Reflections on Buddha

A question:

“My Problem with Buddhism: it is life-negating and hard for any existentialist to buy into. So this harks back to my university days where I studied Mahayana Buddhism. While I was really impressed by it in a number of ways, I could never get myself to accept the first noble truth, aka life is suffering (a negative experience) or that Nirvana was a particularly compelling end goal as it would seem just to be an end to any type of meaningful existence.

Anyone else feel the same way or am I missing something compelling about their sales pitch? or does it only appeal to people who think existence is a fundamentally negative experience?”

I had the same feelings and discomfort about Buddhism. Once I wrote:

“The very noble questions of existence, “why do we live and die?” and whether there is a point in our existence, our very fears of vulnerability and "not knowing" are the mask on the fact that this incompleteness and imperfection, this incorporation and integration in the biosphere and the universe, these noble Buddhist principles of impermanence, that life is suffering of birth, and aging, and sickness and death are at the same time superimposed by the fact that they are the condition of understanding, joy, and love. In this way "death" will lose its senseless and cruel sense. To be able to grow and to become, to find my way about on the earth, I need to be inherently an open system, who exists because of its already connection to biosphere and stardust of universe, in constant growth and decay/change to the point of death, like a flower, a tree, any animal, any seed, and any transformation of one's body. It is like a cell in our body asks why it comes into being, grows, and dies, it is as if a leaf or branch or tree complains about its transient existence, not knowing that it exists and perceives and connects to the world BECAUSE of this ephemeral and impermanent constitution. It reminds me of Kant's analogy of the false perception of a pigeon who thinks that if there were no pressure of the air, it could fly higher! Not knowing, it flies because of the air pressure.”

Now, I think a bit differently. We should remember that Buddhism is a response to the pendulum extreme swing of Hinduism, which essentially says the same thing as Buddhism in one major sense: the essence of God or that-which-transcends-being-and-not-being is within us. However, he undoes the Atman self of Hinduism because it became a source of pride and greed for immortality and caste system for centuries in India. It created diversity of gods and goddesses (33 gods or some say 330 millions) that supposedly were to converge to the same Godhead: Brahman. Starting from wonderful premises and divine intuition, the priority of “joy” to “pleasure”[1], which is also the essence of Buddha’s eightfold path, Hinduism fell into its pendulum swing of excess. Buddhism is a response to this greed for immortality. Consequently, we have Buddha’s reflections on suffering (dukkha) and what skills and ethical practices are required to overcome it, instead of addressing the problem of suffering of sickness, old age, and death with a hope for becoming immortal, in becoming Brahman. He borrowed the major insight of Hinduism, the priority of joy to pleasure, meditative practices and eightfold path to undo cravings as the central notion and dissolved the greed of immortality in his Dharma Seals: impermanence, no-self, and nirvana.

Joseph Goldstein explains the etymology of the word “dukkha” (suffering) as follows:

The word [dukkha] is made up of the prefix du and the root kha. Du means “bad” or “difficult.” Kha means “empty.” “Empty,” here, refers to several things—some specific, others more general. One of the specific meanings refers to the empty axle hole of a wheel. If the axle fits badly into the center hole, we get a very bumpy ride. This is a good analogy for our ride through saṃsāra. On my first trip to Burma, a group of friends and I went up-country to visit Mahāsi Sayadaw’s home temple. We made part of the journey in an oxcart, and it was undoubtedly similar to modes of transportation in the Buddha’s time. This extremely bumpy journey was a very visceral example of dukkha, the first noble truth. In more general philosophical terms, “empty” means devoid of permanence and devoid of a self that can control or command phenomena. Here we begin to get a sense of other, more inclusive meanings of the term dukkha. Words like unsatisfying, unreliable, uneaseful, and stressful all convey universal aspects of our experience. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dukkha#Etymology)

If we take this etymology of the word “suffering” or “dukkha” in Buddhism, then Buddha’s four noble truths makes more sense:

First noble truth: 1) Suffering as a noble truth: Birth is suffering, aging is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering, sorrow and pain…and despair are suffering, association with the loathed is suffering, dissociation from the loved is suffering, not to get what one wants is suffering—in short suffering is the five [groups] of clinging’s objects.

2) This the origin of suffering, as a noble truth, is this: It is the craving that produces renewal of being, accompanied by enjoyment and lust—in other words, craving for sensual desires, craving for being, craving for non-being.

3) Cessation of suffering, as a noble truth, is this: It is remainderless fading and ceasing… letting go and rejecting, of that same craving.

4) The way leading to the cessation of suffering, as a noble truth is this: It is simply the eightfold noble path of right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.

It is not that sickness, old age, and death are suffering per se, as we might think. It is our perception of these seemingly negative problems that is the cause of suffering and gives rise to discomfort, anxiety, despair, and dissatisfaction. The three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion give rise to excessive desire for wealth, fame, honor, and sexual pleasure, a desire for immortality gives rise to excessive rejection of pleasures and the world altogether (pendulum swings); the craving for more and more and stopping the wheel of samsara and impermanence brings about constant desire upon desire, including desire for immortality. But life as such is not suffering, nor death is despair. According to Buddha, the perception of suffering is the result of the axle fitting badly into the center hole or hub, so we get a very bumpy ride.

In his book “No Death, No Fear”, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote:

Our greatest fear is that when we die we will become nothing. Many of us believe that our entire existence is only a life span beginning the moment we are born or conceived and ending the moment we die. We believe that we are born from nothing and that when we die we become nothing. And so we are filled with fear of annihilation.

The Buddha has a very different understanding of our existence. It is the understanding that birth and death are notions. They are not real. The fact that we think they are true makes a powerful illusion that causes our suffering. The Buddha taught that there is no birth, there is no death; there is no coming, there is no going; there is no same, there is no different; there is no permanent self, there is no annihilation. We only think there is. When we understand that we cannot be destroyed, we are liberated from fear. It is a great relief. We can enjoy life and appreciate it in a new way.”

This is the logic of “neither…nor” that is so alien to our Western ears. It is neither permanence nor impermanence, it is transcending both, say into “emptiness”. Now, in Ratnakuta Sutra, Buddha says:

“If you are caught by the notion of being and non-being, then the notion of emptiness can help you to get free. But if you are caught by the notion of emptiness, there’s no hope.”

And Thich Nhat Hanh elaborates:

“The teaching on emptiness is a tool helping you to get the real insight of emptiness, but if you consider the tool as the insight, you just get caught in an idea.” (p.20)

We have to go beyond the idea of permanence, but we also have to go beyond the idea of impermanence. Then we can be in touch with Nirvana. The same is true of no self. No self is the match; it helps to give rise to the fire of the insight on no self. It is the awakened understanding of no self that will burn up the match of no self. This is a way Buddha tries to resist the pendulum swing from Atman (the Self) to Anatman (No-Self). However, most Buddhists fall into this extreme swing. How? By exaggerating on “dependent origination” and that our awareness of our existence and non-existence is not the gift a kind of “divine self” given to us by the Nameless. I will come to this later.

