April's Blog_Dead Gods Wandering Around Lost in the World of Men

(Part I of a loosely knit series).

I can think of few topics more appropriate to this particular season than Dead and Dying Gods. The season is especially festive for Christians, of course, coming off the long season of Lent, which culminates in Easter, a surfeit of chocolate bunnies and Easter eggs, and the Holy Week, which prepares the way for Whitsun (Pentecost) and the descent of the Dove; but also for Jews because it marks the beginning of Passover, and the life of a people over whom the Shadow of Death has passed. 
            The Christian Whitsun also happens to correspond seasonally to the Pagan festival of Beltane, the Walpurgis Nacht of Faustian fame, which, falling six months after All Hallows Eve, marks the beginning of summer (traditionally early May). 

In this springtide season, then, during which men’s fancy seems to turn away from the dying and the dead, and lightly turn to thoughts of God, the question for our reflection concerns the possibility of verifying authentic religious experience in a period of existential intellectual crisis. The short and honest answer to this question is that, although everyone seems to have an opinion, no one actually knows anything for real. HOWEVER, what I, the Reasoning Man, do absolutely know about the possibility of authentic religious knowledge in an existential period, is that the onus remains on the Magical Man TO DEMONSTRATE to all and sundry that Gods are relevant to human existence, which is to say that they can in fact be experienced.

            Insufficient to this task is any pretend-answer that seeks to pawn off on the philosophically shortsighted some religious ritual, which is nothing but a metaphor for interpreting an in-experience, or a lack of some quantifiable experience. It is necessary for the Magical Man—the religiously minded—to bring to the round-table of thoughtful citizens neither metaphor nor psychology (i.e., some vague notion of “belief” as a precondition of psycho-experience), but rather some real, verifiable human evidence for an experience of the Gods.

            Let me also be quite clear when I say that although my naturally critical nature is fairly indisposed to the more philosophical concept that gives support to the idea of “deity,” I am certainly not opposed philosophically to the possible historical existence of Gods, as are some. So I am sure that any Divine Critters out there will forgive me if I presume to be so intellectually bold as to pose questions concerning Their relevance and/or existence, and concerning how men might acquire knowledge about these things… But then I suppose that Such Enormities as Gods must be big enough to get over my little pissant philosophizing.

            However, if it should in fact turn out that the Gods cannot tolerate the pint-sized musings of thinking humans, Dear Reader, which might actually be the case upon closer reading of the story of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 15), then you best watch out for the bolt of lighting coming your way if you dare to continue reading this post—friendly fire is just as deadly as if the bolt were meant for you! The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was intended for just such as me, whence the name of our Phrontisterion URL: nonimprimatur.

[The following essay is condensed from research (complete with references) entitled, “On the Death of God. Reflections on His Life and Post-mortem Future (2011),” which is archived on our Phrontisterion site. ]

Other prophets of the Death of God… and other Dead and Dying Gods.

Similar to generic dying God stories typical to agrarian cultures, announcements of the death of a God in the western world may also perhaps be seen to follow cycles. A first important announcement occurred in the mid-first century, at sea off the western coast of Greece, with the proclamation that the Great God Pan was dead. Some believe that this moment marked the beginning of the end of the pagan era. The announcement was heard a second time, in the late 19^th century, when Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, returning into the world of men from a self-imposed exile, encounters a holy man in the wood worshipping, says the Heiliger, “the God who is my God”-- a statement that leaves Zarathustra wondering at the fact that this holy man had not heard in his woods that God is dead. Nietzsche mitigates the matter-of-fact flatness of Zarathustra’s wonder by also composing an exalted, quasi-mystical dirge in the now-famous madman story from the Gay Science.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? … Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Many have been the assertions that “God is dead,” and sundry the variations on the theme: from the “flight of the Gods,” the “Entflohene Götter”, of Hölderlin, to the contemporary God is Dead movement in America. It seems, however, that there is always hidden within the very language of the assertion, a second proposition: namely, that the Gods, and especially the God that surfaced in the theological traditions of the Christians, once existed. More philosophically oriented than the German romantics and their “Gods,” the high priests of the American Death of God movement offered up the death of the Christian God not by talking about “Him,” but rather, by talking about how humans seem to have transcended the need, interest, or even the possibility, of Him. So what has been at issue in this Death of God tradition, it would seem, is really not (the) Deity, but rather the human (lack of) interest story.

