THE MYSTERIOUS COMMONWEALTH OF CONCEPTS

…We and our thoughts… Are we their parents? Are they our masters?…

Welcome to the world beyond! “Beyond” not in the sense of being on the other side of the river Eridanos; in fact, we are all on the same side, virtually living together, like the Wizards and the Muggles in Harry Potter’s world, and yet they are beyond our grasp and frequently comprehension, while we are... under their invisible spell. Here is Nietzsche entering their mystical realm with nothing short of Siegfried’s fearlessness:

“That individual philosophical concepts are not anything capricious, or autonomously evolving, but grow up in connection, and in relationship with each other; that however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought, they, nevertheless, belong just as much to a system as all the members of the fauna of a continent -- is betrayed, in the end, also by the fact that the most diverse philosophers keep filling in a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies. Under an invisible spell they are always revolving once more in the same orbit; however independent of each other they may feel themselves with their critical, or systematic, wills, something within them leads them, something impels them in a definite order, one after the other, to wit, the innate systematic structure and relationship of their concepts. Their thinking is far less a discovery, than a recognition, remembering, a return to a remote household of the soul, out of which those concepts grew originally. Philosophizing is, to this extent, a kind of atavism of the highest order.” (From Nietzsche’s Jenseits: 20)

This whole paragraph is so much filled with mysticism, the eerie and adamantly paranormal world beyond, that it instantly brings to mind that monstrosity of a thought that thinks by itself, where we thinkers are just the host, whose bodies are snatched by these creepy creatures. Kant (whose synthetic aprioris must certainly have influenced Nietzsche’s thinking in the passage above) ought to have increased his famous count of the Undinge from two to three: time, space, and thought!

The reader may have guessed that the purpose of this entry is not to marvel at Nietzsche’s deep mysticism (even though I do recognize mysticism as a highly commendable quality), but to observe that in the quoted passage Nietzsche comes as close to the purest spirit of religious idealism (in the sense of the independent, spiritual, Divine origin of thinking) as nobody has ever come, on that same elevated, intellectually superior level. Paraphrasing John 1:1, In the beginning was the Mysterious Commonwealth of Concepts, and this Commonwealth was with God, and it was God... When Nietzsche points out that thinking is "less a discovery than a recognition, a return to a remote household of the soul, out of which those concepts grew originally," the “soul” he is referring to, cannot be some particular thinker’s individual soul, but the common soul, or the protosoul of all humanity, which could just as well be a good definition (one of them, of course) of God the Supreme Spirit.

By the way, what is the relationship between thought and Logos? Are they two autonomies under one Deity, or is one somehow subservient, somehow derivative, in relation to the other? Is Logos God’s thought? Or is Logos God Himself? Furthermore, is human thought a product of Logos, partially corrupted by freedom, the peculiar result of Adam and Eve’s eating from the Tree of Knowledge? There are a veritable host of fertile little thoughtlets, fiercely competing with each other for a place under the sun, and I am not referring to the combined thoughts of all mankind. Such thoughtlets inhabit a single mind, a thinking mind… In fact, just as in mathematics, the illusory difference between micro-infinity, ¥, and macro-infinity, ¥*¥, is virtually non-discernable (¥=¥*¥), we cannot even fathom the technical difference between micro-thinking and macro-thinking. Nietzsche gives us the best approximation of religious idealism, again, when he observes that even our own thoughts exist independently from our control, in a realm that exists around us and in us, where we, however, are forbidden to enter...

(This subject will continue in my entry When I think That I Think…, to be posted later…)

DEDUCTION, INDUCTION, ABDUCTION

(There is a tendency among the Europeans to dismiss the intellectual achievements of the United States as if the American life were solely about making money, and all higher pursuits of the mind were somehow foreign to the family of Uncle Sam. This one-sided view of America is a very mean and most unfair caricature, as this great nation surely has a lot of other things to be proud of, aside from her present-day military and economic might.
It is, therefore, not merely to edify the reader with some lesser known trivia that I have undertaken to devote a number of entries to certain exceptional American individuals, but, in a way, to battle that ugly stereotype.
For more on the tragic life and outstanding scientific and philosophical legacy of C. S. Peirce (1839-1914), see my entry An American Tragedy, in the American section [to be posted later]. But this particular entry is not so much about this great American as it is about an interesting scientific/philosophical hypothesis which he offers to the inquisitive mind. Well, here it is, with an appreciative comment from me.)

Charles Sanders Peirce was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist, credited as the founder of the philosophy of Pragmatism and of modern Semiotics, yet until recently almost completely unknown. It was only in 1959 that Bertrand Russell, having discovered some of Peirce’s remarkable writings, would call him “one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century, and certainly the greatest American thinker ever.” Karl Popper in 1972 called Peirce “one of the greatest philosophers of all time.”
In other words, here is definitely a man worth learning about. And, as I said earlier, I have written much more about him in the American section. This entry, however, touches upon just one aspect of Peirce’s legacy, maybe not the most important one, but eminently instructive and vastly entertaining. Deduction and induction as methods of philosophical analysis had been known for ages before Peirce, but the addition of “abduction” to these two was his own invention.
Imagine a situation where we are dealing with two sets of balls: a larger one, which is the pool, and a smaller one, which is presumably a random sample of the larger one. If we know that the balls in the larger set are all red, we conclude that the balls in the sample set are red as well. This is deduction.
Now, if we know that the balls in the sample set are all red, we may assume that all the balls in the sampled set are red as well. This is, of course, an arguable proposition, but this is what we call induction.
But we have not exhausted our logical possibilities yet, and here comes Peirce with his interesting argument concerning the link between the two sets. Imagine that having these two sets, we find all balls in them red. Is it possible to assume that the smaller set of red balls comes out of the larger set of completely similar balls? At least, this is a reasonable guess, tenable as a working hypothesis, and Peirce calls it abduction.

Someone not quite adept in logic may ask about the utility of having such a hypothesis at all, seeing that its premise is even more questionable than the second one of the triad. (Nobody questions the validity of the first logical proposition, of course.) It is true that the third hypothesis is pretty shaky, but so is the second one, and yet, known as induction, its value as a legitimate methodological tool has long been established. After all, excluding foolproof deduction, we are dealing with hypotheses, which can be exposed as false at any time, but the beauty of them is that, for as long as they have not been exposed as such, we can assume them to be true, thus setting in motion the whole essential mechanism of philosophical inquiry, reminding me somewhat of the Hegelian epistemological triad of hypothesis, its eventual refutation, and the forming, as a result, of a much superior hypothesis, waiting to be eventually refuted as well, but on a higher level of intellectual sophistication.

Having presented this procedure in such terms, it must be clear now why Peirce’s "abduction" becomes such a useful new methodological tool. I will let the reader think about this, as by now it is fairly easy to figure out.

DIMENSIONALITY AS A NUMBERS GAME

Space must not be confused with the world, or universe, in so far as space has only three dimensions. On the other hand, the number of dimensions attributed to the world is always more than three. A four-dimensional world, with time being the fourth dimension, has been around for so long that it has become a virtual truism. An original thinker of modernity must choose a different number, rather than three or four--- either less than three or more than four. For understandable reasons, they all opt for a bigger number, although one or two might have treated us to a delightfully peculiar intellectual challenge.
This embryonic entry looks at the question of dimensionality as a philosophical problem. The key questions in this approach are: how many dimensions does the world have?, and how many countable dimensions would constitute the optimum amount, for our scientific and philosophical investigations?

We know that mathematically the number of dimensions is limitless, but what does it tell us, besides the fact itself? There is a demonstrable practical value in talking about the “normal” three spatial dimensions, plus we can throw time into the bargain, forming… four?

Not according to the Russian philosopher Peter Demyanovich Ouspensky, who has come up with the idea of a six-dimensional world. In his mind, the universe in time is also defined by three directional vectors. Like a non-dimensional point moving in one direction to create the one-dimensional line, its non-spatial movement in time only creates a one-dimensional entity, where time is the only dimension. But having formed a line in space, this one-dimensional entity can create a two-dimensional entity simply by traveling in time. Likewise a geometrical plane, traveling in time, creates a new dimensionality, and so does a traveling infinite cube... Ouspensky’s logic here allows him to double the three-dimensional world (rather than just to add a fourth dimension) to a total of six dimensions, but the reader could just as well pursue this kind of logic and come up, with the help of the dimensionless point, to the grand total of seven, not just six dimensions. But enough of this particular pursuit!

The reader may reasonably inquire about the practical use of coming up with a multidimensional world, like this one, and, except for the distinct pleasure of abstract contemplation, it is rather difficult to come up with a good rationale. Personally, I would like to limit the number of dimensions in this case to four: three space dimensions plus time, because four is a good starting point for further explorations. It makes it easier to add new dimensions to the sum total, such as, say, the dimension of thought. And indeed, different players of the dimensionality game have come up with quite a few other dimensional entities, bringing the total number to ten, eleven, twenty-six, and so on.

There is definitely great merit in the mathematical pursuit of infinite numbers of dimensions, and a tangible practical value in pursuing this matter in physics, relative to quantum field and string theories, and quantum mechanics. The single-word term spacetime is already commonly established, to convey “any mathematical model that combines space and time into a single continuum.”