Thich Nhat Hanh continues: “To practice is not to store up a lot of ideas about no self, impermanence, nirvana or anything else; that is just the work of a cassette recorder…. We want to go beyond ideas to have real insight, which will burn up all our ideas and help us to be free.” (p.21)

Pay attention that according to Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhism doesn’t claim that we don’t have any true nature or utterly no selfhood, the problem is with language. The self or no self is the eternal and ultimate dimension in each one of us. He states:

“Our true nature is the nature of no birth and no death. We do not have to go anywhere in order to touch our true nature. The wave does not have to look for water because she is water. We do not have to look for God, we do not have to look for our ultimate dimension or nirvana, because we are nirvana, we are God. You are what you are looking for. You are already what you want to become. You can say to the wave, “My dearest wave, you are water. You don’t have to go and seek water. Your nature is the nature of nondiscrimination, of no birth, of no death, of no being and of no non-being.” (p.24)

I need to clarify that when Thich Nhat Hanh says we are Nirvana, we are God, he doesn’t mean we are literally God, but that we have God within us, it is in our conscience, our reflection, our practice of meditation and prayers, and burning all notions in coincidentia oppositorum. Similar to Jesus’s “the Kingdom of God is within you.”

“The Whole Cosmos Has Come Together In Order To Help The Flower to Manifest.”

This is the essence of all spiritual teachings. The major idea is what we call “potentiality” or “possibility” or “essence”—the water from which waves are manifested—the “unity” that is not in contradiction to “diversity”. However, we are inclined to solidify “essence” in a “substance”, whether God is a person or our essence is soul or Atman, something tangible. God, Thich Nhat Hanh says, is not a being or non-being, we need to transcend both and all notions including the notions of creation and destruction to get a feeling of God. (p.32)

Dharma Seals consists of three notions: impermanence, no self, and nirvana. Thich Nhat Hanh says:

“Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible. Life itself is possible. If a grain of corn is not impermanent, it can never be transformed into a stalk of corn. If the stark were not impermanent, it could never provide us with the ear of corn we eat. If your daughter is not impermanent, she cannot grow up to become a woman. Then your grandchildren would never manifest. So instead of complaining about impermanence, we should say, “Warm welcome and long live impermanence.” We should be happy. When we can see the miracle of impermanence, our sadness and suffering will pass.” (p.41)

No self means inter-being or dependent origination. When Buddha says there is no permanent self it means our body and soul evolve; it won’t remain the same. But if it won’t remain the same does it mean that there is “nothing” there, yes if it means what remains there is “no-thing”; no, if it is annihilation and nihilism. The soul and body evolve and there is dependent origination of all and all. However, if we just see the dependence (the same) we lose sight of diversity of things (the difference). They come together: dependent origination and an evolving separate soul or essence. Nirvana or the Kingdom of God is practicing no-self into dependent origination within and to cosmos and God and practicing dependent origination and God within and in relation to an evolving soul.

Thich Nhat Hanh says “The flower is full of everything except one thing: a separate self, a separate identity.” (p.48). He clarifies that “inter-being is not being and it is not non-being. Inter-being means being empty of a separate identity, empty of a separate self.” It seems Thich Nhat Hanh makes a mistake when he puts all his emphasis on “inter-being”, to see the essence of seed and not to see the flower, again it is losing sight of coincidentia oppositorum. Where does the mistake happen? Exactly in the same place that all reductive mistakes happen: when we reduce the ineffable into seeable, understandable, say, fundamental particles, the measureable, genes, or environment. A flower is the same as the whole Cosmos, but what is Cosmos? What is God? Can we reduce Cosmos or God to seeable or non-seeable? Can we reduce everything to some fundamental and evidential and verifiable essence? This is not the original message of Thich Nhat Hanh Buddhism. Dependent origination is one side of the pole and the other pole is the “no-thingness” of the Giver, an awareness (not only intelligence) loving giving source, to which we return. Buddha calls it Nirvana.

We have the seed of an evolving soul which is dependent on the universe and God to be, to become, and to disappear in the universe and God. But it is a seed that is not reducible to natural causes or merely biosphere. It is “more”, this “more” is not something, is not static, it is becoming of what has been given to us, humans, in distinction to all living beings. Not that we are “better” but that we are the house of language and being, and more importantly eternal love.

In his interview with a Buddhist monk, Heidegger insightfully clarifies this point:

In answer to the Bhikku’s first, very general, question: “You have thought the essence of human beings for decades, which understanding did you gain?” Heidegger launches into his familiar refrain—“one question was never asked [in “Occidental” philosophy], that is, the question of Being.” Heidegger defines “the human being” as “this essence, that has language,” in contrast to “the Buddhist teachings,” which do not make “an essential distinction, between human beings and other living things, plants and animals.” For Heidegger, consciousness—“a knowing relation to Being” through language—is the exclusive preserve of humans.

http://www.openculture.com/2014/05/martin-heidegger-talks-philosophy-with-a-buddhist-monk.html

Heidegger’s “essential distinction” between human beings and other living beings is also shared by so called Western religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The point is that this understanding of essential inter-being, about which Thich Nhat Hanh and Buddhism talk is perceived and understood by us. While all living beings share the inter-being with us and experience and perceive it in their own unique being, we, human beings, understand (have a knowing relation) and existentially and lovingly live this essential inter-being, this is God’s gift to us.

Now, if we fall into “speciesism” and crude “humanism”, we have NOT again transcended the opposites of inter-being and the manifestation of inter-being in different beings. Again we are falling back on what is distinct in us as human beings and not as what is common between all of us. So the point of this gift is not arrogance but praising God for the gift and a deep sense of gratitude.

Inter-being is “emptiness”, not “nothingness” (if we don’t take it as “no-thingness”), and thanks to it, as Nagarjuna says, everything is possible, thanks to the impermanence of our manifestations in the world and cosmos things evolve, and becoming is possible within being. But we, human beings, understand this through not only language (though language is essential for it), but through our emotional-moral apparatus, through love.

Thich Nhat Hanh, however, clarifies that it is misleading we think that no-self is what we are, as well as impermanence or inter-being. As soon as we get stuck in a concept, we lose sight of the divine, whether it is nirvana, language, or being. He states:

“Impermanence and no self are not rules to follow given to us by the Buddha. They are keys to open the door of reality. The idea of permanence is wrong, so the teaching on impermanence helps us correct our view of permanence. If we get caught in the idea of impermanence, we have not realized nirvana. The idea of self is wrong, so we use the idea of non-self to cure it. If we are caught in the idea of non-self, then that is not good for us either. Impermanence and no self are keys to the practice. They are not absolute truths. We do not die for them or kill for them.” (p.32)

Thich Nhat Hanh makes it clear how we go through pendulum swings to rectify mistakes, from the self (Hindu Atman) to no self (Buddha Anatman), from separate self (Western autonomous subject) to complete dependent origination (Eastern Universal Self). From the fact that there is only inter-being (transcendence of being and non-being) we should not so fall back on the ancient priority of the organic and universal to particular or to the modern version of priority of the social to the individual or on the contrary from there to our crude libertarianism and the unique singularity of individuals and the priority of the particular to the universal.