         In the light of the various traditions of God/s in the West, then, and of Their dyings, let us examine a different alternative—let us assume that we moderns do in fact live post mortem Dei christiani. Let us also assume that there are plausible intellectual justifications for why the modern world has moved beyond the Christian faith.

In the Great Conversation, the "death of God" thinkers have laid the theoretical foundations of an idea. For when Plato posited the reality of the Forms to explain how things came into being and (were) moved, it was not long before Aristotle came along to point out that, at the end of the day, the Forms are only a theoretical model with logical issues (e.g., their immovable, yet causative natures), and that a very adequate, persuasive, and almost entirely empirical description of reality could be posited without them. Similarly, I would like to suggest that the modern God-is-Dead propositions and treatments also contain an untenable logical assumption – that the Christian God ever existed.

         The wider evidence of Western history, and not simply the evidence from the history of the Western philosophical tradition, suggests that it is in fact the Christian God, and very specifically The-God-of-the-Bible, who has gone missing. And there is no need of a romantic and exalted post mortem: for the failure of The-God-of-the-Bible, equal to that of His Alter Ego The God of the Christians, is that as a philosophical Fiction derived from debate and consensus, He/They never had any historical reality.

Is the Christian God, the Protagonist of the Bible, really dead? The question is certainly of academic interest to the scholar of religions, and also a challenge for the believer in the fides christiana.

            Evidence clearly shows that The God of the Christians is not The-God-of-the-Bible; rather “It” is a Concept of philosophy—an extraterritorial Deity of Logic born out of the speculations of the earliest Platonized Christian philosophers. It could in fact be argued that Western philosophy already reached its zenith in the first half of the Common Era with the philosophical conception and articulation of this God, whose genealogy can be traced in its evolution from a Hellenistic Abstraktum, to a Supreme philosophico-religious Idea(l). This “God,” conceived very literally out of season, corresponds to the highest ideals of western neo-platonic thought, and bears no comparison, either in actions or character, to the historico-geographical deities of the Hebrew Bible. There is considerable evidence to substantiate this argument.

The-God-of-the-Bible.

Buttressed by archaeology, biblical scholarship has paved a wide road for the articulation of this argument; and much of recent scholarship received its impetus from Albrecht Alt’s groundbreaking 1929 essay on the God of the Fathers, which was so fruitfully furthered by the works of Albright, Gordon, D.N. Freedman, and the Harvard scholar Frank Cross, of Dead Sea Scrolls fame. The Albright “school,” in seeking to identify more fully the various Deities of the Bible in the light of Their ancient Near Eastern origins, has led some to wonder whether the Western Religious narrative has not in fact completely “lost” the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible in its attempt to articulate a philosophical God. Such is R. Friedman’s recent thesis: that the Hebrew Bible is literally a record of the disappearance of God—that it is the story of a God who has gone into retirement, who, like the Canaanite El a thousand years before him, is become deus quiescens.

            This is a troubling state of affairs for the study of western religions. Indeed, it is potentially a worst-case scenario. For in addition to having perhaps identified the wrong deity as God, western religious scholars now must consider the possibility that the Hebrew Bible may be the narrative record of a God-become-absent from the world of men (deus absconditus).  Indeed, it has always been difficult for the missionary to make a persuasive case for a God who is not present to defend himself publicly—the Baalite priests of I Kings 18 learned from Elijah, much to their detriment, that les [dieux] absents ont toujours tort.

The German Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch profiled this argument already in a 1920 volume entitled, The Great Deception, in which he argued that, just like the other olden gods: “the Hebrew national god (Nationalgott) belongs also to the ‘anemic’ ones (elîlîm)—as the Old Testament relishes designating the gods of other peoples—and it is impossible that he should be identified … with the most-powerful GOD.” Delitzsch concludes with this: “Israel is not the people of ‘GOD’, but the people of Jaho, as Moab is the people of Kemosh and Assur the people of the god Asur.” In a similar iteration in the Interpreter’s Bible one reads: “The religion of the fathers was not the same as the worship of the thundering Yahweh of Sinai. The God pictured in Genesis is not like the God who reveals himself to Moses in the book of Exodus.”

End of Part I.

March's Blog-- Is philosophy a waste of time and space?