But the question of dimensionality in philosophy has not been exhausted yet, by any stretch of imagination. It is possible for the free mind to venture into areas where the concept of dimensionality applies, which have been untouched yet, some quite surprisingly. For instance, I have a purely philosophical question, which, to my knowledge, has not been answered yet. How does the undiscovered realm of afterlife stand in relation to the abstract and concrete dimensions identified or envisaged so far? How many dimensions, and which ones, does the Kingdom of Heaven possess, and all the entities depicted in the Bible?

Mind you, it is not my intention to insult the non-believers in afterlife by my insertion of this much-disputed concept into an arguably scientific context of unquestioned reality. But we are talking about philosophy now and the concept of afterlife is a bona fide “unquestioned reality” in the kingdom of pure thought. Moreover, anyone familiar with advanced mathematics would know that it deals with concepts far more bizarre and out of this worldly than the relatively tame concept of afterlife, yet nobody disputes a direct, albeit surely arcane, connection between such extreme mathematics and the blurry outposts of the otherwise solid science.

Thus, to sum it all up, I am sure that unless and until the philosophico-mathematical discussion of dimensionality extends to the supernatural, or the “world beyond,” to be precise, our philosophical endeavors in this field will have fallen short of the mark; and, considering how far we have gone otherwise in our general abstract thinking, it is safe to say that in this area of human thought in particular, our efforts are sorely wanting.

SEEKING THE OLD IN THE NEW

There is an ironclad logical interconnectedness inside the ideal (Platonically speaking) world, giving solid mathematical proof to the Nietzschean mystical commonwealth of concepts. Perhaps, the same logic joins together the physical world as well. Perhaps, it is in the myelon of God’s fiat, the spinal cord of Creation. Which means that both these worlds are shot through with correlative double-headed arrows.


There is nothing extraordinary in seeing the old in what is old, or in seeing the new in what is new. But, as Nietzsche tells us in an earlier quoted maxim, “the original is not what one is the first to see as something new, but what one sees as new, when it is old.”
Granted the presence of a logical parallelism in the “old as old”--“new as new” pair, the same parallelism must necessarily magnetize and bring together the more subtle pair of seeing the new in the old, and… yes, seeing the old in the new, the latter being by no means a "trivial pursuit," either.

To begin with, in its simplest form, the phenomenon of seeing the old in the new is a fairly innocent case of mere pattern recognition. There is, of course, a most natural connection between our seeing a new thing and seeking a pattern which would allow us to make the connection between our new experience and our former experiences, by then already organized into some sort of system within our memory. Nietzsche’s Jenseits is once again availing us of this helpful elucidation:
“Whoever has traced the history of an individual science, finds a clue in its development for understanding the most ancient and common process of all ‘knowledge and cognition.’ There, as here, it is the rash hypotheses, the fictions, the good dumb will to believe, the lack of mistrust and patience that are developed first; our senses learn only late, and never learn entirely, to be subtle, faithful, and cautious organs of cognition. Our eye finds it more comfortable to respond to a given stimulus by reproducing once more an image that it has produced many times before, instead of registering what is different and new in an impression. What is new finds our senses hostile and reluctant. Just as little as a reader today reads all individual words on a page, but picks about five at random out of twenty, and ‘guesses’ the meaning, just as little do we see a tree exactly; it is so much easier for us simply to improvise some approximation of a tree.” (Jenseits 192)
(There are two separate very interesting points here, which I am offering both as an aside, rather than as a footnote, as I am not using footnotes, as a matter of principle:
The first paragraph itself requires two comments. One is about Nietzsche’s provocatively welcome use of the two key words: hypotheses and fiction, which I am myself so eager to use in the discussion of cognition and science {See my Philosophy section, where this discussion is prominent}. The other comment is about our conservative disposition: reproducing prior images most familiar to our senses, rather than registering what is new and different. Is Nietzsche right here, or do geniuses and great men of science generally differ from mediocrities and amateurs in such a quest for novelty? I wonder if, in the final analysis, when they do find their novelty, they might then want to fit it in with their prior image of reality, in the process committing that dreadful crime of hypocrisy, which Nietzsche accused Socrates of, when he noted his contempt for the irrational, while at the same time falling victim to it. Incidentally, what Nietzsche says about our cognitive process as being an insight on his part, had centuries before been presented by Hobbes, as the definition of our cognitive process.
Nietzsche’s second paragraph is very close to my own complaint about people’s reaction to my arguments, in conversations, articles, and lectures. I myself have experienced exactly what Nietzsche is writing about as being done to me, too, when people, instead of opening their senses to a revolutionary, unfamiliar idea, with a sensual tabula rasa, have been trying to fill in the blanks, that is, to put me in a familiar context. But it was exactly that context, which I had been attempting to win over, and, alas, the sad end result of this was my being misunderstood, mistaken for somebody else, misdiagnosed, and misconstrued. In other words, the context won!)

What is the most significant thing in this simplest, ground-level case, is not that we are deliberately seeking the old in the new, but that we are automatically, that is, subconsciously or semi-consciously, seeing the old in the new. There is very little "inspiration" (Biblically speaking) in our processes of breathing, digesting food, or even reproducing: animals and plants are capable of that too. Automatic pattern-recognition can be put in the same league.
A somewhat higher level of pattern-recognition faculty is exhibited by the contestants in IQ competitions at low-to-intermediate levels, where it is used deliberately and progressively effectively. Seeing is now seeking first, and finding, that is seeing, is a result of seeking.
At the highest level of pattern recognition, however, seeking becomes indistinguishable from seeing, as the superior quality of pattern recognition has now become indistinguishable from a natural instinct, and works more by inspiration than by a labored effort.

(As an amusing extrapolation, here is a fresh view of conservatism at-heart: “seeking the old in the new” as a defensive reaction to change, resulting from a general psychological hostility to novelty as such, and, seeing that change is an inevitable process under the laws of nature, seeking the old in the new therefore becomes a manner of psychological adaptation to any such change. Perhaps, more of us are “conservatives,” without either the will or the comprehension to admit it. Even the liberals…
Incidentally, the classic liberals and their more pushy brethren the progressives (not to be confused with the Progressives of Teddy Roosevelt’s fame, who were actually much more about the catchy political name than about the substance of progressivism) shouldn’t be seen in this case as part of a complementary distribution with the conservatives. By the same token, the liberals’ preoccupation with personal freedoms ought not to distinguish them from the conservatives in that aspect, either. What makes these two form the conservative-liberal contradistinction, is a relatively less significant opposition, as the liberals want to accelerate change, while the conservatives wish to impede it, preferring things to remain as they are.

HUMANISM AS PHILOSOPHY

Having discussed the subject of Humanism in my entry Humanism As A Dirty Word, in the Religion section (see my mega-entry Religion And Culture, posted on January 15, 2011, of which it is a part), it would have been strange for me to ignore it here as philosophy, particularly after having discussed the meaning of deism and theism, which all seem to suffer from similar ailments.
Once again, we are confronted with an improper definition of the term, with multiple meanings in multiple contexts. It is a poor excuse for the more honest users of philosophical terms to complain that dictionaries, with their simplistic definitions, are of little value in the study of philosophy (others would not even bother to issue such a caveat). My insistence on dictionary definitions is a direct revolt against the lawlessness of terminological usage, against the inevitable descent into chaos, as soon as we allow ourselves to be swayed by such arguments.
Rather than join the chorus of these lamenters, I am determined to find out how these different definitions of one and the same term have come about, whether or not they are mutually contradictory, and, if they are not, how they can be reconciled.
According to my old Webster’s Dictionary, Humanism (with the capital H) is “the intellectual and cultural movement that stemmed from the study of classical Greek and Latin culture during the Middle Ages, and was one of the factors (according to most of the encyclopedic sources, it was the main factor!) giving rise to the Renaissance. It was characterized by an emphasis on human interests, rather than on the natural world or religion.”
This definition is consistent with the actual history of the word humanitas, and with the following opening passage in Britannica’s entry for humanism:

"Humanism is an attitude of mind attaching prime importance to man and human values often regarded as the central theme of the Renaissance civilization. Renaissance humanism is traceable to the fourteenth-century’s Italian humanist Petrarch, whose scholarship and enthusiasm for classic Latin writings, the humanities, gave great impetus to a movement that eventually spread from Italy to all of western Europe. Although humanism gradually became identified with classroom studies of the classics, it more properly embraced any attitude exalting man’s relationship to God, his free will and his superiority over nature… An excitement over Latin sources touched off a widespread search for ancient documents, which led in time to the Greek and Hebrew studies. Textual criticism and philology were born and with them a new look at Aristotle and the Scriptures. The arts found patrons, and flourished in conscious imitation of classical ideals and forms…In its return to antiquity, humanism found inspiration in man’s personal quest for truth and goodness. Seeds were sown for the flowering of Reformation thought…"

From the history of European humanism it is perfectly clear that no rift whatsoever resulted from the rule of Renaissance values with the personal religiosity of the humanists, and, on the contrary, religious values won as a result, in their welcome liberation from some ridiculous restrictions, imposed on the human spirit by the constraints of Medieval scholasticism. Already in the 20th century, the eminent Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth reaffirmed the close connection between humanism and Christianity, saying that no humanism was possible without the Gospel. Similar views have been held by Roman Catholic theologians, who have claimed that Catholic Christianity has represented humanism, as it emphasized man’s unique role in God’s Creation.

