I.D. Greeks 00018

Another such encasement of context is “The universe must have been created, and there is only one possible creator, God.” This also is based on the supposedly rational proposition that every effect, every object, has a cause. The automatic response of someone like Bertrand Russell is, “If the universe necessarily needs a creator then God too needs a creator. Who created God?” Humean Skepticism would amplify by saying if there is no necessity of logical or ontological or physical connection between cause and effect, if it is really a study of probability and relevance rather than logical law or direct experience, then such rarified deductions have no justification to be stated in the first place. But such a conclusion is judged invalid by theologians because God is taken out of the chain of effects as it is his nature by definition and conception to be uncreatable along the line of Descartes and Anselm: ‘One cannot conceive a greater thought than God.’ Yet Aquinas himself refuted all of Anselm’s arguments. Aquinas did argue that God’s essence was ‘his’ existence. But since Aquinas’ main and most important point was that God’s essence was unknowable by the finite mind of human being, and all of his ‘attributes’ unknowable to the finite mind of human being, Aquinas’ conclusion was that God was utterly beyond words. And therefore the very notion of existence becomes unknowable also. It is significant that numerous mystics of most religions have said the same thing and it is certainly Damascius’ main point in the FIRST PRINCIPLES.

I am not belaboring this line of thought unduly because A) all of our lines of thought whatsoever always tie themselves onto a unknowable “beyond”; B) that this occurs, however, by absolutely no means justifies belief in the “beyond” as any kind of entity what so ever; C) the “beyond” cannot even indicate ‘direction’ because the signposts have been invalidated; D) that the “beyond” is no kind of entity whatsoever cannot justify putting anything in its place because that “place” itself is erased; E) if there is no “beyond” to fall back on for justification of anything, then there is no such ‘thing’ as “ground,” urgrund (a term that is essentially self refuting), “fundamental and unquestionable truth” (this is not the same as “axiom” because the axiom merely defines the context from which one must start argument and is constantly tested by its consistency with results); F) therefore any position that rejects the rag-tag, catch-all concept “God,” essentially an operational and emotive ‘concept’ and not a verbal one which always connotes logic, and tries to fill the empty space with anything existentially ‘positive’ like a brick or a screwdriver essentially has already refuted itself on exactly the same grounds, i. e., if there is no place for “God” then there can be no place for “fundamental” either as theologians have clearly proven the necessity of connecting and identifying the two concepts; G) the concept of “divinity” had a historical necessity of experiment and error that, as Frazer has so well demonstrated, sharpened our ability to deal with individual facts immensely but has never changed in the slightest the context in which this history of trying to understand and control the unknown has occurred; H) on discarding the concept of a “fundamental entity,” of fully realizing all that has ever happened is the constant rearranging, taking apart and putting back together “the fact of the matter” as Wittgenstein would say, then what we are left with as the ‘fundamental’ identity – yes, there is a fundamental historical pressure to continue thinking this way for, after all, what we are coming to is, “What else is there?” – of human being, as species, as people, as ‘race,’ as group, as religion, as custom and tradition, but most important and ‘fundamentally’ as so-called person, as reputed individual, is history, a history where the dreadful uni-direction of time connects all things together in a single line but no longer for a reason, no longer as providence, no longer for a purpose, unless one wants to say, like Heidegger, that purpose is death as the factual and undeniable focusing of futural human intent and how one “faces death” which is essentially another, nonsensical “beyond.” The “one” here is not a “universal” as a description of an aspect of human nature that confronts us all, but s a monadical “one” without “another,” without a dyad, absolutely alone, or as Heidegger says death cuts you off from everything and everybody else absolutely and no one can die for you or with you, i. e., the fundamental existential (the phenomenological correspondent of “category”) “being-with” [mitdasein] ceases. This is the key term. This “being-with” is this unknowable context I keep referring to. History is always and only a history of, actually history as “being-with.” But even history is too much like “beyond.”

What in and as fact is “history”? It is words. From where did words come? Language is not a limb like your left hand nor is it a feeling we call a drive or instinct (actually nonsensical words again, hyper-inflated abstractions that do not describe actual experience) like hunger or thirst or sex. Language is something we learn from Others. Language is something we learn from very “significant others” in a very special and intensely motivated context that is absolutely unique with each person as the overall context of language. It is “being-with” with a vengeance. The “rules” of language, a logically unconnectable but forcibly connected jumble or hodge-podge filled with “exceptions” when the objective form of language itself demands and is logic, are not rules of logical inference but rules of wrote tradition. To speak “right” is to speak “morally,” not logically as any honest child will tell you. These irrational rules must of necessity be memorized. Therefore there is a system of memory enforced right from the start. Therefore the prime ingredient of any memory system, especially if it comes to compete with other systems, is that it must be intensely motivated, usually negatively to the extreme, but also positively in rebellion as with the Renaissance thinkers who, in one fashion or another, wanted to revise or utterly reject Christianity by bringing back the pagan gods, Fate as astrology, magic, alchemy, which becomes like an Indo-European poetic ring composition reflecting a fundamental belief-structure of Indo-European thought that comes back to the original (‘ground’) but totally unknown motivation of controlling reality. But this time understanding is more thorough and changes slowly and haltingly into science. Thus the Renaissance ‘thrust toward science’ need not be seen as an advance of knowledge as in a historical “progressive evolution” but rather as rebellion against what one knows not to be true but cannot directly express that. Therefore it becomes an allusive and deliberately misleading statement of honest desires that must be hidden and therefore cannot be logically worked out in the open and free forum of logical dialogue. It must hide under mystical forms or in secret societies like the Brothers of the Rosy Cross or the Freemasons or in the Ficino/Medici imitation of the Platonic Academy.