Thich Nhat Hanh rectifys a misunderstanding: no self doesn’t really mean that nothing is distinguished about us, but it is to rectify the excessive desire for immortal soul or Atman of Hinduism to bring it to equilibrium. Now if we reside in no-self and no-God of Buddhism again the pendulum is moving to the other extreme and not seeing that the emptiness essence or divine non-being/being essence is within and without us. The excess of this divine essence within all living beings, again ignore the fact that we have a knowing relation to Being and Non-being. We have a knowing relation to God and this is our gift, all praise to all gifts given to all worlds and beings and to us by God; all praise to God, the ineffable, the beginning and the end, the Nirvana.

[1] Three thousand years ago, Nachiketas seeks wisdom of life from the King of Death (Yama), narrated in Katha Upanishads.

Death says: Take horses and gold and cattle and elephants; choose sons and grandsons that shall live a hundred years. Have vast expanses of land, and live as many years as you desire. Or choose another gift that you think equal to this, and enjoy it with wealth and long life. Be a ruler of this vast earth. I will grant you all your desires. Ask for any wishes in the world of mortals, however hard to obtain. To attend on you I will give you fair maidens with chariots and musical instruments. But ask me not, Nachiketas, the secrets of death.

Nachiketas: All these pleasures pass away, O End of all! They weaken the power of life. And indeed how short is all life! Keep thy horses and dancing and singing. Human cannot be satisfied with wealth. Shall we enjoy wealth with you in sight? Shall we live whilst you are in power? I can only ask for boon I have asked. When a mortal here on earth has felt one’s immortality, could he wish for a long life of pleasures, for the lust of deceitful beauty? Solve then the doubt as to the great beyond. Grant me the gift that unveils the mystery. This is the only gift Nachiketas can ask….

Death: There is the path of joy, and there is the path of pleasure. Both attract the soul. Who follows the first comes to good; who follows pleasure reaches not the End… There is the path of wisdom and the path of ignorance. They are far apart and ends to different ends. You are, Nachiketas, a follower of the path of wisdom: many pleasures tempt you not. Abiding in the midst of ignorance, thinking themselves wise and learned, fools go aimlessly hither and thither, like blind led by the blind…. Not even through deep knowledge can the Atman be reached, unless evil ways are abandoned, and there is rest in the senses, concentration in the mind and peace in one’s heart.”

This narration has been resonated through history from East to West, all over where death is contested and the path to overcome it is through joy. As Thomas Merton says: “The only true joy on earth is to escape from the prison of our own false self, and enter by love into union with the Life Who dwells and sings within the essence of every creature and in the core of our own souls.”

This is the essence of all mystical traditions, from Upanishads to Buddhism, from Lao Tzu to Confucius, from Socrates to Euripides, from Jewish Kabbalah to Islamic Sufism. Two things: overcoming the false self or taking off the mask, and abandoning false ways-- concentrating on merely a life of pleasure-- hence stepping in the life of joy.

04/17/16

Reflection on Kearney’s Anatheism: An Arrow of Longing

Socrates starts philosophy by you know nothing. Faith begins, Dostoyevsky says, out of crucible of doubt. Keats says the poetic faith is being in the condition of negative capability. Mystery, uncertainty, and doubt without the irritable reaching out after fact and reason. Then you are faced with an impossible situation. How do we get peace from violence? …. By having faith in the impossible. God is a name for the advent of impossible that it can happen. (Kearney)

In the contact the human soul in the world has with the beyond, nothing is discovered but the existence of God. Everything beyond this belongs to the realm of analogical-speculative deduction and mythic symbolization. (Voegelin)

Thanks to Cassie for sending me these two wonderful resources for Kearney’s Anatheism: an interview with Kearney by Robert Harrison: http://podbay.fm/show/81415836/e/1398240061?autostart=1

And a dense but informative article: https://richardmkearney.files.wordpress.com/.../phenomeno...

I had a brief exchange with Kearney a while ago, when I was teaching a course on “Understanding Love”. I asked my students to read his short article on “Losing Touch”[1], which is align with his general aesthetic theory that touch (following Aristotle) is more important than sight (Plato) or hearing (Heidegger). Even if I agree that the sense of touch is so important, I can’t understand these totalizing claims (pendulum swings). I emailed him a love anniversary poem[2] and asked for a word about it. He emailed back: moving.

After listening to the interview and reading the article, I woke up at 4am this morning, excited to think and write about this invaluable inspiration and aspiration. However, I had to read the last chapter of Eric Voegelin’s “Science, Politics, and Gnosticism” first, for reasons that you will see. And I had to do the right thing: students were waiting for the weekly planner for the next week and I am impatient to sit and write about Kearney, but I had to take care of my students first, and then tend to my wife and son, and reminding him to feed the fish. I had to pray and ask God to set me on the right track, help me not to fall, calm my restless heart, erase the delusion of power, and let me step into its path without the temptation of achievement and Gnosticism. I had to go for my meditation walk, and again conversing with God, losing myself in the ocean-- body and soul, not only by seeing or hearing, but by feeling it on my skin, and by breathing it into my lungs and body, and giving, emanating, exhaling back by my soul, feeling trees and earthworms, and sending my praise to life. Why do I say these things? Because it is related to the topic of this reflection and also I know that we have to step out of “Cartesian moment”, as Foucault puts it, that as if “thinking” just happens in our mind or in isolation, or we can achieve anything just by thinking, regardless of how we live ethically, regardless of spiritual thirst and longing, and regardless of prayer and meditation. No wonder we now think we are “information processing” machines or minds, and our technology is heading towards the destructive forces of will to power (libido dominandi), hedonism, and a desire for immortality.

Kearney’s arguments for Anatheism (God after God) can be organized along three lines:

1. Western Enlightenment (the domination of reason as self-sufficient to itself), Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche’s questioning of religions and so-called “death of God” is an essential step to get rid of a dominant and authoritarian god, what he calls Alpha God or OmniGod.

2. Values of love and justice are significant for human beings. We need to replace violence with peace and address social calamities and disparities with love. In his words, we have to move from hostility to hospitality. But this is turning the impossible into possible, which is beyond human capabilities.

3. We are unable by ourselves to bring about this historical change. For human being it is an “impossibility” to end wars and discrimination. We need to resort to a higher Power. And this higher power is Anatheism, the God of service and compassion.

I think it is illuminating that we have a comparative discussion of Voegelin’s critique of secularism, which on some parts, is diametrically opposite to Kearney and on some other parts overlaps with his views. Voegelin’s arguments can be organized along three axes:

1. Western Enlightenment (the domination of reason as self-sufficient to itself), Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche’s questioning of religions and so-called “death of God” is a continuation of ancient Gnosticism to substitute a version of ‘immanentization’ (secularization, matter and nature are sufficient to themselves) and renouncing of ‘vertical’ or other-worldly transcendence and its proclamation of a ‘horizontal’ transcendence or futuristic Parousia [being-present] of Being—that is, intramundane (being or occurring within the material world —opposed to extramundane) or worldly salvific doctrines—as ultimate truth.