And yet, just as with deism, only even much worse, humanism had become a dirty word, particularly among the millions of American Evangelical Christians, courtesy of people like Tim La Haye and Jerry Falwell, who started their anti-secularist campaign by first identifying humanism with atheistic secularism, obediently following the clever cue of the atheistic American Humanist Association, which happily appropriated the use of the word humanism for its secularist purposes and got away with it, thanks to zealots like La Haye and Falwell. As early as in 1933, the Association published the Humanist Manifesto, and later proceeded with the publication of the quarterly magazine The Humanist, first catering to a tiny, and both politically and intellectually insignificant audience, but eventually making it big, by being blown out of proportion by its Christian detractors, who chose to surrender the beautiful word humanism to the atheists, as if the latter had been the first to come up with it all along.

This new, perverted understanding of humanism has brought about a noticeable shift in standard dictionary definitions of the term.
The smaller and newer Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary adds this new age babble: “A doctrine, attitude, or way of life centered on human interests or values especially a philosophy that asserts the dignity and worth of man and his capacity for self-realization through reason, and that often rejects supernaturalism.”

There is a lot to say concerning the new fight between Christianity and “humanism,” purposely defined as secularist and anti-Christian, to the sick delight of both sides. But we have already spent too much time on this sickness, and now is the good time to move on.

The most apparent conflict of humanism and humanism is in its two senses (forget the two other meanings, such as the study of the Graeco-Roman classics, and, especially, the improper use of this word, both by the authors of the Humanist Manifesto and by their illiterate critics), as, first, the standpoint, that distinguishes man from animals (and provocatively expressed by the famous Protagoras dictum that “man is the measure of all things”), and secondly, the view, which emphasizes specifically human, that is, “natural,” rather than “supernatural,” ethics.
In the context of this distinction, and as applied to the Greeks, for instance, the humanism of Hesiod would belong to the first type.
“To birds and to beasts, writes Hesiod, Zeus, the son of Kronos, gave one law, that they should devour one another, but to man he gave another law: a law of justice, which was for the best.”
This is the same position as the one later held by Christian humanist theologians, who have defined morality in terms of God’s law, and man’s duty to obey it. It is consistent with, and even implied in, Genesis 1:26:

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

The view that man is the measure of all things does not exclude God from consideration, but posits man as the principle actor within God’s Creation, and it can only be interpreted this way.
In so far as natural versus supernatural ethics are concerned, Aristotle’s humanism is usually cited as an example of the ‘natural’ type of humanism. In Aristotle’s humanist view, the moral law of humanity was not placed outside the human nature, but well inside it, according to the principle of man’s rationality. So, what is the irreconcilable discrepancy here, if any? I see none. There is, of course, a difference between a revealed moral code and an instilled, or inspired, one, which by no means makes one a religious code and the other secular, especially, with my use of the Biblical word inspired; and man’s reason and rationality may indeed be judged as such inspired qualities. Incidentally, by the very same token as both rationality and irrationality belong to God’s nature and man’s nature ("And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness"), revelation and inspiration are mutually complementary forms of ethics, as well as of everything else, either “supernaturally” revealed, or “naturally” instilled in the human nature.

DEISM AND THEISM IN PHILOSOPHY AND USAGE: PART II

(This posting is a continuation of the previously posted Part I of the same title.)


Whenever we use one word to describe different things, we end up not knowing what we are talking about. Sometimes this linguistic confusion is part of a deliberate deception, like in the case of libertarianism (or, rather, “libertarian capitalism,” detailed by me in the Contradiction section. Whatever the reason is here, I suspect that much of the confusion is perhaps due to an innocent misunderstanding of the alleged difference between the terms deism and theism in the professional jargon (confusing deism with theism, and also with monotheism, as Thomas Jefferson appears to be doing [my entry on this subject, titled Jefferson’s Bible, will be posted later) by those who have used it… well, liberally, with the resulting “imprecision” then taken as a definitely conscientious effort by some smarter-than-thou interpreters of other people’s wisdom.

No matter what we think of it, or how we define it, deism is an intriguing phenomenon, or, to put it more precisely, a fascinating word, hiding something quite interesting behind its vague façade, and, as such, most worthy of a closer look. As a result, three entries have sprouted on its fertile ground: Deism As Religion in the Religion section, Deism As Philosophy in the Philosophy section, and Deism As History in the History section. Each of them raises a particular aspect of the same subject, which is deism, of course, and together they are, hopefully, presenting a fuller picture of my own, than a single entry in any one selected section can possibly provide. (All three of them will be posted in due course.)

But let us leave all the confusion aside and open Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason (III), where Paine talks about deism in a forceful and definitive fashion, leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind that in his, Paine’s, mind this awfully tricky term has now received a distinctly different meaning from what the Jewish, Christian, and Moslem religions have historically understood as the belief in one God:

"Deism teaches us, without the possibility of being deceived, all which is necessary or proper to be known. The creation (he is probably talking about the physical Universe, and what we jokingly refer to as “Mother Nature”) is the Bible of the Deist. He there reads, in the handwriting of the Creator Himself, the certainty of His existence, and the immutability of His power, and all other Bibles and Testaments are to him forgeries." (Thomas Paine: The Age of Reason, #III)

Thomas Paine’s elaboration of the meaning of deism is rather scandalous, in form more than in substance, and I submit that he was properly chastised and denounced for it, plus I do not think that, by writing this, he made any contemporary deists particularly happy, as he unnecessarily scandalized them, too. But, anyway, the time has come to write down, while trying not to repeat myself from the previous entries on this subject, a few additional notes on the history of Deism. Several sources are being used here, Britannica the foremost among them, but also including Webster’s Biographical Dictionary.---

The high point of Deism in England occurred during the fairly liberal period of 1689 through 1742, but its acknowledged father goes back to an earlier time. He was Edward Herbert, First Baron of Cherbury (1583-1648), Oxford-educated philosopher and diplomat, author of several works, most important of which is his De Veritate (1624), his chief philosophical work advancing his theory, which became known as Deism, in the most technical, albeit effectively obsolete since then, sense of this artificial word.
In Lord Herbert’s writings, the word Deism is explained as the adherence to these five basic religious ideas, recognized as God-given and innate in the mind of man: the belief in a supreme being, in the need for His worship, in the pursuit of a pious and virtuous life, as the most desirable form of worship, in the need for a repentance for sins, and in rewards and punishments in the next world. These fundamental beliefs were in possession of the first man (according to Herbert), and they were basic to all great religions of later times. The differences between the great religions were only benign modifications of the universal truth and were not to be tolerated only when they led to bigotry and persecution of religious rivals. Thus manifestations of religious fanaticism and enthusiasm were deemed dangerous and corruptive to the peaceful coexistence of all world religions, and all of them were strongly denounced as perversions of true religion.

In conclusion of this particular discussion of deism, in its most technical sense, even though there is some philosophical merit in the doctrine of Lord Herbert, the term itself has become so blatantly politicized and abused in subsequent usage, especially by the opponents of all unorthodox theology, who had appropriated it as a curse word for the latter, as to become essentially unusable for serious purposes, serving propaganda objectives instead.

Returning now to the befuddled meaning of theism, we have already seen some very serious problems with the usage and understanding of this word, which make it just as unusable for serious purposes as its abject counterpart deism. There have been attempts made to make the word theism look respectable, but I find all of them quite pathetic. Judge for yourselves, from this heavily abbreviated by me explanation of theism in the Britannica:

Theism is the view that all limited or finite things are dependent in some way on one supreme or ultimate reality, of which one may also speak in personal terms. Theism’s view of God can be clarified by contrast with deism, pantheism, and mysticism.
Deism closely resembles theism; (here is a big surprise already, as for the religious opponents of deism, it is anathema, whereas they readily call themselves theists, in sharp opposition, and would never concede that deism and theism “closely resemble each other”!) but for the deist, God is not involved in the world in the same personal way. He has made it, but allows it to continue in its own way. The theist, on the other hand, seeks to bring man’s relationship to God into a closer involvement. (This distinction seems too arbitrary to be decisive, at least in my knowledge of several serious believers. I think that many self-proclaimed theists actually hold certain elements of deism true, such as the fact that God does allow the world to continue in its own way, which is consistent with the thoroughly “theistic” doctrine of ‘free will” and also explains the phenomenon of evil in the world!)
Theism also sharply contrasts with pantheism, which identifies God with all that there is. By contrast, the theist considers the world to be quite distinct from its Creator, human life being, thus, in no sense strictly the life of God, while also making room for a peculiarly intimate involvement of God in the world and in human life. (Here is an uncharacteristically shallow for Britannica, and extraordinarily clumsy explication of pantheism. God’s omnipresence provides the common ground for theism and pantheism, while the best expression of their true connection is the so much quoted by me already gem of Moses Cordovero: “God is everything, but everything is not God!”)
Mysticism in practice comes close to theism; but mystical thought, and much of its practice, has involved a repudiation of the proper reality of finite things and sometimes tends to dismiss all of the finite manifold or multiplicity of things as some wholly unreal phantasm which has no place in the one undiversified Being, which alone is real. Theism is far removed from ideas of this kind. (This is already complete nonsense. In Russian religious thought, consummate “theism” goes hand-in-hand with consummate mysticism, and the two of them are unthinkable without each other. I would argue further that theism as such is in large part a direct product of mysticism!)