Is philosophy a waste of time and space in an existential crisis? Suppose that you wake up one morning only to find yourself stuck right smack in the middle of some kind of a complicated game with a mindboggling number of players, a game that stretches off way beyond all the horizons of time and space and imagination; and suppose, equally, that you have memory neither of how you got into the game, nor of the precise number or identity of the other players, nor of the rules of the game or of its goals. Let us finally suppose that you decide at some point in this waking nightmare that you are not particularly comfortable being enmeshed against your will in this bizarre game, but then you also somehow realize that you do not have the power to just up and quit and to exit the playing field or the Game (—death is no exit; simply another of the infinite doors in the labyrinth-game!).

            So you have no idea what is at stake in this little game of impenetrable rules, and yet you have no choice but to continue playing.

Welcome to the Twilight Zone of Life-Itself – you are on a journey neither sought for nor desired, only to discover that the road map for the remainder of the trip got left behind in some long-past highway rest-stop.

            Where to go…? What to do…? How…? Why…?

Myriad are the tales of rovers in these “foreign” parts we call Life-Itself.

Homer, for example, in the Odyssey, tells us the stories of the travels and woes of one of the most well-known wanderers in human memory: Odysseus.

[1] Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose mind he learned, aye, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea, seeking to win his own life and the return of his comrades. Yet even so he saved not his comrades, though he desired it sore, for through their own blind folly they perished—fools, who devoured the kine of Helios Hyperion; but he took from them the day of their returning. Of these things, goddess, daughter of Zeus, beginning where thou wilt, tell thou even unto us.

[11] Now all the rest, as many as had escaped sheer destruction, were at home, safe from both war and sea, but Odysseus alone, filled with longing for his return and for his wife, did the queenly nymph Calypso, that bright goddess, keep back in her hollow caves, yearning that he should be her husband. But when, as the seasons revolved, the year came in which the gods had ordained that he should return home to Ithaca, not even there was he free from toils, even among his own folk. And all the gods pitied him save Poseidon; but he continued to rage unceasingly against godlike Odysseus until at length he reached his own land.

Tennyson, Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, beautifully rendered the obstacle-laden Homecoming (Grk. Nostos) of this ancient Odysseus into a Ulysses well fitted for the 19th century, a wanderer who, in the absence of the gods, was driven onwards by the swells of his own Wanderlust.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed

Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when

Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades2

Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honoured of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy3.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

Gleams that untraveled world, whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

As though to breathe were life.

Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this grey spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Another wayfarer, the omniscient narrator in Dante’s Inferno (Canto I), finds himself lost in the Middle of Life, and tells us of his journey through the spiritual realms, until he finally “finds himself” found again.

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more;

We are presently living through a period of human existential crisis, with the result that any significance we might attach to our personal passage through the world of Man-existing derives primarily from self-defining, closed interpretive systems—from philosophizing. Such journeys as those described above, and these celebrated travelers, can therefore become roadmaps, and these travelers pathfinders, for each one of us; and if we allow them, if we find the way to make sense of the echo of their voices in the hallways of our own labyrinth, they will become road markers for us modern wayfarers, indicating obstacles for us to avoid, desirable attitudes to cultivate, or not, and helping us to choose out for ourselves from among the almost infinite variety of possible goals that we may freely adopt at one time or another during our own Life-journey.

If this analysis is in fact accurate, then all the resources of Philosophy and Poetry, which are attendant handmaidens in the service of Reason and Inspiration, and which help us to think about and make sense of our Life-journey, can never become exhausted. So as a means of making sense of our world and our journey through it, Philosophy, both as discipline and art, must never be abandoned—that is unless one means to give up entirely on the various interpretive possibilities of human reason and enlightenment. Let it also be clearly said, however, that Philosophy is incapable of yielding just One Single Response/Interpretation of the world upon which all men will agree to hang their hats—rather, it is an ongoing conversation with many layers.

Philosophy in this existential period is fairly persuasively and therefore fairly firmly grounded in the idea of the Subjectum, the cogito, the “I” of Descartes; all other metaphysical ground (read: religious grounding) has been pretty well stripped away—for better and for worse. So it would seem that the “I” who is the Wanderer in this wasteland would be a pretty reasonable philosophical starting place to begin thinking about the World-Life.