2. The nature of human conscience is divine. “The border experience of the examination of conscience can be elaborated meditatively and expanded to the experience of standing in Judgment.” So pragmatism, secularism, positivism, and historicism cannot substitute this divine conscience. At the same time because of fragility of this border experience we are prone to fall into the dream of Gnosticism to see ourselves self-sufficient and so venture to become Superman (Übermensch) and strive to make heaven on the earth by our own secular powers, without the grace of God. An inevitable and dangerous failure.

3. “The order of being remains something that is given, that is not under man’s control. In order, therefore, that the attempt to create a new world may seem to make sense, (according to Nietzsche, Marx, Heidegger, Comte, National Socialism, and generally secularism) the givenness of the order of being must be obliterated; the order of being must be interpreted, rather, as essentially under man’s control. And taking control of being, further requires that the transcendent origin of being be obliterated: it requires the decapitation of being—the murder of God.” For Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Freud the order of being as the given reality is defective and unjust and human being in itself is capable of bringing harmony and justice to the world.

And these are my theses:

1. We experience historical oscillations to extremes in each step. Western Enlightenment is as essential and as important as Eastern Enlightenment. Western Enlightenment is a response to the excesses of religious dogmas, where we displaced the nexus of ethical practices, love and justice, as the major bridge to the divine source and God with: a) metaphysical speculation about the nature of God and universe; b) we lost the ethical sense by playing the role of a false and aggressive god, and became aggressive and violent in our righteous indignation (against Mohammad and Jesus’s message). Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx fell off the cliff of excessive reaction to the false conscience and consciousness about God and consequently rejected the divine self, separated the ethical from spirituality and a sense of harmony with God and universe, and followed the Gnosticism of secularization, hedonism, and humanism.

2. The so called Alpha God, the Abrahamic God, is a dynamic God within its own message (clearing away aberrations through Jesus and Muhammad, with further clearing under way). The message from the outset had expressed clearly that our body and soul, our conscience, in its divine nexus and our ethical practices (love and justice) establish our inner worth. And our very own soul and body will judge us by the law of karma in this world and the world to come. However, religious zealotry and excess turned the message of the Day of Judgement, inherent effect of our actions on our body and soul, into righteous indignation—hence turning us into judgmental souls who forgot the message of Mohammad and Jesus: love your enemy and repel evil with what is better. [3]

3. I agree with Kearney and Voegelin that we are unable to have ultimate Gnosis about our condition and conscience; we are unable to make the impossible possible and we have to accept our hopelessness and appeal to a higher power.

4. I disagree with Voegelin that Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche were utterly misleading.  By focusing on the condition of our existence, they taught us precious lessons about our lives. But I disagree also with Kearney who endorses and believes that indeed Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche were capable of murdering omnipotent God. Historically, it is obvious now that their claims failed because of their totalizing and extravagant belief that as if they know how things work, whether through Nietzsche’s will to power, Marx’s historical materialism, or Freud’s libido psychoanalysis. I disagree with Kearney that there is a complete breach between the so called Alpha God, or Omnigod, and the compassionate and serving God. We can’t and shouldn’t completely reject and say adieu to one and say a welcoming a-dieu to the other, but to discern the wheat from the chaff, the right course of action from blind righteousness or reaction, and stop swinging violently from one extreme to another.

In his interview, Kearney states:

“It is true that the critique of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche and Western Enlightenment is a critique of an illusory father God, a god of power and theodicy. Alpha God, or OminGod. The God of omnipotence, omniscient, and omnipresence, the god of the first cause of Aristotle, the supreme being in Plato and others. This notion of a god beyond the world, beyond life, beyond time, beyond the body came to prevail and mixing with Judeo-Christian monotheism in our Western world, that we ended up with a split, that God is out there, we are here. And God is out there to create us, guide us, determine our lives, and ultimately punish and reward us. That notion of God, which is called the God of theodicy, that everything is part of the will of God, that person died, an innocent child is being tortured, take Dostoyevsky’s example, they are all part of the will of God. We don’t understand “how” or “why”. Ours is not to ask “why” but they are all part of a secret providence. That notion of God, to me died, on the day of massacre of Jews and ..., why did God not come to save the massacre of innocent, the tortured child, Dostoevsky says? So true faith comes out of the crucible of doubt. We must doubt in that God, we must get rid of that God, in order to open up, in Dostoevsky sense, the God of compassion. But there has to be letting go of the old, the first Dei of abandonment, and coming back to the God of advent, of service, not of sovereignty.”

These words sound so pleasing to our ears and are partially true in terms of excesses of religions; however, one can see the pendulum swing of questioning the excessive interpretations and speculations about a transcendental God, and going all the way to the other extreme: to an immanent God. Why can we not stop this swing? Why can we not bring the seemingly opposites together, to hold the transcendental (outside) and the immanent (inside) God together? The omnipotent and the compassionate God together? Moreover, he complains that Alpha God is responsible for holocaust. Why should we question God about the consequences of our own actions? Was holocaust not part of our “secular” Gnosticism? Didn’t we declare that we didn’t need God as a refuge and protection in our Western Enlightenment? Didn’t we say that we were sufficient to ourselves? Well, one may argue that God let us be for a few centuries, during the whole twentieth century, during the holocaust and cold war, our communism and capitalism, our excessive religious behavior and forgetting the original message of Abraham, Jesus, and Mohammad, to see it for ourselves that we are deficient. Didn’t we say that we were mature and our reason was sufficient in bringing heaven on the earth? Why should we complain now? Quran says: “God does not change the condition of a people unless they change what is in themselves” (Quran, 13:11).

Kearney continues:

“In Levinas, there is a radical overturning of theodicy and omnipotence. And he went through the holocaust, he lost most of his family in Dachau. However, the separation that he celebrates is that two is better than one. That God created the world, in the story, it is better to have two people, our speech, language, relations, and what he calls hospitality, the host, that can receive the guest. It is better to be with a stranger than to be alone talking to yourself. The metaphysical notion of God that Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche got rid of, was a self-thinking God, the God of Aristotle, what is the divine? It is a being who has no need of the other. It is purely self-sufficient, that then becomes a self-causing cause, scholasticism, the self-loving loved of the God. It is a self-regarding, self-referential, self-sufficient God.”

It seems Kearney, as well as Levinas, are rightfully taking a turn to the ethical rather than to the metaphysical questions about the nature of God. This is the lesson we learned from Axial Age sages[4]. We don’t know what God is and we won’t know, as long as knowledge goes, but we can feel God in love, in helping others, in a stranger. True, but then why should we now say God is not this thing (self-sufficient) but is that thing (it needs a company, that two is better than one)? Is it not again giving a metaphysical definition of what God is? How do you know? These are the oscillations and generalizations and pretensions of knowledge. I don’t understand why we are so much inclined to contradict ourselves and make such extravagant claims about the metaphysics of God.

