maoists believe that their portly premier still haunts the streets of Beijing in order to call themselves Maoists? I think not. 

The fact that the Roman Catholic Church has set up a series of requirements that believers must meet before they can call themselves Christians has no bearing on the true meaning of the word "Christian" - to be a Christian is to adhere to (or at least attempt to adhere to) the teachings of Jesus Christ. Proving that corpses do not reanimate in no way disproves that humility is a good quality to have, or that love of one's neighbor is generally a good thing; and conversely, a man is not made humble and loving simply because he places his belief in a physical impossibility. A Christian is first and foremost a follower of Christ - the superstition is no more than icing on the cake. If you believe it, that is. 

Aside: A Word to a Loved One

I suppose it's something like luck that brings friends into our lives, and cruel fate that takes them out again. A man can never do enough planning, make enough efforts, or arrange enough circumstance to establish a relationship with someone; similarly, he cannot fight hard enough, work long enough, or give more than enough to maintain a relationship that's running through his fingers. The only thing over which he does have control is the place he makes in his heart for those central figures in his life he calls friends - and he should take care not to misplace them. But then I'm telling the moral before the story:

I knew somehow, and long before we met, that you would be a part of my life. I knew somehow, when we did meet, that you would mean more to me than anyone else I'd ever known. And I knew, after you'd stepped away, that I'd shown you too much. I let you know exactly what role you played in my life, and you weren't happy with the part; I let you know how much you meant to me, and you were overwhelmed with the responsibility; and I let you know that, in spite of all your shortcomings, I still loved you. That, I think, is when you realized exactly what it meant to take advantage of people - and you felt guilty for doing it.

It would be wrong to say that I begrudge you all the insipidity, insult and indifference that you've shown me over the years; in fact, I do believe I've grown from them. At the very least I can say that I've come to know a little better exactly what place in my heart you must occupy (it's somewhere near the ground floor, most probably in the maintenance closet) - perhaps the role suits you better? Come now, and do be honest: is that not the room I occupy in yours?

Faith vs. Reason: An Attempt at Reconciliation

This post is an extension of a train of thought begun in the post "Reasonable Rhetoric," and followed upon in "Specificity Contra Art." The upside-down, read-from-top-to-bottom, inverse-Chinese aspect of the blog's chronological layout means that the commencement of this argument is to be found somewhere below this one. I would change that, if I knew how.

The apparent manifestation of the "unscientific backlash," as we will call it, directs us back to our concern with the New Synthesis of faith and reason. It's quite obvious that these two world-views have time and time again established paradigms in every field of human activity; that they have been all-too-often paraded as mutually exclusive criteria for Truth, despite the intrinsic mutual dependency that exists between them; and that contemporary social phenomena evidence a strong inclination towards the reconciliation between their adherents. All that is left to be done is to bring some of these exemplary phenomena to light, so that the hypocrisy that feeds the perpetual battle between the two might be exposed and eliminated.

Reason in Faith: Let's begin with the adherents of faith. The Roman Catholic Church is the most influential faith-based institution in the world, and as such represents the greatest threat to reason that has ever existed: I refer you all to the fates of Galileo and Descartes, whose scientific milestones were assailed with the stinking muck of heresy, insubordination and atheism before finally reaching their public's awareness. More importantly, I ask you to examine the "dogma" that stands as a prerequisite to the "profession of faith": it includes such bizarreries as Virgin Birth, Immaculate Conception and Resurrection After Death. Obviously, none of us were there to witness these miracles - we are instructed to accept them upon faith alone. 

But then what, according to the instructors, is this faith? From what I have seen, their "faith" consists of argumentation, syllogism and vast cobwebs of cold, calculated, often circular - reason. Take a listen, if you will, to the subterranean rumblings emanating from the caves of the Vatican: you will hear an army of apologentsia, devising rudimentary Aristotlean equations in order to prove that Christ rose from the dead, after having been conceived by a Virgin. They are out to devise geometrical proofs for the very mysteries that are to be accepted upon faith, and the laboratories in which they work are of a decidedly Frankenseinean nature. 