In conclusion to this discussion of the rather vacuous term “theism,” which a normal person should not even try to distinguish from the simple “belief in God,” I could only reiterate that both deism and theism are artificial and ambiguous terms, which have obtained their meanings mostly through defective usage, but I insist that neither can properly sustain itself in a serious philosophical context. So much for them both.
However, being important for the understanding of certain salient points in history and theology, we cannot dismiss them on the grounds of their inherent inconsequence: there are unfortunately too many things in our strange world, which are inconsequential in themselves, yet rising to the heights of consequence, as a result of their most unfortunate misapplications into practice.

DEISM AND THEISM IN PHILOSOPHY AND USAGE: PART I

(A legitimate question may be asked regarding my interest in this rather abstruse subject, but only by those who are unfamiliar with the fact that the majority of America’s Founding Fathers were allegedly “deists,” and that this fact has allegedly something to do with their intent in writing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Considering that my interest in America and in this nation’s Founding Fathers is great, the importance of this subject, or at least its curiosity value to me, should leave no lingering doubt about it, even though the subject is indeed esoteric and rather befuddled, which only makes it more intriguing. What makes it still more intriguing is that my own views concerning the opposition of “God of philosophy” vis-à-vis “God of religion” may be misinterpreted as a form of “deism,” although I am in no way distancing myself from God of my native religious culture, Russian Orthodox Christianity. I am only suggesting that through the philosophical abstraction from the world’s great religions, the nations of the world can come together to a benign and wonderfully enlightened commonness of international morality and justice, without ever renouncing the particular faith of their fathers. I suspect that the original concept of religious tolerance, developed by the Founding Fathers in America, had contained a similar rationale, and that it was on this account that they may have embraced the term “deism.” In other words deism can become an effective political, or political-philosophical credo, but as a specific religious "creed" it continues to have a rather hollow ring to me.)

All diligent students of philosophy or theology, when asked about the difference between deism and theism, are surely expected to come up with a crispy clear explanation of what each one signifies, and how they are different. I wonder, however, if any one of them will rise to the occasion, and talk about the artificiality of these two terms, one of Latin root, the other one of Greek, but both meaning the same thing: “Godism,” and also, how very confusing these terms have been, with the most serious philosophers always giving them a wide berth.
No wonder! Before we reach for a major multi-volume encyclopedia let us open the more natural choice of the vast majority of people, with our old familiar friend Webster’s Dictionary, and see what we can find in the depths of its wisdom.
The dictionary provides these three very different definitions of theism:

(1). "Belief in the existence of a god or gods." (This definition is supposed to include, together with normal monotheism,--- polytheism, and perhaps pantheism too, that is, it describes a belief in any kind of deity, what I have jokingly termed “Godism.”)

(2). "Belief in One God; monotheism: opposed to pantheism, polytheism." (It becomes clear right away, that the second definition clashes with the first, a sorry position for any kind of term to be in!)

(3). "Belief in One God, creator and ruler of the universe, known by revelation: distinguished from deism." (This third definition is the most artificial; it is obvious from how it uses the term "deism" that it is designed exclusively in reaction to deism, as the positive alternative to the negative denotations and connotations of deism.)

Now, opened on the word "deism," the Dictionary provides these two very different definitions of deism:

(1). "The belief that God exists, and created the world, but thereafter assumed no control over it or the lives of people." (When taken as a distinctive creed, this is obviously a part of the term’s description, but only an isolated part, as the second definition, which follows, suggests. The question is: why separate the two? A likely answer also follows.)

(2). "In philosophy, the belief that reason is sufficient in proving the existence of God, with the consequent rejection of revelation and authority." (How strangely disparate and logically incongruous these two formal definitions are, suggesting that the term deism must have been used rather frivolously, since its inception… but wait, there is more!)

...To which two, we can add this third, on the unimpeachable authority of Thomas Jefferson, who defines the word deism in his 1803 essay An Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus Compared with Those of Others:

“Their system was deism; that is, belief of only one God. But their ideas of Him and of His attributes were degrading and injurious…” (And now the prosecution can rest its case!)

Jefferson defines the system of deism as a belief in one God, which makes it indistinguishable from the first definition of theism in Webster’s Dictionary. Running a little bit ahead of myself, I find it interesting that when the French encyclopedist and learned correspondent of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia, Denis Diderot translated into French the works of some English deists, he used the French word théisme in every place where the English original would say deism. One may argue that Diderot, who became an agnostic in his late years, was doing it disingenuously, on purpose, one may equally argue that the French public would have been bewildered by the unfamiliar word deism (although ironically, this word originated in France in 1564 with the Protestant preacher/theologian Pierre Viret, referring to somebody else, unclear who by name, who allegedly may have called themselves deists [my entry Deism As Religion, dealing with this subject, will be posted later]), and Diderot needed another, similar word which they would understand. But no matter what, when things get this complicated, there must be something wrong somewhere, and that is a fact which nobody can deny.

I suspect, however, that the word deist was adopted by certain people (like by Lord Herbert, discussed in Part II below) who started calling themselves “deists” simply to distinguish themselves from the more general "theist" crowd, by the same token as the Jesuits wished to distinguish themselves from all other “ordinary” Christians, even though both these words: Jesuit and Christian, have obviously been derived from exactly the same person: Jesus Christ.

On the other hand, the vagueness of the word deism and its esoteric usage well off the beaten path had given an opportunity to the conventional Christian theologians (actually starting with Viret!) to "clarify" its meaning, by ascribing to it all sorts of heresies, and to turn it into their rhetorical punching bag. There are numerous illustrations of it, but there is no need to choose any, because my readers can have some special fun finding them for themselves...

...To be continued in Part II tomorrow.

MATERIALISM AND IDEALISM REDEFINED

It is often the case that the same word can be used in a restrictive professional sense and in a broad common sense, and it is furthermore assumed that there must be a linguistic chasm between the professional term and its popular usage. Thus, anyone who dares to mix up the two, has to be a dunce.
To me, this is not the case in certain instances. I think that occasionally our dunce may be actually closer to the truth in his popular usage of the term than the self-important professional. Not that I would want to deny legitimacy to the professional term, but it is always instructive to look at it through the lens of the colloquial and learn a few "new" things.

Materialism and idealism are, perhaps, the most recognizable labels, routinely attached to the philosophical systems of the great thinkers of history by the examiners and interpreters of other people’s ideas. Defining both, they generally stress the monism of the former and the dualism of the latter, but such simplification is too coarse and misleading. Let us, however, take a closer look at these two definitions.

Philosophical materialism is defined as “the doctrine that matter is the only reality, and that everything in the world, including thought, will, and feeling, can be explained only in terms of matter.”  (Webster’s Dictionary.) The Encyclopaedia Britannica’s short definition is similar, but not identical: “Materialism in philosophy is the view that all facts (including facts about the human mind, and will, and the course of human history) are causally dependent upon physical processes, or even reducible to them.”

On the other hand, Webster’s defines idealism in a rather extreme fashion, as “any of various theories, that hold that the objects of perception are actually ideas of the perceiving mind, and it is impossible to know, whether reality exists apart from the mind.” Meanwhile, Britannica emphasizes the philosophical dualism of idealism, attributing to it, among other things, “a belief in God, in disembodied spirits, in free will, or in certain kinds of introspective psychology.”

There are numerous variations of these definitions, of course, and, technically speaking, each of them has some merit, inasmuch as it is applied to a specific philosophical view, which, justly or not, is identified as materialistic. But their technicality is exactly their problem. A more general definition of these two terms, in their opposition to each other is basically lacking and my intent in this entry is to make an attempt at coming up with one that would suit me, in the broader sense, where the existing definitions have proved themselves pitifully inadequate.
To begin with, scientific idealism and scientific materialism have somehow become connected with faith in God or a lack thereof. I find this connection misleading at best. Here is a demonstrable case of how horribly unscientific pseudo-scientific conclusions may turn out to be. It is often better to stay away from too much professional philosophy, as, driven to excess, it becomes unreasonable. This is the reason why, in redefining materialism and idealism, I am opting for more common sense and good psychology and less abstraction and professional jargon.
But even with professional jargon, what is all this talk about the ‘monism’ of the one versus the ‘dualism’ of the other? Both of these theories exist in either form: monistic and dualistic!
Materialistic monism and idealistic monism are extreme forms, as their dualism is the more accurate way to describe reality. But dualism cannot be equated to idealism for at least these two reasons: idealistic monism is demonstrably in existence, thus defying idealism’s exclusive association with dualism, and then, secondly, there is such a thing, at least structurally and conceptually, as materialistic dualism, which may be defined as the acceptance of a coexistence of mind and matter, yet in a form which makes mind both dependent on, and, ergo, inferior to, matter.

Turning now from theory to practice, I insist that all philosophical theories related to the distinction between materialism and idealism ought to be judged by the personal ethical predispositions of their proponents.
In practical terms, very few of the many millions of religious believers will ever consent to being called “materialists,” and will further insist on being "idealists," by mere virtue of their religious affiliations, although most of them are clearly of the material kind, having nothing to connect them to idealism, but their empty declarations.