Kearney continues:

“Levinas moves from the lonely creative God to the God of hospitality to the widow, the orphan, and to the stranger, which is straightforward from the Torah. For Levinas, God is in the moment of the gesture of “after you” (ana), saying the other person first, opening the door to the guest, the important moment of Abrahamic tradition is when Abraham and Sarah are in their tents and they are looking out and see three strangers walking to them from the desert. And there is a choice: what should I do with these strangers? . . . Should I kill them or welcome them into the tent? So the hostility becomes hospitality. And the word “hostis” etymologically means “guest, stranger, and enemy [as in hostility]” as the over-moment of all the great religions of transforming “hostility” into “hospitality”. And in welcoming the strangers by Abraham, those three men become God and one, going down through Christianity and Islam.”

Yes, but I don’t see any contradiction between the loving God who turns hostility into hospitality (as I quoted the Quran before: Repel evil with good) and the omnipotent God. Why can God not be both?

When we look at scriptures and history of religions, what we find first and foremost is a mixture of messages. Some are fundamental to those religions and some marginal. Fundamental to all religions of the book as well as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucius is Golden Rule, the right conduct, to be ethical, to do justice and to care. Fundamental to religions of the book is the notion that God is already within us. Judaism says we are the image (in Hebrew “cut off” from) of God. Jesus declares the same thing and insists it is “love” not the “law” that has priority in God and the kingdom of God is within us. Islam repeatedly declares that our “fitrat” (essence) is divine. Human beings, according to these religions, are endowed with a divine gift which is not to be “omnipotent” but to love and to care. We have the same theme in Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucius which are religions, not secular traditions, and believe that there is a divine (Buddha nature, Dao) essence in us, without calling it God, but surely they see it heavenly or ultimate inter-beings of all beings. Now you can call it anything you wish.

But then the question is: Are “punishment” and “reward” not the internal working of this divine essence within us? Depending on the degrees that one is capable to do justice, to approximate its Source or God, and keep the integrity of its conscience, one moves on the scale of defection to perfection. And against nihilism and moral relativism, this is a meaningful direction of the soul, i.e., to the degree that we distance ourselves from our divine nature, we fall into hedonism and nihilism, and harm ourselves.

Even Kantian Western Enlightenment of the sovereignty of reason has an interesting and strange ethical theory, which is a heroic attempt to show that our wired in and innate (a priori) law of reason defies inconsistency in ethical issues and falls into cognitive dissonance and contradiction if it can’t universalize its own moral actions, i.e., I shouldn’t find myself in cognitive dissonance if everyone does the same thing that I morally do. This Kantian theory can’t explain why this inconsistency should be avoided. Kant appeals to a sense of “reverence” for the law of reason within. We all understand the kind of shame and guilt we feel, when we realize we are inconsistence. Maturity of divine conscience is a movement from the shame we experience under the dictum of social norms only to the shame we experience if we violate our own divine nature and lose the integrity of our own conscience. Is it not strange that religions hold us accountable to our sense of shame and guilt and this is also exactly where pendulum swings of excess occur? Now, if we want to go to the extreme of getting rid of so called punishing God, we should say: as religious fanaticism and patriarchy abuse our sense of shame and guilt, we should have no sense of shame and guilt, so viva cognitive dissonance, suffering conscience, and immorality. Is this not utter falling?

Harrison asks Kearney, “do we need God for understanding hospitality? Is human solidarity, the love and justice, not sufficient to itself?” In other words, one may ask: is Nietzsche, Marx, and Foucault’s historicism (historical ontology) NOT sufficient for establishing values in our own life, which makes us able to turn the impossibility into possibility, hostility to hospitality? Kearney responds “no, because it is impossible for the human to make the impossible into possible” and elaborates by bringing the example of Alcohol Anonymous twelve steps meetings:

“Take AA in ANA in Anatheism and Addiction Anonymous, letting go of those idols and addictions and in the case of AA movement which is 12 steps program which is developed and disseminated to all kinds of healing programs. It begins with very important sentence “I am helpless, I am abandoned, I am helpless about my addiction. Without the first adiou of abandonment the second adiou will not come. That I can’t cure myself, that I ego cogito self-willing will cannot do this. It is beyond my power. So, what do I do? I hand myself over to a higher power.” This sounds monotheistic if you will. Something bigger than you. That can be the story of other people, that they did the impossible. They gave up their addiction, I can do it too. That is what the higher power mean, it doesn’t mean some big being with a beard upon a Platonic heaven, waiting to punish or reward us when we die. Actually it is very simple thing, it is the disposition of openness and receptivity to something coming to us that will heal.”

I, Voegelin, and Kearney agree on one point: without the grace of God, our wisdom, passion, reason, will to power, and Gnosticism cannot save us or make the world a better place. I reiterate Voegelin’s thesis:

The nature of human conscience is divine. “The border experience of the examination of conscience can be elaborated meditatively and expanded to the experience of standing in Judgment.” So pragmatism, secularism, positivism, and historicism cannot substitute this divine conscience. At the same time because of fragility of this border experience we are prone to fall into the dream of Gnosticism to see ourselves self-sufficient and so venture to become Superman (Übermensch) and strive to make heaven on the earth by our own secular powers, without the grace of God. An inevitable and dangerous failure.

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[1] Losing Our Touch

By Richard Kearney

AUGUST 30, 2014 11:30 AM,

Are we losing our senses? In our increasingly virtual world, are we losing touch with the sense of touch itself? And if so, so what?

I recently had occasion to pose these questions to students in a college class I teach on eros — “from Plato to today.” Not surprisingly, the topic of physical contact and sex came up, and the conversation turned very much to “today.” A number of the students said that they regularly messaged online before having “real contact” with partners, perhaps using online dating and mating services like Match.com, OkCupid, SpeedDate.com and Tinder. They shared messaging acronyms that signaled their level of willingness to have sex, and under what conditions. They admitted to enjoying the relative anonymity of the one-off “hook up,” whose consummation required no preliminary close-quarters courtship rites or flirtation ceremonies, no culinary seduction, no caress, nothing — apart from the eventual “blind rut,” as James Joyce put it — requiring the presence of a functioning, sensitive body.

We noted the rather obvious paradox: The ostensible immediacy of sexual contact was in fact mediated digitally. And it was also noted that what is often thought of as a “materialist” culture was arguably the most “immaterialist” culture imaginable — vicarious, by proxy, and often voyeuristic.

Is today’s virtual dater and mater something like an updated version of Plato’s Gyges, who could see everything at a distance but was touched by nothing? Are we perhaps entering an age of “excarnation,” where we obsess about the body in increasingly disembodied ways? For if incarnation is the image become flesh, excarnation is flesh become image. Incarnation invests flesh; excarnation divests it.