It should be clear to anyone without conceptual cataracts that the miracle-mystery dogmatism of the Catholic Church is nothing more than a crooked spinning wheel of social control, designed to keep even the most astute intellects occupied so that the political pressure-cooker might go on boiling undetected. But what concerns us here is the fact that reason has been employed to buttress faith - even in cases where the faith has gone bad. Despite their cries against the scientific community for trying to introduce reason where reason doesn't belong, the bedrock of Christian dogmatism is being reinforced with logical rebar. 

Faith in Reason: The scientific community represents humanity's immense investment in the power of reason; let us then address their method, for as we will discover, faith plays a critical role therein. 

The first assumption - that reason is capable of arriving at Truth - is an assumption which must be accepted upon faith alone. There is no way to prove that the products of reason are in any way congruent with what we call Truth, no more than we can prove that Truth actually exists independent of human consciousness. The attempt to drive out faith from the scientific realm is a pipe-dream; if this purging were actually realized, the vast bodies of knowledge that science has accumulated would fall into the same irreparable senselessness in which the theologians anguish daily. We require an immense amount of faith in our own reason to even arrive at the possibility of employing the scientific method.

The second assumption - that the Truth arrived at by reason is justified by experimentation - is also a faith-based assumption. In order to assert that, for instance, the theory of relativity correctly predicts the bending of light around high-mass astronomical bodies, one has to put a great deal of faith in one's eyes and instruments - how else would we then know that we are even witnessing an eclipse? What in the hell would the term "observation" mean, if we didn't trust the proper functionality of our cornea-lens-retina-nervous-system combo? The entire undertaking which we call "experimentation" has been constructed on these two basic assumptions - that reason leads to Truth, and that our observations of the world are reliable. And I thought I heard the scientists say that assumptions were to be left to the religious..?

The Backlash of Irrationality: It is clear (I hope) that the two most prevalent world-views, pronounced the one by the other to be antithetical and mutually incompatible, are indeed intertwined in ways that would lead us to believe that they are in fact mutually dependent - i.e. faith cannot exist without reason, and vise versa. The eventual synthesis of these two perspectives has already begun - has been underway, perhaps, since their conception - but is being achieved through a number of successive oscillations, at the extremes of which one of the two is demonized, and the other glorified. At the moment, as I stated in a previous post, we are witnessing a shift away from the cold logic of the twentieth century to a more aesthetic perspective that values the multifarious, the vague, and the ability to interpret. What I hope to have shown here is that, even during the periods of extreme faithfulness (during which rationality is demonized), there is a great deal of rationalization employed in the service of faith; and conversely, that when rationality is held to be the only method of attaining Truth (to the exclusion of belief), there is much faith required to justify that position. 

I cannot at this point determine whether or not these two tendencies will ever coalesce into one unified paradigm from which we may move beyond their respective limits; nor can I really imagine what such a paradigm might resemble, or what will be raised up against it as the New Antithesis. All I can ask - and I ask this of the Scientist, the Priest, the Politician and the Everyman - is that the idea of a synthesis be seriously entertained. With all the current limitations on knowledge and epistemology, it seems reasonable to assume that an alternative criteria for Truth would be welcomed.

Specificity Contra Art

In a society that has spent almost a century now observing Reality through a hyper-scientific monocle, it's often worth the time to examine the aesthetic value-judgements that run, if you will, in a countercurrent to the empirico-deductive mechanism that powers the sciences. 

The Division of Labor amongst Words: Some words, like "cat," "cake" and "limb," do not carry a heavy load of concepts along with them - they mean what they mean, and as such are specific enough to accurately describe natural phenomena. Other words, however, pull their weight: "his," "freedom" and "love" come to mind. These are words that have taken on a heavy burden, that fight for (if I may) the ability to communicate volumes quite briefly.

The Specificity of Words and their Value: The problem with these "heavy words" and their application is this: that words lose their specificity - and thus their immediacy, as far as comprehension in concerned - in direct proportion to the increase in their richness of meaning. The more weight a word has to carry naturally makes that word more cumbersome, or what is the same, open to more possibilities of interpretation; such words are inimical in the highest degree to the scientific spirit that has dominated the past hundred years. 