My definitions of materialism and idealism are therefore simple and to the point, and they have nothing to do with the fake distinction of monism and dualism, assuming the presence of a dualistic mix in both. This has all to do not with some outward social practices or declarations, but with the individual’s philosophical attitude to life. It is either matter (money, political power, social success) and such, over spirit, or else spirit over matter (in which case, the above-mentioned “material pursuits,” although not necessarily non-existent, become non-overwhelming, non-consuming, and demonstrably secondary to the spiritual pursuits).

Needless to say, idealism, as a philosophical attitude, which values the spirit over the material interests, is a truly rare quality of the mind, defining both the individual and all his philosophical output, whereas a selfish intellectual mercantilism is customarily the norm, with everything that it entails. And yes, one does not have to be a religious adherent at all, to merit the honorary title of idealist. Nietzsche and Russell were two salient examples of the consummate philosophical idealism, who had purposely renounced all claims to a religious affiliation.

What does this mean in the ultimate analysis? Scratch an idealistically-minded self-professing philosophical materialist, like, say, Karl Marx, and you will find an idealistic core under the surface. Indeed, it is my firm belief that a large majority of the so-called materialistic philosophical systems are closet idealistic at heart, which throws the elaborate professional judgments as to which philosophers are materialistic and which are idealistic, out of the window. (My specific entries on major philosophies, viewed under this angle, are to be posted later, as parts of the Magnificent Shadows and Significant Others sections.)

By the same token, I’ll never believe in the sincerity of the opposite case, that of a materialistically-minded individual who professes to be a philosophical idealist. I cannot imagine a materialistically-minded person capable of creating a truly idealistic philosophical system. Such a ‘split personality’ is unthinkable, and this is not just common sense, but pure science (psychology, if you like), plain and simple.

THE PITFALL OF ALL PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY

The concomitant challenge of all philosophical inquiries is to resist the temptation to answer the questions we pose: as soon as we start answering our questions, it only means that we have hopelessly fallen into the “Sphinx” trap: imagining that we are under duress to provide the answers, whereas we are not.
Questions can be difficult for a number of reasons. One, of ignorance: we simply don’t know the answer. Another, of indecision: we don’t know which answer to choose. The most interesting, philosophical question is the one that is being asked for the sake of asking, and not for the purpose of being answered at all. The whole point of such a question is that we ought to be thinking about it, and, in the process of thinking, discover a whole treasure trove of all sorts of riches, except, of course, the answer to the original question. One caveat is in order here, however. Should we think, even for a moment, that we might have also found that elusive answer among the said riches, let us run away from it at once, and as fast as we can, for this can only mean one thing, that we are on a false track, sent there by our vanity and arrogance, which are always there, with us, tirelessly trying to convince us that, in fact, there are no such questions in existence which could not and should not be eventually answered, if only one would keep trying long enough and hard enough: Oh, what a tragic intellectual superstition!
Continuing our conversation about the complexity of “questions,” let us point out the semantic significance of the interchangeable use of the words question and problem, in the sense that the importance of ‘question’ is thus elevated to a higher status than what a ready answer would require, as the solution of any problem is impossible and meaningless without first identifying and analyzing the “problem” itself, and going through the necessary steps along the way. By the same token, answering without profound respect for the question (that is, without a careful personal study of the question, or a cluster of questions involved) amounts to that proverbial exercise of great eloquence and little wisdom, eloquentiae satis, sapientiae parum, that Hobbes is referring to, in his Elements (27:13).

A FESTIVAL FOR GOD

What was the likely reason for God to give man his free will, making it possible for Eve to conspire against Him with the Serpent and to seduce Adam into an act of disobedience? We are aware of a multitude of such reasons, the validity of all of which we need to weigh against the end result of allowing evil into the world. We can debate, of course, whether any kind of reason provides a sufficient justification for the appearance of evil in the world, but there is no arguing against God’s creative design. Ironically, here is also a compelling case for political philosophy to defend the principle of free societies, with their terrible excesses, in opposition to the totalitarian principle, which promotes obedience and suppression of free will, in exchange for peace and pleasantness of a restored Garden of Eden. (Could God, please, abolish free will altogether, in order to make the beautiful totalitarian dream of the Paradise a reality, rather than wishful thinking?!)

But one of the best arguments for free will, although highly irreverent and unmistakably tongue in cheek, is provided by Nietzsche. In his Genealogy of Morals, 2nd Essay (7), he writes about “the pleasures of cruelty” and Homer’s gory depictions of wars as “festival plays for the gods."
"It was in the same way that the moral philosophers of Greece saw it. Their invention of “free will,” man’s absolute spontaneity in good and in evil was devised to furnish a right to the idea that the interest of the gods in man could never be exhausted. There must never be any lack of novelty: the course of a completely deterministic world would have been predictable for the gods, and they would have quickly grown weary of it.”

This is an absolutely delightful, aesthetically perfect, irreverently innocent, and brutally, childishly honest, apologia for the invention of free will, thus providing its highly imaginative rationalization of the theistic involvement of an interested God, as opposed to the deistic indifference of a bored God, in human affairs. In this passage, Nietzsche rises to the absolute mystery of Creation. Where I embrace his contemplation with particular delight is in his philosophical concern for the rationality of Creation. A purely deterministic world (and that is what the world would have been without the spontaneity-in-time of free will) would have made God’s Creation of Time totally superfluous, unnecessary, unimportant. The only rational justification for the conception and the reality of Time is exactly this precious spontaneity of free will, a festival for God! Yes, our Creator can still see our lives-in-time as one still image, from His all-encompassing vantage point of the timeless eternity, but this vantage point never becomes a point of disadvantage for exactly the same reason: not because we may be able to somehow drag God into Time with us, but because our spontaneity makes us interesting!

UNFREE WILL AND ITS EXISTENTIAL LIBERATION

The old philosophical question of ‘free will’ versus the deterministic perception of the world, and of man in it, has been debated throughout the ages with the same result each time such controversy would rise to a level that gets noticed because of the high intellectual caliber of the proponents of this or that side. The result, as I say, has always been the same. No one’s preexisting opinion on this subject has ever been swayed by the contrary argument, which only means that the argument itself has always been devoid of meaning. This is like defending the Euclid hypothesis in geometry against the contradictory Lobachevski hypothesis: it is a matter of particular preference, but not of validity or incompetence in substance. (Forgive me my constant recourse to these two names in geometry: by now they have come to signify a certain thing, which there is no longer a need to clarify, thus my repeated allusion to the same thing saves time and effort of explaining what I want to say, and thus has an obvious merit.) There is no merit therefore in sparring, say, a Hobbes or a Spinoza against an Erasmus or a Berkeley, or in restarting the whole argument again, in the hope that a different constructive result may be achieved, where the previous great minds have all failed.
I understand, though, the mesmerizing attraction that the question of free will has for the modern Western mind, preoccupied with the word freedom. I guess that there are many who rise in defense of the freedom of the will not so much for the sake of the will, as for the sake of freedom as such, and, on the other hand, all that talk about “unfree will” boils down to the desperate desire of our dear freedom-fighters to ascertain its existential liberation. More power to you, brave men: you will surely achieve better successes in the fields of modern philosophy, which is not much to talk about anyway, than fighting the realities of the real world as if you owned them.
But should we resign to the futility of the effort to convince the contrarian world that “my hypothesis beats your hypothesis” and enjoy arguing not for the sake of converting the heathens, but for its own sake, much fun can be had from the pure enjoyment of the multicolored sparks of wit and sheer insight, flying all over the place, like fireworks in a lavish display.
In the future, I may still find time to expand this quest for intellectual gratification over the subject of free will versus the deterministic view into a full-blown essay, but, so far, this is only an expression of intent to indulge myself in such an effort, and not the effort itself. For now, I am taking just a sample of what some of the most original and unpredictable minds have come up with, on this subject. And who is better suited, then, to spark up this little display than our dear friend Nietzsche, in his inépuisable Jenseits! Now, is he for free will or against it? See for yourselves:---

“The ‘causa sui’ is the best self-contradiction conceived so far, it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic; but the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for “freedom of the will,” in the superlative metaphysical sense that still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire responsibility for one’s own actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, the ancestors, chance, and society involves no less than to be precisely this ‘causa sui’ and with more than Munchhausen’s audacity to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness. Suppose someone were to see through the loutish simplicity of this celebrated concept of ‘free will’ and put it out of his head altogether, I then beg of him to carry his “enlightenment” a step further, and also put out of his head the contrary of this monstrous conception of “free will”: I mean “unfree will,” which amounts to a misuse of cause and effect. One should not wrongly reify cause and effect as natural scientists do… one should use cause and effect only as pure concepts, as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication, not for explanation… The unfree will is mythology; in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills.” (Jenseits, 21).)
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, Nietzsche is truly a kindred spirit!

Meanwhile, returning to Nietzsche’s passage above, it is amazing how insightfully he catches the spirit of existentialism, making short shrift of it. Here is Sartre’s celebrated definition of existentialism to compare:

“Man is nothing but what he makes of himself. This is the first principle of existentialism. He is responsible for what he is. Existentialism puts every man in possession of himself, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders.”