            An initial philosophical intuition on the part of some of the earliest thinkers in this modern existentialist period, e.g., German Romantics such Winkelmann, Höldelin, later Heine, etc., and more philosophical types such as Schilling, Hegel, Nietzsche, et al, was to look back into the period of the ancient Greeks in an attempt to discover an original experience of an original world of men as yet unpolluted by centuries of religion.  The strong conception common to these thinkers is that the world of men is tragic (although a variety of different explanations is given in an attempt to explain why this is the case…), and that therefore the experience of men in this world will be defined by Leidenschaft or suffering. From this tragic conception of world and life would also bloom the fine flower of an idea—that the life of the individual is a Work of Art, and that we are all artists. The canvas we paint of our lives is therefore our own.

            Other streams of Philosophy will evolve along other lines of tradition, such as the empirical tradition first articulated by Aristotle, and which will eventually give rise to the 18^th & 19^th century Empiricists like Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Mill, and then the 20^th century Popper; then there will also be the various traditions of (Anglo-American) Analytical Philosophy, developed by Russell, Wittgenstein, Frege, et al, which will include philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and logical positivism. This is Philosophy in her incarnation as a pseudo-empirical science.

            Another persuasive application for Philosophy during the journey of our lives is in trying to discern and to decide how the self can, may, and perhaps should act in the world. This application, popularized of late by the French philosopher Pierre Hadot, also harkens back to the philosophy of the ancient Greek period in order to re-articulate in and for the modern period the Stoic or Socratic life.

            Finally, Philosophy also contains all the elements and tools of enlightenment criticism … so we can, and should, bring all the might of our human understanding to bear critically upon all the bigger questions that interest the individual “I” in the labyrinthine world of men, in this Twilight Zone of Life-Itself. Questions, for instance, concerning what Men should hold sacred, and which touch upon culturally taboo subjects such as:

1.     The received traditions such as religion

2.     The culturally determined ideas – such as State, patriotism, etc.

3.     Of methodologies – science

So, what to do during a journey that you neither asked for nor desired, a journey through a savage (intellectual) wasteland where each step must inevitably be your own? Take a big breath, and Think Big Thoughts… because you cannot be any more lost than you already are.

February's Blog _ An Existential Moment....

Anti-conversion....

           

Just about every human child born in and after the 1960s knows about existentialism and has probably thrown around the term, or an associative culprit (e.g., Camus, Sartre, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard & Assoc.), a time or two at some cocktail party or other. All in all, it is a fine and weighty word with which to impress those who are impressionable and to offend those who seek to take offense; it is a word that has enjoyed all the status of a philosophically charged nuclear device being detonated in a conversation in which one seeks evasion from intellectual obligation, from moral responsibility, or in which one just wants to do a little intellectual sparing with a Christian-ly minded westerner.

However, although certainly of philosophical import, “Existentialism” is neither a philosophy per se, in the sense that it is not an assemblage of ideas and concepts articulated by a single and deliberate author or faction (i.e., it has no omniscient narrator!), nor is it a system of thinking. Rather, it is the situation or experience of the mind-world (the kosmos) in which the generally homogenous organization of our ambient social, religious, philosophical, and scientific ideas (the knowledge paradigm), has become progressively disrupted and porous, and thus disharmonious or heterogeneous; at which point all hell begins to break loose intellectually speaking. With the loss of a universalizing or commonly accepted notion (a paradigm) of how One might best interpret or best prioritize data or information, which is replaced by a nearly infinite variety of possible perspectives and thoughts and opinions that could be entertained in and by the ambient Zeitgeist, the intellectual “lay of the land” takes the shape of a paradigmatic wasteland, barren of any specific dominant belief or narrative. To borrow just a little from Schopenhauer’s idea that systematic thinking is an architectural structure – when the foundation begins to crumble, the edifice built upon it also becomes unreliable—so the London Bridge of interpretive intelligibility comes falling down… and pop goes the weasel in an intellectual no-man’s land!

