Tuesday, December 31, 2013

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.

Monday, December 30, 2013

Reflection iii

More Hegel: "A State is a realization of Spirit, such that in it the self-conscious being of Spirit--the freedom of the Will--is realized as Law." Sounds like a bunch of nonsense! I think I watched a lecture on Aristotle the other day that talked about regime in these terms. Like the totality of culture, what's suggested by the language and reinforced by the institutions it authorizes. Like--I suppose in terms of Bhartihari--what the vernacular realizes. Sometimes I wonder why we still wander around saying, "Jesus!"

I suppose if I zoom too far out then everything gets a bland, objective character. Is the objective bland? I'm still wondering what freedom means. I did a little bit of research into Kierkegaard and find that he was a sharp critic of Hegel. The commentaries that I listened to and read talked about Kierkegaard's criticism in terms of a distaste for an all-encompassing system that removes mystery. Maybe I'm misinterpreting this. It seems Hegel is building a super-structure in which to fit all peoples, customs, cultures and histories. The whole gist of the thing seems patronizing in a sense that other cultures are "progressing" toward what he--I presume--appraises as a superior mode.

I want to hear what Kierkegaard has to say about the person of Jesus. There were several questions in my cursory examination of Hegel that came up about the spirituality of his theories. Just running around with the word "Spirit" has its own consequences. I guess we could translate it as Ghost. But what does freedom mean? It seems that Hegel is setting himself up--in Philosophy of History--to make an argument for a sort of middle path. Something that isn't a totally moralistic State, or a monotonous state, and something that isn't completely diverse. Something that aspires toward, or is inspired by, an ideally abstracted divine, but operates in the real with some authority. This is where I feel Jesus fits in.

I'm interested to see what he has to say about Buddhism as I trudge along. I think I've been led back into Christianity because I've had complex ethical questions. Reading a transliteration or a translation of Buddhist "ethics" or Hindu "spirituality" didn't do much to answer my questions about how to behave in the world, what is "right" or "true." I wonder if part of that is me not being able to participate in those narratives because I'm not in the language, in the culture, in the regime, in the flux of the national spectacle, in the tremor of the received religion...

I think for me Jesus is attractive as a mediator between those dual positions: the personal relationship between an essentially mysterious God and the real love, compassion, etc. that is our responsibility in the world. John 14:1-6:

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God[a]; believe also in me. 2 My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. 4 You know the way to the place where I am going."

5 Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”
6 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you really know me, you will know[b] my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”

Saturday, December 28, 2013

Reflection ii

Hegel says, "True faith is possible only where individuals can seclude themselves--can exist for themselves independently of any external compulsory power." He keeps mentioning a little bit of the "nonage" I'm familiar with through Kant. When I watched a few lectures on Hegel and Marx they mentioned that some argue the genesis of Critical Theory is Kant, not Hegel. Not really that it matters, but I guess you can draft a more authorized syllabus with that information.

Words to examine: true, faith, individuals, seclude, exist, independent, external, compulsory, power. I've only been trudging through the first sections of Hegel's Philosophy of History, those concerning China and India. He says interesting things about patrimony, the analog between familial relationships and governments, and Supreme Power, or substantial being. Basically a bunch of semi-mystical hoo-ha but it's sometimes refreshing.

For example: when speaking of Chinese religion he says it's a religion which "regards as the Highest and Absolute--as God--pure nothing; which sets up contempt for individuality, for personal existence, as the highest perfection." I watched a few lectures by R.C. Sproul on the character of secularism where he explicated a few existential notions, and it all seems now to be about how we conceive of Time. I need to find a biography of Einstein, or some comment on the conversations between Tagore and Einstein maybe a century ago. I think there may be keys there on how to navigate the tipping point between science and spirituality, or even the subjective with the objective. Seems the philosophical speculation is so far removed from action in the world, though.