In perhaps the first great works of human psychology, the “De Anima,” Aristotle pronounced touch the most universal of the senses. Even when we are asleep we are susceptible to changes in temperature and noise. Our bodies are always “on.” And touch is the most intelligent sense, Aristotle explained, because it is the most sensitive. When we touch someone or something we are exposed to what we touch. We are responsive to others because we are constantly in touch with them.

“Touch knows differences,” Aristotle insisted. It is the source of our most basic power to discriminate. The thin-skinned person is sensitive and intelligent; the thick-skinned, coarse and ignorant. Think of Odysseus and the Cyclops, Jacob and Esau. The power of touch. Even the Buddha, when challenged by Mara to reveal his authority, simply touches the ground. Our first intelligence is sensory refinement. And this primal sensibility is also what places us at risk in the world, exposing us to adventure and discovery.

Aristotle was challenging the dominant prejudice of his time, one he himself embraced in earlier works. The Platonic doctrine of the Academy held that sight was the highest sense, because it is the most distant and mediated; hence most theoretical, holding things at bay, mastering meaning from above. Touch, by contrast, was deemed the lowest sense because it is ostensibly immediate and thus subject to intrusions and pressures from the material world. Against this, Aristotle made his radical counterclaim that touch did indeed have a medium, namely “flesh.” And he insisted that flesh was not just some material organ but a complex mediating membrane that accounts for our primary sensings and evaluations.

Tactility is not blind immediacy — not merely sensorial but cognitive, too. Savoring is wisdom; in Latin, wisdom is “sapientia,” from “sapere,” to taste. These carnal senses make us human by keeping us in touch with things, by responding to people’s pain — as when the disguised Odysseus (whose name can be translated as “bearer of pain,”), returning to Ithaca, is recognized by his nursemaid, Eurycleia, at the touch of his childhood scar.

But Aristotle did not win this battle of ideas. The Platonists prevailed and the Western universe became a system governed by “the soul’s eye.” Sight came to dominate the hierarchy of the senses, and was quickly deemed the appropriate ally of theoretical ideas. Western philosophy thus sprang from a dualism between the intellectual senses, crowned by sight, and the lower “animal” senses, stigmatized by touch. And Western theology — though heralding the Christian message of Incarnation (“word made flesh”) — all too often confirmed the injurious dichotomy with its anti-carnal doctrines; prompting Nietzsche’s verdict that Christianity was “Platonism for the people” and “gave Eros poison to drink.” Thus opto-centrism prevailed for over 2,000 years, culminating in our contemporary culture of digital simulation and spectacle. The eye continues to rule in what Roland Barthes once called our “civilization of the image.” The world is no longer our oyster, but our screen.

For all the fascination with bodies, our current technology is arguably exacerbating our carnal alienation. While offering us enormous freedoms of fantasy and encounter, digital eros may also be removing us further from the flesh.

Pornography, for example, is now an industry worth tens of billions of dollars worldwide. Seen by some as a progressive sign of post-60s sexual liberation, pornography is, paradoxically, a twin of Puritanism. Both display an alienation from flesh — one replacing it with the virtuous, the other with the virtual. Each is out of touch with the body.

THIS movement toward privatization and virtuality is explored in Spike Jonze’s recent movie “Her,” where a man falls in love with his operating system, which names itself Samantha. He can think of nothing else and becomes insanely jealous when he discovers that his virtual lover, Samantha, is also flirting with thousands of other subscribers. Eventually, Samantha feels so bad for him that she decides to supplement her digital persona with a real body by sending a surrogate lover. But the plan fails miserably — while the man touches the embodied lover he hears the virtual signals of Samantha in his ears and cannot bridge the gap. The split between digital absence and carnal presence is unbearable. Something is missing: love in the flesh.

The move toward excarnation is apparent in what is becoming more and more a fleshless society. In medicine, “bedside manner” and hand on pulse has ceded to the anonymous technologies of imaging in diagnosis and treatment. In war, hand-to-hand combat has been replaced by “targeted killing” via remote-controlled drones. If contemporary warfare renders us invulnerable to those who cannot touch us, can we make peace without a hand to shake? (Think of Mandela-de Klerk or Begin-Sadat).

Moreover, certain cyber engineers now envisage implanting transmission codes in brains so that we will not have to move a finger — or come into contact with another human being — to get what we want. The touch screen replaces touch itself. The cosmos shrinks to a private monitor; each viewer a disembodied self unto itself.

Full humanity requires the ability to sense and be sensed in turn: the power, as Shakespeare said, to “feel what wretches feel” — or, one might also add, what artists, cooks, musicians and lovers feel. We need to find our way in a tactile world again. We need to return from head to foot, from brain to fingertip, from iCloud to earth. To close the distance, so that eros is more about proximity than proxy. So that soul becomes flesh, where it belongs. Such a move, I submit, would radically alter our “sense” of sex in our digital civilization. It would enhance the role of empathy, vulnerability and sensitivity in the art of carnal love, and ideally, in all of human relations. Because to love or be loved truly is to be able to say, “I have been touched.”

Richard Kearney is a philosophy professor at Boston College whose books include “The Wake of Imagination” and the forthcoming “Carnal Hermeneutics.”

[2] A poem: Spiral of Love

Justus’s first day of school with Mongoli,

His Harvey’s púca, and our anniversary of love tomorrow!

A backpack of love to carry separation and to join many,

With the trace of love behind and its rejuvenation flowering,

The anniversary of growth and the miracle of depth,

A journey of silent contentment in fading out into space,

With natalité of love engrained in each breath.

Viva growth! Viva change!

Your love sat deeply inside my wrinkles and my eyes flight of light.

You changed and my gray hair.

I changed and your transformation into a bronze and ivory Diotima stay-of-life,

Eternity of now, profundity of eyes, and your magical touch.

We float in deep waves of discovering anew feelings and desires.

Turning the ladder of love into Mobius strip,

Enjoining sensational desire and blinding light of eternity,

We superimpose the beginning and end.

Then drown in your wisdom, I drink your ivory legs,

Spiraling in holistic circles of existence, I kiss your domes,

Embracing the impetus of growth and death, I fade into your bosom,

We emerged in dependent differentiation of love,

Travelled into abyss of new births,

And disappeared into integration in the universe.

[3] Surah Fussilat (Made Distinct), 41:19: “On the Day when God’s enemies are gathered up for the Fire and driven onward, their ears, eyes, and skins will, when they reach it, testify against them for their misdeeds. 21: They will say to their skins, ‘Why did you testify against us?’ and their skins will reply, ‘God who gave speech to everything, has given us speech—it was It who created you the first time and to It you have been returned.” In the same Surah God says: “Good and evil cannot be equal, repel evil with what is better and your enemy will become as close as an old and valued friend, but only those who are steadfast in patience, only those who are blessed with great righteousness, will attain to such goodness.” (The Quran 41:33)

[4] When we look at Axial Age sages (Socrates, Euripides, Upanishad’s mystics, Jeremiah, Amos, Ezekeil, Buddha and Confucius). Ethical practices have intrinsic values; that is, we don’t want them for their result but for their spiritual cultivation. Is it not strange that in terms of ethics, unlike Mill, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, all Axial Age sages, are non-consequentialist? They held that morality has to be practiced for the cultivation of the soul at the disposal of and harmonized with the way of heaven or achieving a meaningful spiritual growth.