So, for instance, an Immanuel Kant might anchor his idea of perception, which is a function of the human mind, in the (for him) necessary deduction that some unknowable Ding-an-sich (thing-in-itself) type of worldly reality is present behind the perceptions of my body, which caused or provoked my perceptions in the first place; but this other and original “world” behind the “perceived-world,” which has gotten all tangled up in my seeing and hearing and tasting and feeling and smelling, is itself unknown and unknowable precisely because it is outside of the confines of my perceptions. So as far as Kant is concerned, there is a world out-there, beyond my perceptions, which anchors my perceptions—there are two elements in this Kantian equation: 1) the world out-there, and 2) the concept of the world that I construct in my mind, which consists of the out-there world + whatever other changes my body needed to contribute to that original thing in order for me to be able to see it, hear it, taste it, feel it, and smell it. To be sure, this is a lovely philosophical paradigm in its architectural design.

            Schopenhauer, of course, kindly (or not so, if his curmudgeonly reputation is accurate and deserved) takes exception to Kant’s architectural flair, and thus dismisses the Kantian philosophical foundation (the out-there world), but decides to keep the Kantian mental edifice. So Schopenhauer chooses to hoist philosophical anchor in a distinctly non-Kantianesque movement – by arguing that the “world” is in fact no-“thing” other than the mere composition of my perception/imagination (Vorstellung) and my will (Wille).

Now, we all know, more or less, what a conversion is in the religious and philosophical meaning. The individual Turns Away From one path, and Turns Toward (con + vertere) a new path – there is a changing of the mind, which has application to my actions. So in all its various contexts, conversion is an ordering of the mind around a philosophical anchor, a very deliberate turning toward a different fundamental and organizing idea or principle. What happens, though, when the paradigm surrounding the anchor, which is composed of associative ideas and ancillary beliefs, breaks down? How do we reason philosophically, or even meaningfully, in an intellectual wasteland? What are the rules for thinking during History’s more existential and therefore chaotic moments?

            That this question is still meaningful actually shows why existentialism is not a philosophy in any ordinary sense of that word—for we are not converted to the existential philosophy. Rather, we become persuaded that the organizing worldview, the paradigm, in which we grew up, is porous and dissolving, and that it no longer holds sway over our minds. We become anti-converts.

            However, there certainly were, are, and can be a variety of plausibly meaningful intellectual responses to the existential moment, and these responses certainly can be articulated philosophically. An example of this may be found in Camus’ volume of philosophically oriented essays entitled The Rebel.

           

As a condition marking the human intellectual condition, existentialism is not a state of the physis-world, but rather of the kosmos-world. It is a state of mind provoked by the disintegration of the religious world-view. To date, there have been two existential periods in the history of the western thought tradition, both of which have been triggered by a breakdown of a mytho-religious intellectual paradigm. The first dissolution, which began in ancient Greece prior to the 7^th century B.C., resulted in the birth of philosophy with the Greek natural philosophers, such as Thales, Heraclitus, et al. And the Really Big Idea that was brought forth from this first and primary intellectual response to the breakdown of a mytho-religious paradigm was the articulation of the Just Life.

            In Greece the idea of Justice, as a Big Idea, derived from an understanding of the physis-world as system where process occurred correctly or rightly (i.e., justly). This idea is not dissimilar to the Asian understanding of the Tao. Human understanding was anchored in the right understanding of the “way” of the natural world – phases of the moon, wind blowing, water flowing, etc. Naturally, then, if there was a rightness inherent in the way the natural (physis)-world operated, the next logical step would be to search out the rightness, or justice, that must also be inherent in men’s relationship to their world in general, and to one another in the polis in particular. On the question of Justice, of course, the great Socrates comes to mind among others.

           

The second existential period in the western thought tradition was provoked by the onset of the “Fall” or dissolution of the Christian worldview. What was to become an anchoring idea for this existential period, was the articulation of the idea of Man as thinking subject – the Cartesian cogito, an idea that has continued on to the fantastic, albeit muddling success we see around us still today.

            It is interesting to note that, yet again, a dominant response (Really Big Idea) to this second breakdown of the mytho-religious paradigm remains the question of justice. Hence, there is Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in which the author invites us to observe that God’s justice has no effect on, in, or for this world of men, and that men’s justice is, frankly, no better – for it only manages to muddle its way to concluding that an innocent Dmitri Karamazov is guilty of and should be punished for patricide. Thus, Nietzsche’s pale criminal (in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, book I) rebuts the judge for his hypocrisy – there can be no justice (but also no true crime) where all men (including judges) are born native predators, and where all men must, of necessity, work out their native predatory destinies in the world of predatory men. Thus, also, Joseph K’s fruitless search to discover the crime he must have committed, because he has been sentenced to capital punishment for that crime, in Kafka’s The Trial. All that K manages to discover is that he is guilty and that the “system” has the power to exact punishment on him. Thus, finally, Meursault’s trial in Camus’ The Stranger, in which he is put on trial for the murder of a man, but condemned, really, because he apparently, in his remembering her death, did not show the proper love and appreciation for his mother.