The Aesthetic Preference for Interpretation:  Interestingly, current aesthetic preference tends to place a high value on these more cumbersome words and the opportunity they afford us to make various interpretations. If we want to make an equation of this observation for all the scientific minds out there, it seems that the aesthetic value we place on words increases in direct proportion to the number of possible significations they may have.

In a world that is trying to become exclusively scientific - or, which is the same, as specific as possible - it is interesting to note that human beings are placing more and more value on that which is vague. Could we be experiencing the beginning of a backlash against science?

Outpouring #1

Monsieur de P... ,

I know you think you're not one for sentiment; accordingly, we're going to leave that out of this. To tell you the truth, I can't even begin to try and conjure up an emotion when I think of you - you can probably blame yourself for that. You were the one who taught me how not to feel, how to "play it off" and "roll with the punches" (your words). As far as I can tell, these skills have gotten me nowhere. 

So now we're back to square one, and the view here is just as clear and empty as it was before. I can see now that your professed "immoralism" is nothing more than a façade - a mask I even tried to wear for a time, in order to be with you. But I had to take it off, I couldn't breath under the sheer weight of inauthenticity...I'll leave it to you to imbibe that kind of lifestyle with whatever value you can.

As a romantic, it's hard for me to discover that my idols are nothing more than gross, feeble human beings; to learn, however, that they're not even human just blows my mind. And I don't mean to insinuate that you were my idol, any more than I want to think you're not a human being - you quite obviously are. It's just hard, to know that you made me believe you'd "overcome," that you were somehow more than just a "human being" - because now I don't think I can ever take you seriously again.

As for me, it's time that I took stock in my Self: improvements are a slow, energy-consuming process, and I can't waste any more energy trying to divine your nature through that mask. You say a lot, for someone who has close to nothing, and I'm done sifting through the shit just to find out that that's all there is. 

Subjectivity, in Physical Terms

I thought of something rather interesting last night as I was ruminating on cosmology, quantum mechanics and our general place in the world. It suddenly struck me that the methods used to observe and understand these two realms of the universe - the micro and macro - can give us a fundamental insight into the nature of the Subject. 

All of our knowledge of the physical universe beyond our planet is accumulated through passivity - in other words, we lie in wait for astronomical phenomena (almost exclusively in the form of electromagnetic radiation) to affect us. On the other hand, our knowledge of the micro realm (and this especially in physics) comes about through our manipulation of the object which is being studied: particle accelerators, chemical combinations and the famous "two-slit experiment" are all examples of this method. 

What this illustrates is the Subject's essentially twofold means of acquiring knowledge about the world: he is either passively or actively accumulating data, and his methodology depends upon whether the data corresponds to something larger or smaller than himself. And while I didn't enter into this train of though with any indication that it might pertain to the moral realm, does it not insinuate that the "will to power" is at work in the field of epistemology..?

Identity Crises

One of the greatest disappointments of maturity - assuming that we're talking about sensible human beings here - comes with the realization that there has never been a manmade institution that actually served to unify the different members of our species. One could consider religions, political parties, academic communities, corporations - no matter what the goal, the only way "organizations" can achieve it is by shattering whatever common bond we may have with our fellow human beings. 

Observe, if you will, the rites of initiation and ethical codes of any such "organization": each instance provides the members of said community with a number of criteria by which they can easily distinguish the Outsider - and this simply by his lack of knowledge. Failure to act or dress a certain way, to observe certain holidays, or even to glorify a certain Ideal - all these serve to indicate "otherness" so that it can either be excluded from or initiated into the "organization."

Now it may sound as though I'm passing judgement on "institutions as a whole," and a negative judgement at that - oh, but I would never dare! Although it's disappointing that they posture as so many unifying forces in society (which of course they are not), and thus breed confusion and misunderstanding, it is their exclusive nature that serves us best: being able to identify that nature is the first step in being able to identify its opposite. The next great evolution of mankind - the next übermensche if you want to call it that - will be easily distinguished from the rabble that cling to one another with apprehension and fear: his only initiation rite will be eye contact; his only ethical code, brute honesty. He will be a living example of transparency, and he will be reviled as such.