04/23/16

Divino Ecce Homo: Become Who You Are  

A response to Cassie:
Thanks for your thoughtful and stimulating response, Cassie. You made and raised so many interesting ideas and questions. I try to express my heart/thoughts reflections on some of them.

Referring to my point about the fact that historically we swing almost violently from one extreme to another, you wrote:

“This also makes me wonder: why does this pendulum swing even occur in the first place? Is it simply the "gravity" of our human condition? Why do we (almost violently) swing back and forth?”

I like your expression “the gravity of our human condition”. And I agree with your well poised words:

“In one sense (as I think you suggest here), one of the most important steps to “balancing” would be to become more self-aware of how this “swing” functions in history AND, perhaps, in our individual lives (do you agree that we can experience similar swings on a personal level, in relation to the “slings and arrows” that life serves us?) This in itself may create a greater equilibrium, a "peace" that transcends the continual violent movement between opposites.”

Yes, these extreme oscillations have come to our full attention now, in our historical maturity. It is so much so that it hurts now to know and ignore it, and it seems that if we can’t transcend it, we can’t go forward anymore. Maybe it is time to get lighter and lighter, learn from personal and historical practices, and pray to God for its Grace to help us to get ready to fly, at least a little bit. I have come to the conclusion that prayer and longing is as important as, if not more important than, our rational emotional ethical transcendence, or it is its eternal root, oil, or soul without which all our attempts will go to extremes, nihilism, and we will never reach maturity. I will come to this at the end.

One may ask: How much totalizing and reductive thinking/reactions we need in order to come to our senses and step aside from the precipice of nihilism?

How far should we go before our final annihilation?

How far, how far violent swing our souls need to suffer: to say human being is “nothing but” computing machines, to reduce our suffering ethical soul to sheer “information processing” minds?

How far should we go to say we are nothing but our “genes and environment,” leveling off humans and germs, and all living beings to some simplicity of reductive minds?

How far should we go to say that we are nothing but “historical practices” (Marx and Foucault)?

How far should we go to say we are nothing but our “sensuality” (hedonism), “consumerism”, “homo economicus”, and “speciesism” or “humanism”?

How far should we go to say we are nothing but “contingent interaction of particles”?

How far we should go to say we are nothing but a cursed and sinful soul thrown in the world?

How far should we go and suffer until we realize that our values of love, justice, mercy, and forgiveness are not mere fictions, they are as real, if not more real than scientific evidence, our reductive totalizing methods, and simple facts of our daily life?

You wrote:

“The other aspect of your letter that I found interesting was the whole idea of re-evaluation of all values (Nietzsche). After the death of God, the responsibility falls to us to reevaluate values, but that is a heavy burden and I’m honestly not sure how well we’ve handled it thus far. It’s almost as if we have entered, culturally and collectively, a metaphorical stage of “adolescence"—we collectively (even if only unconsciously) struggle against meaninglessness, depression, loss of objective "given" values (again, even if only unconsciously). Yet, maybe this is a necessary stage. We have to struggle with (and even against) ourselves, our collective identity (identities, actually). We have to (at least for a time) “reject the traditions of our parents,” even though we know on some level that their example and “teachings"—like the example and teachings of good parents—contain at least some degree of positive, life-affirming wisdom (for example, the various manifestations of the Golden Rule). Perhaps we never fully reject them, so much as doubt, question, and reevaluate them. While it may seem, and feel, as if on some level we have ceased to fully believe in the core principles of the Axial Age sages, perhaps this is only temporary—a necessary stage or condition of our “internal" growth. Going back to the adolescence metaphor, perhaps it is akin to the child learning that his/her parents (which metaphorically represent the positive and objective virtues and values) are NOT perfect, not infallible. Awakening to this realization (the imperfection) is not easy, and perhaps nihilism is a potential (and hopefully temporary) side effect.”

A point of my writing was that the cry of Nietzsche’s madman[1] is the cry of a falling soul, generation, and time in reaction to: 1) excesses of religions in a devilish deviation from the Dao of God into excessive self-righteousness and seeing evil all around itself, and 2) against religious fanaticism, which put out the fire of divine critical thinking and unbiased and impassioned observation and evidence seeking sub specie aeternitatis (from the eternal or roughly objective point of view) reflection about the enigma of life and love.

Consequently, we swung to the extreme reductive “nothing but” of crude Darwinism, hedonism, economism, measurelessness, and moral relativism or perspectivism (historical ontology).

We had to come out of the stage of “Divine Command Theory” to find the judgment of love within, the divine moral light within, and this time knowingly and lovingly abide with God. Is it not strange that all mystical traditions insist that God is within us (it is in our conscience, NOT that we are God), but they ask us to deconstruct our fictitious conscience, the voice of our parents and culturally imposed values, to come to the divine voice, which as you mentioned, is not necessarily against parents’ voice but we have to discover it in our own conscience for ourselves (with the Grace of God) rather than following them blindly; this is a sign of maturity of our moral reasoning and feeling.

You wrote:

“The really interesting question is, I think, what happens when we "grow up” and what might this look like? My views on this are perhaps a bit pessimistic, insofar as I believe we have a great deal yet to learn and experience, at least on the collective level, before we reach maturity (and by “maturity I mean, at least in part, the self-awareness and the "sense of history" to be able to see—not only intellectually, but on a deeper level—the nature of the pendulum swings. And further, to see these “swings” without identifying with them and unconsciously falling into their sway—which, as we have seen, is tricky).”

I agree, but it is optimistic, there is a sense of “direction” here (i.e., undoing the whole nihilistic project) to see the oscillations of excess clearly, to go back to the Axial Ages sages and prophets’ message, this time with better understanding in heart and making it our own: “Enowning” it partially in Heidegger’s sense [Ereigniz: the Event of Appropriation][2], and partially in Walter Benjamin’s sense[3], though it is more. It is coming back to the message of theism and the Ethical Divine Guide Within which is absent in both Heidegger and Benjamin.

You continued:

“If I can say one thing about how I envision maturity, it is something like this: we become creators (not only in the Nietzschean sense, as I think he only partially grasped what the act of creation actually meant). Rather, we see that while values may be inherently empty (where nihilism seems to stop), they are also the most important part of existence, and perhaps the most important aim in existence is breathing life (and continually breathing new life) into our values. Reaching maturity means becoming responsible creators of our values, in the same way that someone like the Buddha or Jesus or Muhammad did.”

While your general understanding is so insightful, I see a confusion here. I don’t think that Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values was bound to liberation or freedom to become mature human beings, because it starts from false premises. First, God and God given values exist and have never been empty, if they felt dead and empty, it is so because WE killed them in our excess. Second, the direction that Nietzsche offers for such a re-evaluation doesn’t come from a spirit of “completion” and “digestion” of the Axial Ages message (similar to Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammad). Nietzsche’s message is essentially disconnected from the divine source and this is a reason that it is barren and dies out in the drought of nihilism. The point of “re-evaluation” that we talk about is “essential” and attempts to “re-connect” to the source or God. I assume you too had this in mind, just wanted to clarify it.