A lesson in Hermeneutics - How do We Translate a Two Hundred Year Text into the Ideas of the 21st Century

President Barack Obama's inaugural address – full text

"Vice President Biden, Mr. Chief Justice, Members of the United States Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow citizens:

Each time we gather to inaugurate a president, we bear witness to the enduring strength of our Constitution. We affirm the promise of our democracy. We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names. What makes us exceptional – what makes us American – is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

Today we continue a never-ending journey, to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth. The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob. They gave to us a Republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed.

For more than two hundred years, we have.

Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together.

Together, we determined that a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce; schools and colleges to train our workers.

Together, we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.

Together, we resolved that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life's worst hazards and misfortune.

Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society's ills can be cured through government alone. Our celebration of initiative and enterprise; our insistence on hard work and personal responsibility, are constants in our character.

But we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action. For the American people can no more meet the demands of today's world by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias. No single person can train all the math and science teachers we'll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation, and one people.

This generation of Americans has been tested by crises that steeled our resolve and proved our resilience. A decade of war is now ending. An economic recovery has begun. America's possibilities are limitless, for we possess all the qualities that this world without boundaries demands: youth and drive; diversity and openness; an endless capacity for risk and a gift for reinvention. My fellow Americans, we are made for this moment, and we will seize it – so long as we seize it together.

For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it. We believe that America's prosperity must rest upon the broad shoulders of a rising middle class. We know that America thrives when every person can find independence and pride in their work; when the wages of honest labor liberate families from the brink of hardship. We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American, she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.

We understand that outworn programs are inadequate to the needs of our time. We must harness new ideas and technology to remake our government, revamp our tax code, reform our schools, and empower our citizens with the skills they need to work harder, learn more, and reach higher. But while the means will change, our purpose endures: a nation that rewards the effort and determination of every single American. That is what this moment requires. That is what will give real meaning to our creed.

We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future. For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty, and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn. We do not believe that in this country, freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us, at any time, may face a job loss, or a sudden illness, or a home swept away in a terrible storm. The commitments we make to each other – through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security – these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries – we must claim its promise. That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure – our forests and waterways; our croplands and snowcapped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That's what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.

We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war. Our brave men and women in uniform, tempered by the flames of battle, are unmatched in skill and courage. Our citizens, seared by the memory of those we have lost, know too well the price that is paid for liberty. The knowledge of their sacrifice will keep us forever vigilant against those who would do us harm. But we are also heirs to those who won the peace and not just the war, who turned sworn enemies into the surest of friends, and we must carry those lessons into this time as well.

We will defend our people and uphold our values through strength of arms and rule of law. We will show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully – not because we are naïve about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear. America will remain the anchor of strong alliances in every corner of the globe; and we will renew those institutions that extend our capacity to manage crisis abroad, for no one has a greater stake in a peaceful world than its most powerful nation. We will support democracy from Asia to Africa; from the Americas to the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of those who long for freedom. And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice – not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice.

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.

It is now our generation's task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote. Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity; until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country. Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm.

That is our generation's task – to make these words, these rights, these values – of Life, and Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – real for every American. Being true to our founding documents does not require us to agree on every contour of life; it does not mean we will all define liberty in exactly the same way, or follow the same precise path to happiness. Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time – but it does require us to act in our time.

For now decisions are upon us, and we cannot afford delay. We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate. We must act, knowing that our work will be imperfect. We must act, knowing that today's victories will be only partial, and that it will be up to those who stand here in four years, and forty years, and four hundred years hence to advance the timeless spirit once conferred to us in a spare Philadelphia hall.

My fellow Americans, the oath I have sworn before you today, like the one recited by others who serve in this Capitol, was an oath to God and country, not party or faction – and we must faithfully execute that pledge during the duration of our service. But the words I spoke today are not so different from the oath that is taken each time a soldier signs up for duty, or an immigrant realizes her dream. My oath is not so different from the pledge we all make to the flag that waves above and that fills our hearts with pride.