So if you're lost, and you're in love, and you're wondering, and you want to know where the next genuine human being is to be found - why, simply take a look at the great institutions: they will be slinging mud (as they always do), and one has only to follow their aim to find him. 

Pretty Purposes, Reasonable Rhetoric

As a philosopher, I am deeply moved by the diversity of methods that human beings have devised in order to survive on the face of the Earth. From faith all the way to reason, mankind has proved to himself again and again that, despite the rough terrain of reality, he is capable of leveling it - if only for a moment - in order to pass on to the next leg of the journey. We see the Middle Ages, wrought with pestilence and famine, and shiver to think that men and women had to live through them; but a glance at their Earth-centered cosmology, their comfort in faith and their sublime superstitions reveals not only an awesome ability to deal with a bad situation, but also the process by which they dealt with it: falsification. 

 

Our species has passed through a number of trials and tribulations, and at each step of the way has devised their own particular myth that helps them cope with (and often enough arrive at) the Truth. In fact, when one considers the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, the birth pangs of Romanticism and the death throes of Modernism - when one considers these different paradigms in relation to the more general Truth that they all but obscured, it is evident that each favored its own limited method for arriving at Truth, and this to the exclusion of all others. What this amounts to, for a moralist, is that every generation of epistemology has falsified and obscured almost all of reality in order to clarify a specific particle thereof - in short, that human progress is built upon a history of lies. 

 

It is indeed strange for our modern minds to try and comprehend, for instance, a Cubist representation of reality as a chaotic flux, when we know that this particular aesthetic form grew up under the most systematic, highly-organized despot-machines hitherto known to mankind. But when we put ourselves in the place of these artists, and try to comprehend the fact that the atrocities committed during the first few decades of the last century were indeed committed by vast, human organizations - well-ordered human social machines, if you will - why, it's quite easy to see why the artists and intellectuals of the time preferred chaos! "Human beings," they must have thought, "especially organized bodies thereof, cannot be capable of such monstrosities - it's nothing more than fate! accident! forces beyond our control!" This particular little lie - most likely propagated without any consciousness of its falsity - provided those poor men and women with the will to live through a horror movie. 

 

If we move our historical perspective a bit further out, and consider a much larger portion of mankind's progress, it's obvious that two dynamically opposed fictions have pervaded Western epistemology since the ancient Greeks: namely, faith and reason. They have acquired different names throughout the years - "art/science," "irrationality/rationality," and "subject/object," just to name a few - but the basic concepts have remained the same. The two most prevalent (and, naturally, antagonistic) modes of thought today still consider reality as one of two things, neither of which it actually is: either completely unknowable, chaotic and master-of-man; or entirely knowable, lawful and subject to man's intellect. 

 

It is these two antagonizing elements in the western world that are responsible for almost all of the technological, scientific, political and humanitarian progress that our society has made in the past two thousand years; and it is these elements that, after a long and arduous battle, are yearning to be reconciled. This is evident enough from the most cutting-edge in both the sciences and the arts: I refer you to the irrational beauty of method by which the "truth" of string theory is usually asserted, or the rigorous industrial rationale that produces our popular music. The aesthetic appeal of science, not to mention the faith placed in reason by our leading scientific minds, shows us quite clearly that these lies, these "coping mechanisms" we call faith and reason, are no longer working on their own and respective of each other - for our sake, they must join forces, in order to keep mankind sane and on the road to tomorrow. Our will to live - assuming it is still intact - would not settle for anything less. 

Fall Follows Summer: '69 is over

Dear "Lover,"

Despite how enchantingly honorable you may try to make it seem, the chintzy moral fabric that makes up your ethical wardrobe is more repugnant than the smell of the Chinese sweatshop from whence it came. Now I've seen some outlandish adornments - I'm a musician, for Christ's sake - but as far as hypocrisy, slavishness and intellectual swindling go, your get-up takes the cake. And eats it, too.

