Reflection iv

The Philosophy of History is starting to feel a lot like a history textbook. I'm catching vibes of Cleveland's A History of the Modern Middle East, or something like Will Durant. I'm curious about his books of world history, I read his Story of Philosophy a while back. It's like there is this unfolding tapestry, or a broad vault of heaven that is this quilt, and everything fits into this scaffold deliberately but confusedly. Is that the beef between Kierkegaard and Hegel? Or the beef these professors say Kierkegaard had with those who attempt to fashion an all-encompassing system? I'm reminded of the Borges poem on Spinoza:

Baruch Spinoza
by Jorge Luis Borges

A haze of gold, the Occident lights up
The window. Now, the assiduous manuscript
Is waiting, weighed down with the infinite.
Someone is building God in a dark cup.
A man engenders God. He is a Jew.
With saddened eyes and lemon-colored skin;
Time carries him the way a leaf, dropped in
A river, is borne off by waters to
Its end. No matter. The magician moved
Carves out his God with fine geometry;
From his disease, from nothing, he's begun
To construct God, using the word. No one
Is granted such prodigious love as he:
The love that has no hope of being loved.

"Someone is building God..." Is that what everyone is doing? Is He personal and free? It seems like Hegel has an idea of man progressing to some ideal of liberty. I guess this is thoroughly situated in the modern ethos, predecessor of Kant, inheritor of the great Renaissance tradition. I have no idea what I'm talking about. It's funny some of the ways he talks about Persian tradition, Zoroaster and the concomitant deities. I wonder now if Nietzsche first became familiar with Zoroaster in this way...

Hegel says that Ormuzd in Persian tradition is "the Word thus personified." I keep thinking of Manichaeism from Augustine, or the origins of Christianity. There seems to be this struggle between positive conceptions and negative conceptions, something that comes up in 1 Peter 3. What are the consequences of devoting one's self to a conception of the supreme as Nothingness, or essentially impersonal and negative? What are the consequences of devoting one's self to a conception of the supreme was Everythingness, or essentially personal and positive?

Who else is out there creating systems and destroying them? Who else's prose is full of questions? What is more magisterial than the opening of the Confessions: a litany of questions for the deity? I can't find the scripture right now, but there's something in the paraphrase about being cognizant of one's failures or imperfections. I think there is a robust ethic in the "fall of man" story, or believing that we all sin. I think can it be overwhelming positive in its fruits, though at first it may seem overwhelmingly negative. I think it involves honesty and sincerity to be upfront about imperfection, and that there is great power in confession. That's my major take-away from Christianity thus far. Remember friends, there is no argument for God.