Do I have a "contempt for individuality" though? I'll run around the social media brandishing my "woe is modernity; woe is individualism; woe is relativism" jargon and propaganda, but to what purpose? But I think it will be useful to think of Modernity not as something antithetical to Religiosity, but as an outgrowth of it. Kind of like a spiritualization of the individual. I think this is why I have been drawn to Hegel through my study of Christianity. There is a certain sense of individuality in the person of Christ that gives me the intuition that it leads to broad ideologies that embrace the secular, relativism, or just subjectivity. Hegel seems to trace history as a "progress" from the objective to the subjective. What I may need to examine next is notions of "freedom." I think there is a "democratic" idea of freedom, and a different kind of freedom that takes into account notions of ethics or duty.

I'll dig into the remainder of the India sections in Hegel tomorrow, but he starts it off saying that in "China the patriarchal principle rules a people in a condition of nonage." I guess my personal politics has to struggle with conceptions of development, when, where and whether or not there is any appropriate "time" for a maturity opposed to "nonage," etc. What happens in a world of pure, true relativistic and subjective freedom, free of patronage and patriarchal principles? What is the consequence of a prevailing ideology that embodies this idea? Did Kant win through Hegel? Isn't this just a new hegemony that pretends it isn't a hegemony? What did Luther say about Christians? “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject of all, subject to all.”

Monday, December 23, 2013

Reflection i

I feel clear and unclear; visited and unvisited; vacant and full; etc. I'm going to push myself through a lousy discipline and appreciate. I'm no different now that I've always been, yet I'm infinitely changed. I can remember writing without thought as a child, then thinking without writing, reversing the whole thing and wondering about a synthetic other-ness beyond it. Sometimes I feel like I'm lost while I'm found, like I'm in the middle of a terrible yet terrific paradox. I'll push through these reflections throughout 2014 with vainglorious intent. But I'll put without an expectation, or with the expectation to have no expectation, or with the feeling of no feeling, or with the paradoxical essence of no-essence coursing through my non-body...

I'm meditating on a bit of Tagore: "In order to find you anew, I lose you every moment/ O beloved treasure." Treasure isn't so bad. I'm in the middle of ambiguous conversations about the challenges of the everyday, how they give us the tolls to deal with the challenges of tomorrow, how the present is an unfolding nonsense that is never extinguished. I'm grateful for the difficult things, and I know with my whole heart and my whole disjointed faith that tomorrow will bring something immeasurably more terrible and traumatic. But what do I have within my will and power to push on? What steam and verve and vigor resides inside me that I can draw upon like a fount to push myself into the future? Is this pushing and this will--this will to believe--a vainglorious mission? Why do I have a question for myself?

I'm devising a four-pronged plan to push into 2014. There are four courses of study, probably to be supplemented with a physical aspect. I'm going to revisit my snuffed mantra of last year: discipline. I can understand why my cohorts at that meeting-of-minds weren't enthused about that word. But I'm going to need to push on as a duty to myself and my god, wherever she resides, in whatever guise or face she chooses to present herself, through whatever mysterious veil I imagine for her. The four-sided time I'll push through consists of: reading, writing, music and painting. Every day gets a deliverable. Every day gets a reflection (these are the preamble); every day gets a series of poems and writings; every day gets a meditation on an old song; every day gets a construction of an image--a representation in two-dimensional color.

I'm going to pray and hope and imagine all things beyond the real, a satisfied life of discipline where work demonstrates faith. I can't imagine myself in the future without a regimen of creativity. The artist creates; he doesn't philosophize about creation, criticize creation or even think twice about making. He makes, and that's the ethos I want to live with for the rest of my life. No longer any of this, "But I'm not good enough. But I'm not ready. But I'm not qualified, justified, inspired, etc." I am the arbiter of my time. I can choose to revolve myself about a productive calendar. I can choose to be the progenitor of myriad little spinning proverbs in a plethora of media. The only thing that's stopping me is myself.

So thank you all for listening and being inspiring. Thank the clouds and the grasses for standing silent or roaming with a whisper. Thank the bayous and gulfs for being beyond me. Thank the grand universe for spinning without a care for my vanity, thank all the words and languages, faiths and doctrines, for being this dew upon a grateful grass. Thanks for your patience that inspires mine. Thanks for the spirit that moves us all. Namaste.