They are the words of citizens, and they represent our greatest hope.

You and I, as citizens, have the power to set this country's course.

You and I, as citizens, have the obligation to shape the debates of our time – not only with the votes we cast, but with the voices we lift in defense of our most ancient values and enduring ideals.

Let each of us now embrace, with solemn duty and awesome joy, what is our lasting birthright. With common effort and common purpose, with passion and dedication, let us answer the call of history, and carry into an uncertain future that precious light of freedom.

Thank you, God Bless you, and may He forever bless these United States of America."

The Man Who Would be President

This is a man who would be President of the United States.

This man believes that no laws pertaining to guns can save children, or could have saved the children in that school. Yet, there are laws controlling the ownership of bazookas, tanks, mines, machine guns, hand grenades, missiles, nuclear devices, and other military arms or weapons of mass destruction, with the result that few American children are dead on American soil due to the proliferation of such weapons in US cities. So is it not conceivably the case that had there also been other laws controlling ownership of other types of military weaponry, such as those used at Sandy Hook, Aurora, and elsewhere, surely fewer people, fewer children, would be dead? Perhaps the argument now for America has to be about "fewer dead."

This man believes that laws are the tools of the secular, or non-religious state-- that laws are the fruit of Reasoning Men, rather than Religious Men, and that this is not good. It is true in fact that laws, such as are found in the Democratic Republic with its rule of law structure, are the fruit of Reasoning Men. So is the concept of We the People, which is the philosophical cornerstone of the very human and rational idea of Democracy. Every Religion is, by its very nature, a Theocracy, which is structurally equal to every other form of totalitarian or authoritarian rule, except that it clothes itself in the robes of virtue. Reason, on the other hand, leads to concepts like We the People, and Democracies. So there is no space where Religion and Reason can meaningfully intersect in the Civil Society -- never should the twain meet.

This man believes that laws in the hands of reasoning men are not sufficient to create a State that is both just and safe. He believes that We the People should put Law and Reason to the side, and that we should return passively to our churches. That We the People should exchange civil action for religious inaction. This man would exchange a State of the People, by the People, and for the People--a Democracy, for a State of God, an Authoritarian State, a divine Tyranny.

This is a man who would be President of these United States.

Sandy Hook School.... in memoriam

15 December 2012 -- Reflecting on the Sandy Hook School shooting, and about some of the "bright lights" out there who are trying to make the case that teachers could have minimized the tragedy had they only had guns.

 

For a reasoned analysis, and information, on the hysteria surrounding the Gun Control conversation in America, view the link to Rachael Maddow here.

Bellybuttons in the Lost and Found.

Sometimes we are just lost. Not necessarily in the “real” or outside world, but internally. It may be, though, that the Human Mind-Body comes equipped with its own built-in navigation system, in the form of the modest bellybutton, which can help us to get back home again if we just stand still long enough to pay attention.

The umbilicus, the navel, the tummy-button… the (seemingly) commonplace bellybutton, is actually much less anodyne than it might appear at first blush. There are in fact many denizens of the bellybutton world. There are innies, which, according to at least one source, may serve a variety of interesting purposes ranging from storage space (our own personal lint containment center…), to a handy way to tell twins apart (who’d a thunk?), to a drinking glass (don’t ask). Then there are outties, which also, according to the same source, express a diversity of functionalities, from trampoline, to microphone, to doorbell. Just for the record—it does seem rather clear that the hyperlinked source of this information is not really in the business of information, but rather of working through the ramifications of the 3^rd grade imagination and the one-track mind.

            That said, however, the belly button has not only been an inspiration for humor; it has also been a source of controversy.  In the throes of newfangled evolutionism, for instance, the nineteenth century understood that the bellybutton was central to understanding a great mystery about Adam and Eve. If Adam was like all men, and the Apostle Paul does remind us that Adam was our “father” according to the flesh, then Adam must have had a bellybutton; but this would also imply that he had a pre-history that is neither recorded for us nor suggested in the biblical texts, and which in fact even flies in the face of the Edenic narrative. Eve, of course, did not partake in divine equality and is therefore let off the hook; she could not have had a bellybutton of her own to contemplate because she was drafted from the rib of Adam. Unless of course she did. Imagine the nightmare for the Renaissance artists, who must have struggled with the idea of how to depict an Adam and Eve who looked like our human ancestors, but who were not, logically speaking, inalienably endowed by their Creator with all that our post-natal humanness implies.