At first glance, the uneducated eye would say you were a lover: you loathe war on principle, are contemptuous of all that evidences great power and strength - you even abstain from eating meat, out of fear that your bacon or beefsteak might once have been conscious of its abysmal standard of living. Every manifestation of conflict (even the mere possibility thereof) incites your moral indignation, and would probably reduce you to [crocodile] tears if brought up in conversation. Now I will grant you this, that the ability to shed those tears prevents me from going as far as to say that you're soulless beneath all that frou-frou - it's just that your soul's been horribly misplaced.

Take, for instance, your bourgeoning, overwhelming, gushing-forth-like-Old-Faithful love for animals. Psychiatrists of late have diagnosed similar sentiments as "bestiality," and usually attempt to redirect their patients' errant emotional complex back towards their own species. Not to say that I've never seen you in coitus with a lapdog - an amusing mental image though it may be - but the fact that you can treat your husband like one gives me good reason to believe that your interests do lie somewhere near/around that playing field. That is, of course, assuming that someone as frigid as yourself does copulate from time to time.

And this point brings me right to the one I'm trying to make: that neither you, nor anyone else in this post-modern apocalypse, can "dress up" your general contempt for humanity and expect it to pass for "love." As far as power struggle and war go, anyone with half a brain can see that they are not only necessary for mankind, but inherent in his nature - we don't even need to open that can of worms. What concerns me, and needs to be addressed, is your continual looking-down, your "moral superiority complex" that stems from the simple fact that you know how to string four letters together [l-o-v-e] to form a word - and that you use this to justify your hollow-man ethics. Please admit - and for all to hear! - that this word means absolutely nothing in your mouth; for if it did, you would be helping all of us "down below" rise up to your heights, because that is what a lover does. But you...you prefer rather to poke and prod us, disillusion and confuse us, and tell us that we're bad - and when you finally have us all chasing our tails, wondering how in the hell we'll ever repent for all the "hate" we've bred, you blame our confusion on "the inherent worthlessness of the world." Well I guess I'm wondering, if the world is so inherently worthless, why do you worry so much about it? Why all the moralizing? Why all the "activism"? Why so serious?

Now I'm impressed, of course, that you've been able to achieve such a manipulative, malicious clairvoyance: it's something every human being should envy, and you can be sure that my jealousy is not overshadowed by my respect. I only want you to know - and all those like you as well - that I can see right through the clouds of rhetoric that you call "love." In fact, all I can see is a frightened, self-conscious, resentful little bitch, who shouldn't need someone like me to tell her that fear and resentment don't get along so well with Love. You're going to need to find some new clothes, honey - the sixties are dead, and smelling something awful. 

Yours in a nutshell,

Nicholas Penske

A letter to no one...

To whom it probably doesn't concern:

There seem to be some discrepancies here. Now I'm not known as one to complain (habitually), but I think it's high time that someone started voicing an honest opinion in this world. And while I can't promise that the opinion voiced herein will be my own - reason has a way of leading one far beyond a strictly "personal" perspective - I can at least assure you all, that the complaints this blog will contain certainly merit being made. The discrepancies are just too many to tolerate any longer. 

It is well known that humans beings are by nature a sensitive bunch of organisms. My unique sensitivity, or what you could call my "specific beef with shit," is that I cannot be aware of a contradiction without trying to dig up its roots and find out why it exists. For example: when someone tells me that abortion is immoral, and that the war in Iraq is not; when I hear some self-righteous politician telling us that the war is inhuman, and that abortions = a woman's right to choose - these things make my hair stand on end. I start sniffing. I wonder about the why. I want to know 'why the one,' and 'not the other' - human life either has some sort of intrinsic value, or it doesn't. The problem with trying to discuss such paradoxes is that the maintainers thereof almost invariably lapse into "Piss off" mode when that wonderful little why is to them posed. 

So I guess my goal with this literary excursion is to bring some of these discrepancies to light: pull them out of the musty little glory-hole dens where they grow and into the fresh, clean air, where good things grow and bad things die. I can only hope that my readers are not too sensitive to listen with open ears...but then that's probably too much to hope for, now isnt it? 

Yours truly,

Monsieur Penske