Was this a joke on Sartre’s part, considering how long after Nietzsche his words were to be written? Is the whole theory of existentialism a joke, and proud of it? Or maybe the need to get rid of God is so strong in Sartre and his existentialist followers that anything goes? Give me responsibility, or give me death! And, of course, by the word responsibility I understand that exact word which Thomas Paine used in his celebrated dictum: “liberty!” For Paine, it may have been simple and straightforward, but for the existentialist, no way! Personal responsibility, for him, is a liberation from God.

EVIL AND THE NATURE OF THINGS

Preamble: To prevent a confusion and, even worse, a misunderstanding, I must clarify my position on Good and Evil up front. I see evil all around us in the world, and it is often my impression that the actual power of evil is far greater than the flimsy moral power of the good. Yet, in absolute terms, I insist that evil is temporal and only goodness is absolute. The Absolute, in my philosophical treatment, is an Ideal, rather than the reality of existence. The world needs the Absolute to be able to tell the right from the wrong, as the gold standard of morality, even if this gold standard is not part of the “real world.” Our discussion below is a distinctly philosophical discussion. Contrary to the general understanding existing in philosophy since the Ancient Greeks invented it, I do not see Ethics as part of philosophy, but rather I see philosophy as part of Ethics, which also includes a separate, although connected, discipline of Social Ethics, based more on the pragmatic convenience of society than on the conception of the Ideal.
I wish to emphasize here that the following focuses on the philosophical component of Ethics and leaves the Social Ethics component out of this particular consideration, and the reader needs to approach my treatment of the subject of good and evil with this in mind.

The seemingly endless discussion of good and evil continues in yet another entry, this time tapping on the reputable authority of Epictetus reflecting on this subject, followed by Simplicius elucidating it.
Epictetus, the great Greek stoic of the Christian era, makes short shrift of the question of evil. He says: “As a mark is not set up for the purpose of missing it, so neither does the nature of evil exist in the universe.” Simplicius has a lengthy and curious discourse on this text of Epictetus, both amusing and instructive. “Evil is not part of the nature of things,” he argues. “If there were a principle of evil in the constitution of things, evil would no longer be evil, but evil would be good.”
Remember my comment on the Stoics’ argument on good and evil being nice fodder for psychology, rather than for philosophy? Surprisingly, this observation of Epictetus, as well as Simplicius’s comment on it, are so much in harmony with my own view of evil, expressed in several entries in this section, that there is no need for me to add anything to it, except that both these observations are pure top-grade philosophy!

Curiously, one point made by Simplicius, that “If there were a principle of evil in the constitution of things, evil would no longer be evil, but evil would be good,” deserves our very special attention.

I assume that what Simplicius means to say is that had evil been part of the original Creation not as an effect of a good cause, but as a Kantian thing-in-itself, evil would have had to be good, because everything created by God must be good. After all, we are not Manichaeans, and we do not believe in Ahriman’s independence from a constrained God! (It must be noted, however, that Simplicius was a persecuted pagan philosopher in the reign of Justinian I, and, in this context, my reference to the Christian Bible can be questioned. However, Simplicius’s opposition to Christianity by no means precludes his philosophical agreement with parts of the Bible, and this particular tenet about the goodness of God’s Creation must raise no objection from a devout admirer of Plato, which Simplicius admittedly was.)

But let us now develop a logical argument. Qualities are established and understood through opposition: hot and cold, day and night, good and bad, etc. Is it then possible to say that, absent evil, good would cease to be good, and even God would no longer be good, but basically taken for granted, non-ethically, because ethics itself ceases to exist?
Wrong argument! We have accepted God by definition, and He is good by definition, too. Moreover, we are told by the Bible that “every thing that God had made… was very good.” Original goodness is thus absolute, in the sense that it does not require the opposition of evil, to exist as a philosophical concept.
It is only in the temporal world without philosophical transcendence, that good can only be qualified as such via its complementary distribution with the concept of evil. Which means that neither “before” the creation of time nor “after” the end of time in eternity, if such a thing ever happens to man in afterlife, the concept of goodness can lose its significance. It is by no means that “good” and “bad” are only relevant to our freedom of choice (good choice versus bad choices), and also psychologically, as matters of attitude, as Nietzsche is seeing them! There is most definitely such a thing as “absolute goodness,” although the same cannot be said about “absolute badness.”
But wait, there is more to it than metaphysics! The ethical argument works here too. Even if we abandon the insistence on the theological imperative of absolute goodness and propose that the Absolute can be ethically neutral in eternity, this cannot work from the standpoint of our ends and purposes in time either, where good and bad are essential practical moral concepts. There must exist a necessary connection between our ethical preference for the good and rejection of the bad, on the one hand, and the Absolute Eternal ethical standard, on the other. In other words, it will probably make more sense to postulate ‘goodness’ as the natural state of eternity, and therefore God is also good, even outside time, than to make the Absolute ethically neutral, and, ergo, not applicable to the ethical practicality of human existence.

And so, this thing appears to be settled. Goodness is the natural, the one and only state of eternity, and also the eternal nature of all things. Eternity, therefore, is not neutral, but it is positively charged with absolute goodness, whereas evil is of a different, temporal substance, and the complementary distribution of Gut-und-Böse cannot in itself define the nature of good in any possible way.

(Postscript: Now, what about the Nietzschean Jenseits von Gut-und-Böse? Ironically and excitingly, in our very last observation above: “the complementary distribution of Gut-und-Böse cannot in itself define the nature of good,” we come to the realization that we have climbed up somewhere along a religion-owned path, and---lo and behold!---have found our friend Nietzsche already there!)

IS FEARLESSNESS A SIN?

(This ironic entry must be read in conjunction with the previously posted entry Pain, Like Destruction, Is A Creative Passion, Too!)

According to Nietzsche, “fear is the mother of morality.” Considering that the Original Sin was caused by Adam’s “fearlessness,” wasn’t his amorality immoral, and, therefore, the properly “original” sin?

Indeed, I am talking of Adam’s fearlessness because, although he knew God “face to face” and was aware of His dominant role in their relationship, he showed no fear in disobeying His parental order not to eat from a certain Tree, even though he had God’s no-nonsense warning that in case of a disobedience, both he and Eve will surely die (which, by the way, was literally true: born mortal, both were prolonging their lives by continually eating fruit from the tree of life). We can talk of the irresistibility of temptation, of course, but the fact remains that neither Adam nor Eve had any particular fear of God, and even if that was not the most commonly accepted occasion of the original sin, the latter was its direct product.

The reason why I do not count absence of fear (particularly and shockingly, of the fear of God!) as a sin is that I believe that only an attitude of love, and not of fear, is the mother of genuine morality, whereas fear breeds the Tartuffes and the Uriah Heeps of this world, and fake morality rooted in hypocrisy with it. I am sure that this is exactly the kind of “morality” Nietzsche had in mind in the quote above, and this must be the overwhelming reason of his mocking attitude toward such morality, as well as of his famous call for a revaluation of values.

No, Adam’s and Eve’s fearlessness was not their actual sin, which had to be their lack of love for… the garden of Eden,--- the root cause of their transgression, and of their resulting Fall from God’s Grace.

PAIN, LIKE DESTRUCTION, IS A CREATIVE PASSION TOO!

(The title alludes to Bakunin’s celebrated dictum, which my reader must be quite familiar with, by now.)

Continuing the discussion of pain in my comments on Schopenhauer’s Counsels and Maxims, First Section (see the previous entry)--- where does that leave the necessity of pain as a fundamental creative stimulus?

According to the Bible, the childbearing pain of Eve was God’s punishment for her Original Sin, but could she have been capable of any procreation (following God’s command to “multiply” given to all living souls, which is presumably to include the humans as well), not to mention painless procreation, without that sin?! Explicit in the Bible is the suggestion that only after the sin were the eyes of Adam and Eve opened to their sexuality. Ironically, only after that shocking sin of disobedience, were they able to engage in the proper act of obedience to God’s command, starting procreation. Was that a coincidence (no, it could not have been!), or a product of God’s own design? (This is indeed what it looks like!)

In some of my writings I am refusing to treat procreation as creation, and I stand behind my refusal to do so, in those specific contexts. But, like in every matter of deep philosophical contemplation, this answer cannot be generalized to cover all cases. On the one hand, the pain of childbearing is an excellent metaphor for the pain of artistic, scientific, and all other types of creation. On the other hand, procreation can indeed become an act of creation if it is properly and responsibly comprehended as such, with everything that such a mental attitude entails. Once again, “punishing” Eve with childbearing pain, God is deliberately disingenuous, as his intention here and elsewhere is obviously to teach Adam and Eve certain lessons, and, in exercising their freedom of choice, He wants them to become aware of, and to be fully responsible for, the consequences of disregarding the rules. (Which, judging by what we have already discovered about this matter, may not be such a terrible offense in God’s eyes, after all!)

But let us keep moving on with the question of pain as a companion of creation. Generally speaking, is any creation at all possible without pain? What about God’s own Creation? Had He experienced a Creative Pain Himself? I suggest that there is some merit in thinking about this further.

And now we come to the direct correlation between truth and pain. The question of how much truth we can handle goes right to the heart of Nietzsche’s “Fiat veritas, pereat vita” not only linking truth with great pain, but directly with imminent destruction as well. In fact, undiluted truth is poison, as the following Nietzsche passage forcefully asserts:

“Nobody is likely to consider a doctrine true merely because it makes people happy. Something might be true while also being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. It might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of the spirit should be measured by how much of the truth one could endure, or to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, sweetened, falsified.” (From Jenseits 39.)