You finish your comments eloquently with this passage:

“In other words, we need to believe in them not only intellectually, but fully, with an embodied belief. But just as they did, we must first go through a rejection, or revision, of the old beliefs, which can be painful on a personal and societal level. This reminds me of what the poet Wallace Stevens once said (and he said it much better than I am attempting to explain it here): ‘The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.’ I might change the last word to something else rather than “willingly”—perhaps “passionately” or “with everything you are” or “lovingly”—in other words, something that conveys that it is not simply an intellectual belief based on reason, nor simply a habitual belief handed down without critical inquiry—but a belief that is forged by experience, by doubt, by failure, and yes, also by love.”

While what you say makes so much sense and sounds true. I need to highlight one point again. The rejection of Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad of the tradition is “essentially continuous” with the past, they reject for completion not trashing or discarding the past. As well, they don’t think that maturity in connecting, lovingly and wholeheartedly, with the divine through ethical practices is a fiction to believe in. This was the problem with Foucault’s historical ontology that couldn’t hold a sense of faith in the continuity of history and so disconnecting with the divine experience, because to him it was all a fiction, including his own philosophy.[4] Now in the maturity of enowning our values for ourselves, i.e., to feel the love, truth, and the moral light of God within, we hold fast to the faith (not belief) that it is true and this truth is discovered by us through the Grace of God. In my own experience, without the divine Grace, I couldn’t find my way out of nihilism and ethical decay. Here I go back to the point I mentioned at the beginning: without a constant longing for the divine and the source, without constant prayers so that God sheds light on our lost souls and fictitious identities, without this immense longing and prayers which are absent in Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger, and I assume Wallace Stevens, any endeavor of our own, as wonderful as the works of these valued thinkers, will not take us from “fiction” to “truth” and “faith”. Maybe, it can take us to a “belief… that is forged by experience, by doubt, by failure, and yes, also by love,” but we need more than this, we need Axial Ages wisdom of the significance of ethical practices and their connection to the cosmic divine pathos, and a deep longing for the Source or God. And what will come as the consequence, the divine Grace, will show us this historical experience has never been a fiction, but truth through and through. Hence, faith is born both as the beginning, the seed and the fruit, as one can meaningfully say: “Become Who You Are”. Nietzsche taught us interesting lessons as an Antichrist, he rejected the whole divine values and traditions, declared we are a subclass of dead and got lost in the drought of nihilism and became what he was, his “Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is”[5]. On the contrary, Jesus and Muhammad didn’t reject the faith and tradition totally but completed and enowned them by rejecting the excesses and misleading interpretations, and became what they were: Jesus’s Divino Ecce Homo[6], reconnected to their divine source . This is the maturity to come.

04/8/16

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[1] NIETZSCHE'S THE MADMAN 
“Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" -- As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? -- Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him -- you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us -- for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto. "Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves. It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?" [Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp.181-82.]

[2] MEANING OF HEIDEGGER’S EREIGNIS: Ereignis is rendered in English as ‘appropriation’ or ‘the event of appropriation’. We could briefly clarify the notion of `Ereignis’ by analyzing the term etymologically. Speaking of the term `Ereignis’, Heidegger speaks of it as a ‘key word’ (Leitwort) and that cannot be pluralized, but is a singulare tantum. Strictly speaking it is untranslatable. To quote him: " As such a key term, it can no more be translated than Greek ‘logos’ or Chinese ‘Tao’." In the common usage ‘Ereignis’ means an event or a happening. Heidegger speaks of its etymological affinity with two root words: ‘ er-eigen’ and ‘er-augnen’. The former is related to German ‘eigen’ (own) and in this sense ‘Ereignis’ means to come to one’s own or to come to where one belongs. The latter word is related to the German ‘Auge’ (eye) meaning to catch sight of, to see with the mind’s eye or to see face to face. If we put these two meanings together, Ereignis has the sense of being far removed from everyday events or something which we see with our mind’s eye; yet it is something so close to us that we cannot see it, i.e., it is something to which we belong. This is clear when Heidegger speaks of Ereignis as . . . the most inconspicuous of the inconspicuous phenomenon, the simplest of the simplicities, the nearest of the near, and the farthest of the far, in which we mortals spend our life." Here we notice a sense of mystery in Heidegger’s consideration of the Ereignis. Being is different from Ereignis and only in the realm of Ereignis can Being be thought of. "Being . . . in respect of its essential origin can be thought of in terms of appropriation."

Ereignis is the realm in which the truth of Being is manifest. Therefore, Being must be understood in and through the realm of Ereignis. In other words, thinking of Being reaches its purity and perfection when it is thought from the realm of Ereignis. It is not available to the representative-calculative thinking and to individual experiences of men. It is, rather, given to the essential thinker, the poetic dweller, the seer and the shepherd, in his realization of his belonging-together with Being. "Event of appropriation is that realm, vibrating within itself through which man and Being reach each other in their nature." Ereignis is ". . . Dasein’s complete Self-realization in Being and Being’s appropriation (Zueignen)" of Dasein. (http://www.crvp.org/book/series03/i...)

[3] WALTER BENJAMIN THESIS IV ON PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: 
"Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was’. It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to hold fast that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to the historical subject in a moment of danger. The danger threatens both the content of the tradition and those who inherit it. For both, it is one and the same thing: the danger of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer; he comes as the victor over the Antichrist. The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious." - Walter Benjamin, Thesis VI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/These...)

[4] FOUCAULT: “In spite of that, the people who read me... often tell me with a laugh, “You know very well that what you say is really just fiction.” I always reply, “Of course, there’s no question of it being anything else but fiction.” …[M]y problem is not to satisfy professional historians; my problem is to construct myself, and to invite others to share an experience of what we are, not only our past but also our present, an experience of our modernity in such a way that we might come out of it transformed.” [Michel Foucault, Power, translated by Robert Hurley and others, in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 3, edited by James Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1997), 242.]

[5] ECCE HOMO: HOW ONE BECOMES WHAT ONE IS (German: Ecce homo: Wie man wird, was man ist) is the last original book written by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche before his final years of insanity that lasted until his death in 1900. It was written in 1888 and was not published until 1908. The book offers Nietzsche’s own interpretation of his development, his works, and his significance. The book contains several chapters with ironic self-laudatory titles, such as “Why I Am So Wise”, “Why I Am So Clever”, “Why I Write Such Good Books” and “Why I Am a Destiny”. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_...]

[6] ECCE HOMO (“behold the man”, Ecclesiastical Latin, is the Latin words used by Pontius Pilot in the translation of John 19:5, when he presents a scourged Jesus Christ, bound and crowned with thorns, to a hostile crowd shortly before his Crucifixion. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecco_...]