“Being-with” as language is, like a literal, mechanical recording, a personal history, record, of how you learned language. All the elements of that learning are in that personal history, a random conglomeration of facts, that you call your identity. And, as the fact of its actual occurrence, that personal history is the context of everything else, or to specify it in this context, it is the context of the universal history of language. Language is a full tradition you inherit from others. But once given to you it becomes absolutely yours. It is a strange, derived solipsism where your solipsism is a borrowed system. In the word “inheritance” lives the whole history of the “dual realities” human beings have been cursed with, where you can speak of “this world” and “the world beyond,” or worse, “this world” and the “real world.” Language comes from elsewhere than your self and yet it absolutely composes your self. It is the least personal and yet it is the most personal. It is how Others “live on,” how “Others” literally inhabit you with the phrases that constructed their own identities. Language is the most fundamental form of ancestor worship. Language exists by haunting you. Language is filled with real ghosts living in their memorized phrases and catch words that form your thoughts and feelings. And some of these ghosts may be hundreds of thousands of years old. You want contact with the spirits? You do it every second of the day, waking or sleeping, and most significantly sleeping. Dreams are formed by the spirits in language. Usually they relate to people you have problems with in everyday life where, many times you tell them “what you should have told them,” or much worse say and do things you would never ‘dream’ of doing in ‘real’ life. Since language is reality, Chuang-tzu’s question of whether you are a human dreaming you are a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming you are human takes on serious ontological significance because dreaming and waking are simply different ways of using language in wholly different contexts!

And it is precisely in the use of language that we realize we are not ourselves because the structures of expression come to us set and formed beforehand, a realization emphasized when we suddenly find ourselves bemused by a word or a phrase we use all the time yet in an Augenblicht, “moment of vision,” suddenly realize the word is strange, a stranger, or even meaningless, that you know the form of thought that usually fits with the word but at this moment it no longer fits together as one flesh, that the word stands there as a meaningless, disjointed, abandoned sound. Words are just sounds. That is an undeniable Humean fact. And it is also obvious from experience that the meaning-giving aspect of words when you put them together as a sentence and send them off to another person, that person receives them as individual, meaningless words and puts them together in a meaningful way absolutely in their own fashion and context of which you know little or nothing of. Logically, in dialogue which is itself a form of logic, you can discover some of the protruding discrepancies between one-another’s interpretation of the same words but it also makes you realize that that interpretation reveals that person’s language is their personal history composing their identity and not yours.

Now memory systems are primarily based on a simple fact. They are motivated and maintained by desire. One does not remember things, especially systematically, if one is utterly indifferent to them. What is the fundamental way memory systems are built? By pain. By discipline. By the desire for a reward. But predominantly by pain. Sufficient pain over-rides any and every other kind of sensation. There is nothing that can over-ride a pain level that is high or you know can be raised. As a doctor once told me, “Embarrassment is the best teacher.” Several things happen here, One, the pain over-rides everything else at the moment. You do not want it repeated. And, worse, you know the second time around will give you a higher level of pain. The sergeant’s boot teaches you to put your left foot in the right place. But these are guided pains that teache you specific things. There is also the pain that you do not know where it comes from, what it is, or why it is happening. It is telling you to avoid something but you do not know what. Some people come to the conclusion which, in an over-all way is correct, that the pain is life itself. Suicide in Indo-European cultures is considered by most people to be the greatest of sins. This is to be distinguished from sacrificing oneself for . . . which is considered the greatest of virtues. Suicide is the most extremely selfish act, and going back in history, Indo-European culture becomes more and more extremely anti-selfish in the actual acts of daily life, not just lip-service as it is now. Being against selfishness is common to most cultures. However, being against suicide most certainly is not, and therefore it is not regarded as a selfish act, a renunciation of responsibility which one cannot get rid of even in the grave as it is in Indo-European cultures. The Chinese do not expect their dead ancestors or even the gods to help them in this life. They may exist, live on, but they are absolutely apart,  otherwise, and when they do interfere in daily life, most of the time they do so as demons. Only the Indo-European blames God or the souls of the departed for not providing a world as it should be, or have the need to explain evil as part of a benevolent plan. With the Chinese, good is real and evil is equally real, and the only escape or blessedness is escape from reality altogether. These attitudes can also be found in Indo-European cultures but never on an everyday level! Just in ‘higher’ levels of thought. This is a very loose and shoddy representation but it actually fits most of the facts. Our crazy modern culture is filled constantly with blatant and drastic contradictions that, simply to function, one most use a multi-leveled memorized but subconscious system to simply ignore its disaster.