But there is yet another reason why this passage is so unusual, or rather, so perfectly usual that it stands out. Even though the title of the book explicitly suggests it, Jenseits is not always as immediately related to the thought expressed by its author as in the case here. If truth is good by one account, and happiness is good by another, similar account, then the fact that truth can be harmful and cause extreme unhappiness means either that what we call the truth here is in fact a lie, or else, that something is wrong with the preceding proposition. However, if neither is the case, and the contradiction becomes psychologically unbearable to us, the only way to overcome this conceptual crisis is to recognize that we have just stepped into the highly perplexing territory of Jenseits von Gut und Böse... Incidentally, I am convinced that this is the essence of Nietzsche’s most famous idea, and it suits my personal understanding of good and evil just fine that on the other side of morality the standards of good and bad do not apply. Otherwise, the truth turns out to be the greatest evil in the world, which would be wrong, because God is truth, and God is good, but in a different sense, because there is an infinite goodness, which exists in God, and goodness that is derivative from the complementary distribution of good and bad, and which relates to the temporal created reality submissive to the created freedom of choice, which produces some confusion, because of such awkward coexistence within one word of two so disparate concepts. (They are disparate, of course, only because one is infinite and the other finite, but they do have more in common than first meets the eye.)

And finally, on the direct correlation of pain and the creative urge, the birthing pains of truth, and nothing but truth, as all creation is true by the fiat of its creator. The greatest happiness in the world is the creative labor, which, as any true creator knows, is also an extremely painful act. Truth, creation, pain, happiness… Pain is indeed destructive, but, like destruction, it is a creative passion too. In fact, like in a woman giving birth to a child, pain is happiness!!!

PAIN AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…” But what is that “happiness,” which is so precious that it is worth pursuing alongside with the other two prized possessions? According to Aristotle, it is “not pleasure but freedom from pain, what the wise man will aim at.” (Nichomachean Ethics). Yet, to suggest that in our pursuit of happiness, all we want is the absence of pain, would be inadequate and incomplete. In the words of Schopenhauer, who discusses this Aristotelian passage in the first section of his Counsels and Maxims (in Parerga and Paralipomena), “the truth of this remark turns upon the negative character of happiness, the fact that pleasure is only the negation of pain, and that pain is the positive element in life.”
(Observe that I am deliberately maintaining the ambiguity of the word positive in my comments here, one sense of it being ‘independent, unqualified,’ and the other ‘assertive, progressive,’ etc. One may argue of course that Schopenhauer uses it in the first sense, and I myself, in the second, but there seems to be more than meets the eye here. There is also a subtle connection between the two, if you will recall my argument that Goodness is positive in the first sense, while Evil is derivative, dependent on the Kantian Undinge.)
Why is the answer incomplete? Schopenhauer here is attempting to go beyond Aristotle, and substantially contradicts him, inasmuch as he is equating pleasure with the negation of pain, whereas Aristotle clearly puts them at odds: ‘not pleasure, but freedom from pain.’
However, my interest in the ‘pursuit of happiness’ cannot be equated with ‘happiness’ itself. The negative character of such a pursuit does not easily follow from what Schopenhauer calls ‘the negative character of happiness.’ The pursuit itself cannot be entirely negative, which it will be, if its object is negative. In that case, the ‘pursuit of’ turns into an ‘escape from,’ and loses its meaning. In other words, a negative pursuit is not a pursuit at all, but an escape.
Therefore, happiness cannot have a strictly negative character. It has to be properly balanced, in order to validate the pursuit. It must include at least two components, one of which, the avoidance of pain, is negative. (I cannot deny this negative facet to happiness, because I am perfectly willing to concede that a successful escape will result in happiness.) But where is the positive element of happiness, then? Not in a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” split personality, escaping from pain, but at the same time, pursuing pain, as ‘the positive element of life.’ Indeed, a positive pursuit consistent with the negativity of the escape, that is, a happiness that does not contain a basic contradiction, ought to be the answer.
Remarkably, Schopenhauer is by no means mistaken, when he asserts that “pain is the positive element in life.” While it would be sick to suggest that the pursuit of happiness can be equated with a pursuit of pain, even in the pathological case of masochism, there is a solution to the problem of the objective existence of pain, constantly interfering with our pursuit of happiness. It is to reexamine and redefine the pain, in the manner of the Stoic approach to pain, so that our positive pursuit becomes, in fact, the pursuit of the other side of the coin, that is, trying to identify the positive component in the source of our pain, thus turning our escape from the negative aspect of the source into a positive pursuit.
Ironically, the abject misery of human existence, which interferes with our pursuit of happiness to the point of killing it altogether, arises not so much from the objective pain, which I was talking about in the previous paragraph, but from the additional burden of subjective pain, which is the result of our failure to properly identify the object of our pursuit, that being a false idea of ‘happiness,’ or the inability on our part to come up with any such object. By the same token as a successful escape can result in happiness, a failed pursuit or a false pursuit results in unhappiness, to the point of total misery.

"CERTAIN KNOWLEDGE" AND BLASPHEMY

The presentation of this entry does not indicate a desire on my part to start an Epistemology subsection, or something like that. The word epistemology as such implies a professional approach to philosophy, at least in so far as the jargon is concerned, but I believe that after so many great philosophers of the past have said so many great things on this subject already, the authentic philosophy of the twenty-first century belongs to the insightful originally-thinking dilettante, rather than to a stiff and self-important diploma-holding alumnus of a prestigious academic institution. My interest in the subject of knowledge is not systematic or theoretical, but out of the vast epistemological domain I rather prefer to pick and choose pieces which are of special, even if limited, interest to me, and to stay with them not at the expense, but to the simple omission of all others.


In Book II of his Method, Dèscartes says this: “I was thus led to infer that the ground for our opinions is far more custom and example than any certain knowledge.” This wonderful insight advances the importance of "certain knowledge." But, come to think of it, what is knowledge? Only good education can help us distinguish genuine knowledge from fake knowledge, and unfortunately, it is the latter, which we most often accept for the real thing.
Sir Francis Bacon must be commended for his famous dictum “Knowledge is power!” even if the attribution is rather suspect. (We know, for instance, that in 1658 our old friend Thomas Hobbes went on record with his own “scientia potentia est,” whereas a similar “finding” in Bacon’s works cannot be made directly, and indirectly is taken out of a different context.) It must be said, though, that this expression was so much loved in Russia during her Soviet days that it was turned into a popular Soviet slogan used without any attribution. But to anyone who is too eager to use this phrase indiscriminately, I suggest to do some thinking about what kind of “knowledge” exactly we are talking about here, and whether such knowledge, except for being used parenthetically, exists in absolute terms, and also whether a much more common type of “knowledge from authority” may have become a clever substitute made by the “authority,” in place of that elusive treasure for which Wotan/Odin had once given up his eye.


Playing the cynic here, I may rephrase this pseudo-Baconian gem with one of perhaps even greater practical value: “Knowledge is Propaganda!” But maybe it would be still fairer to say,--- "Knowledge Is… Take Your Pick!"

Leaving my not-very-nice versions of “Knowledge is…” to the further scrutiny of the reader, I am taking a leap to the 46th Chapter of Hobbes’s Leviathan, where we can meet another knowledge impersonator, this time caught by the wonderful Englishman in a display of exceptional perspicacity:

“Nor are we to give that name (“knowledge”) to that, which is gotten by reasoning from the authority of books, because it is not by reasoning from the cause to the effect, nor from the effect to the cause; and is not knowledge, but faith.”

In other words, adopting Hobbesian parlance, “knowledge” from authority is faith! Considering that the only object of our faith ought to be God Himself, our worship of any other authority therefore constitutes the abominable sin of idol-worshiping, and, if nothing else, it must at least offend our religious sensibilities!

KABALLAH AS ADVOCATUS CHRISTI: SEFIROT, TZIMTZUM, AND GVUL

Throughout the ages, many attempts have been made to “comprehend the incomprehensible,” particularly in the area of the Absolute and the concept of God. Not that any of these attempts have ever been able to prove the existence of the incomprehensible beyond a reasonable doubt, but they are all commendable for at least trying, and for occasionally being successful in making the incomprehensible a little more “palatable” to the discriminating human mind.
Having touched upon the Jewish mystical quest to comprehend God in a non-specific entry above, it would have been unimaginable for me to forego a direct entry in this section, expressly devoted to it, even though this subject was raised and discussed before in the Tikkun Olam, that is, in the Judaica section. So here it is.

There is no other nationalist like a Russian nationalist, in so far as the openness of the mind is concerned. It has been noted that a Russian, unlike any other national, feels at home wherever he happens to be, without stopping to be a Russian-first. In this sense, there is no wonder that I find many of my kindred spirits in the most unlikely places, in this case, among the classic Jewish mystic scholars of the Kaballah. But, quite objectively, these scholars all deserve the highest praise anyway, for their fearless and intellectually uncompromising delving into the mysteries of Creation, and into the greatest of all mysteries, which is God.
In this entry I am particularly interested in three special concepts of the Kaballah, known as Sefirot, Tzimtzum, and Gvul.
The profound theosophical concept of the ten Sefirot, Numbers, originally formulated in the Sefer Yetzira, takes off in style, with a full-blown controversy as to the number of Divine emanations: ten, as such is the number of the Sefirot, or perhaps, nine, assuming that the initial Sefira, the Crown (identical, or maybe not, with Ein Sof, the unknowable, being the causa prima of the emanations), should not itself be counted as an emanation, being an effect (!), thus reducing their number to nine.

Any true Christian mystic ought to marvel at this opening conundrum, as it so closely parallels, at least to me, the famous Christian theosophical controversy about filioque! (As a reminder to the reader, the gist of that matter was whether the Holy Ghost proceeded {emanated!!!} from God the Father only, or from both the Father and the Son {filioque} Jesus Christ! For those still in the dark, this is the historical controversy that split the Christian Orthodoxy of the Greek--- and thus the Russian Church, which never accepted filioque,--- from the Church of the West, which unilaterally postulated it...

From my personal standpoint, I am going to imply, talking about the Sefirot at all times, that there are ten Sefirot, but only nine emanations.
The delightfully sophisticated story of how the incomprehensible nature of God progressively reveals itself in the Sefirot through the nine emanations, each making itself more comprehensible than the previous one, yet, in the process, the impenetrably mysterious nature of God remaining unrevealed, is a monument “aere perennius” (to quote Horace) in the history of human thought. Its details, further developed from their first appearance in Sefer Yetzira by the masters of the Kaballah, above all, through the extensive cosmological commentary of Isaac the Blind.
The ten Sefirot start with the least comprehensible Keter Elyon, the Supreme Crown. Being the first of the ten Sefirot, it is necessarily vague, and even its specific relationship (namely, its identity vs. non-identity) to the unknowable Ein Sof, is effectively unknowable.
The other nine Sefirot are more or less intermediaries between the unknowable and the created world, the infinite and the finite. They are Chochma, Wisdom, Bina, Intelligence, Hesed, Loving Goodness, Gevura, Might, Tiferet, Beauty, Netzakh, Eternity, Khod, Majesty, Yesod, Foundation, and Malkhut, Kingship.
Each name is a description of one of the Divine attributes in the act of Creation, and our mystics believed that the rhythm of the successive emanations accurately represented the rhythm of the Creation itself. Also noteworthy was the effort to correlate these Sefirot (and, intriguingly, the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet as well) to various parts of the human body, with the implication that man, too, is a microcosm of God’s Creation of the Universe.

The concept of the ten Sefirot and the nine emanations was the starting point for the concepts of Tzimtzum and Gvul, which lead us on an incredibly exciting journey, where Kabalistic Judaism encounters the main challenge of Christianity and responds to it in an act of selfless harmonious compatibility without seeming to care about such down-to-earth things as religious concordance. Needless to say, I am not trying to score a theological point here, on behalf of Christianity. My philosophical credo is speculation for its own, vastly important sake.
In my teasingly perplexed entry Christian Theology As A Philosophical Challenge (posted on October 13, 2011), in the Religion section, I marveled at the intricate complexity of Christian theology, as reflected in such intellectual puzzles as the multiplicity of Oneness, in the Trinity, or the harmony of incompatibilities, in the two Hypostases of Christ, to name just these two.

The highest irony, however, lies in the fact that the best theosophical argument ever made on behalf of the Christian theological dogma belongs to… the Jewish mystics of the Kaballah!

Earlier on in this section, while discussing the significance of Sefer Ha-Bahir, I made this comment:
“Bahir contains the earliest effort to characterize the ten Sefirot of Sefer Yetzira as manifestations of God’s powers. These awesome powers are not attributes, but hypostases of God. (Another uncanny conceptual link to the Christian ideas of the Trinity and of the two hypostases of Christ.) These hypostases are inseparable from the One God, but each possesses a personality of its own. (Once again, this argument parallels the idea of the multiplicity of oneness, contained in the Christian concept of Trinity!)”

The mystical concepts of Tzimtzum and Gvul, representing the contemplations of the Kaballah thinkers, are particularly remarkable in their philosophical capacity to explain the phenomenon of Jesus Christ. Just as Nietzsche, with his magnificent introduction of the Creative Child concept, reveals an unexpected affinity with Christianity, though each one of them is climbing up its own path to the summit, so does the concept of God contracting His Infinity of Self into certain finite manifestations, unexpectedly, perhaps, even for the Jews themselves, renders that bizarre and incomprehensible Christian idea of the Infinite God making His appearance in the human body of Jesus more palatable than even the brightest Christian theologians could ever have expected to make their own case for.
(This theme also resonates with Nietzsche’s mystical vision of philosophical unity, like this Kantian Ding-an-Sich, which I comment on, in my entry on Jenseits 20.)

Now, a little more on the subject of tzimtzum as represented in the so-called Lurianic Kaballah, which is a collection of Isaac Luria’s (of the Tikkun Olam fame) teachings, compiled after his premature death by the already mentioned Hayim Vital. Three main components are essential to Luria’s theosophy, which depicts the whole history of the world: its past, present, and future, as creation, degeneration, and redemption.
Retracing these stages in reverse order, redemption is represented by the tikkun olam, degeneration, by the shevirat ha-kelim, the breaking of the vessels, and now the original act of creation is represented by God’s withdrawal into Himself, or his contraction, tzimtzum, thus making room for the material world, which is just about to be created. Incidentally, creation itself is accomplished by a thrust of God’s infinite light into the vacated space, where the light becomes trapped in finite receptacles, that break under such stress, and so on...

As for the concept of Gvul (the name is well familiar to every Israeli as a secular term in Hebrew, meaning “border, limit” and widely used in such dissimilar phrases as Mishmar Gvul [border police], or Yesh Gvul [the movement of conscientious objectors abstaining from the mandatory military service], but quite unfamiliar to most in its theosophical sense), I used to discuss it extensively with Rabbi Rice, but it is extremely hard to retrieve from the Internet, where I am often fishing to refresh my memory of various factual bits and pieces, as if this latter concept is somehow protected from outside intrusion. Eventually, it surfaced on a website of the Israeli free masons (!), and here is how a certain Errol D. Feldman, 33°, talks about it, bringing back to mind my stimulating conversations with that Hasidic pillar of learning in Marin County, California, Rabbi Yisroel Rice who has, without ever realizing it, taken up a permanent niche in the corridors of my consciousness.

“Atzilut (Emanation), Beriah (Creation), Yetzirah (Formation) and Asiyah (Action) are the four worlds that emerge out of Hashem’s infinite light, and culminate in our finite, physical, and material universe. Atzilut is the first, and highest, of the four worlds. The Ten Sefirot (Countings) of the World of Atzilut, and of the other worlds, are the fundament of the Kaballah.
All the worlds are created and conducted by means of the Sefirot. The Ten Sefirot demonstrate both G-d’s infinite power (Koah HaBliGvul) and His finite power (Koah HaGvul). For, as is pointed out by the author of Avodat HaKodesh (Tikkunei Zohar reproduced in Siddur Tehillat HaShem), just as Hashem has infinite power, so too does He have finite power. For if you were to say that He possesses infinite power, but lacks finite power then you minimize His completeness, --- and He is the most complete entity of all.
It is within the Sefirot that infinity and the finite first coalesce, as it were, in order for worlds to be created and directed. For the Sefirot are composed of both orot (lights) and kelim (vessels).”

Observe how effortlessly the question of the two hypostases, that is, of the infinite and the finite, coming to form a composite entity, is resolved here, which now brings me to the key point of this entry.

The concepts of tzimtzum and Gvul are of great interest to me, as they are raising the intriguing question of how it may be technically achievable for the spirit to so-to-speak break the matter barrier. After Einstein’s profound breakthrough in the relativity theory, where his e=mc² formula establishes a relationship between energy and matter, without the need for anyone to engage in any kind of theosophical contemplation, such mental visualization and conceptualization of an actual contraction of the spirit as the causa prima and the creative impulse for the emergence of matter, ex nihilo (in the sense that John Scotus Erigena provides us, when he says that nothing, that is, something which is not, is not something entirely non-existent, but it is a substance which transcends everything that is!), that is, as a result of an activity of the universal spirit, the unknowable God, is thus by no means inconceivable, but is available to scrutiny well within the capacity of human comprehension.
By the same token, it is now comparably conceivable how the Spirit of God, in its exercise of its ability to move (not in the spatial sense of moving from place to place, which then turns it into matter, but in a very difficult, but not impossible to grasp, sense of contraction and expansion of itself, from the infinite to finite, and back) may not only cause matter to appear (that is, to be created), but may fill a material receptacle, or “vessel,” without any diminution of its own infinity (¥-X=¥), such as was, perhaps, the physical case with Jesus Christ, either at birth, or, which is more likely, during His Epiphany at the river Jordan, when He was filled with the Holy Spirit.
The argument expounded in this entry serves, as a matter of fact, to strengthen the contra-filioque case of the Christian Orthodox Church, as the capacity for Gvul, to continue our recourse to the Jewish mysticism of the Kaballah, is reserved for Ein Sof, God the Father, alone, rather than for any of His manifestations. On the other hand, it does not diminish the co-equality of the Trinity, once the two manifestations of God the Father (God the Son and The Holy Ghost) are seen as God’s Infinity filling them both, yet once again explained through the mathematical formulae of infinity, where even one tiny iota of infinity is still equal to the whole (¥/X=¥).