            And then, of course, there is also the controversial viewpoint expressed by the Greek comedic poet Aristophanes who, in Plato’s Symposium, reached the epitome of his humoristic glory, and erotic insight, with his discourse on Eros. Aristophanes imagines original man as a sort of one-eyed jack, only plumper, joined in the middle with heads on both ends, who was prone to insolence toward and undue aggravation of the Gods. Says Aristophanes: when the Gods reached the end of Their collective rope with these tiresome human trouble-makers, Zeus directed Apollo to slice them all in half, creating a bunch of one-eyed, one-legged folk, each fully sexed and hopping around looking for their other half to rub up against, but, failing that, certainly willing to rub up against just about everything else. But this was only the beginning, of course, because the Greek Gods also seemed to be artistic in Their creative problem-solving with respect to humans (the problem was how and where to tuck in all the skin left over from the cutting and slicing of the original human); so reads the Jowett translation:

Apollo was also bidden to heal their wounds and compose their forms. So he gave a turn to the face and pulled the skin from the sides all over that which in our language is called the belly, like the purses which draw tight, and he made one mouth at the centre, which he fastened in a knot (the same which is called the navel); he also moulded the breast and took out most of the wrinkles, much as a shoemaker might smooth leather upon a last; he left a few, however, in the region of the belly and navel, as a memorial of the primeval state.

And so the knotty (naughty?) history of the curious bellybutton began its meandering journey through the world of men.

The physical bellybutton, however, this very material center of our bodies, is not exactly the subject of this Reflection. Rather, what really interests us is the immaterial bellybutton, which constitutes the internal center, the North Star of our-Self. We reflect in metaphor, of course, for the Self is not precisely a thing, nor does it “have” precisely a center. There is no true center of the Self beyond the physical location of our bodies standing behind their very-physical bellybuttons at any given moment. Our Self is not defined by some “What” that is at our core, but rather by all the stuff that moves directionally away from, or toward, the locus “where” this body (center, ego, self) lives… everything is going in every direction to or from this locus, this ambulatory GPS point in the center. Yeats saw this metaphor-idea as a general truth about the world, which also necessarily tells the story of our bodies – that things fall apart; there is no center, and even if there were, it still would not hold.

            The model for this idea of the immaterial bellybutton, which was understood originally to be the bellybutton of the world, comes from highest antiquity, from the Greek omphalos, which was found in Delphi at the oracle of Apollo. Plutarch tells us that Epimenides of Crete, sage and epic poet (early 5^th century B.C.), “refuted the [original mythological] story that eagles or swans setting out from the ends of the earth met in the middle at Delphi, the so-called Omphalos): There was no Omphalos, either in the center of the earth or of the sea. If any there be, it is visible to the gods, not visible to mortals.”

            This concept went on to have a very fruitful career in the history of ideas with Mircea Eliade, the famous philosopher of religion, who, in a very Jungian theory, identified the immaterial omphalos of the world with man’s collective unconsciousness. This is not inconsistent with the greater Greek worldview, however, which saw the material world, the earth, as a physical type of dwelling, a physis, but the immaterial world that is created by the interpreting mind (Descartes’ later imaginando or the imagination), as an intelligible kind of dwelling, the kosmos, the world “seen,” then organized and tidied up by human thought and language.

So why are we interested in reflecting on internal bellybuttons? Perhaps just to give ourselves some perspective so that the next time we are throwing stones into a pond in our external dwelling in order to watch the concentric rings, we remember that with our mind’s eye we are actually also “seeing” that in those very physical rings the metaphor of our internal dwelling-life is also being writ, but just in a visible language. When we realize that Our Life, both material and immaterial, happens in the midst of concentric rings moving out away from us, then we also begin to understand certain organic relational truths – that things that are closer to us are inevitably more relevant to us, and why it is also and necessarily true that things in our more remote rings “feel” less relevant to us. To be sure, things remote to us are not in and of themselves less important, they are just ex-centric to us – more removed from our center, further away, less immediately imposing.

            It is also important for us to keep our Internal Bellybuttons turned on and tuned in for all sorts of relationships (personal, interpersonal, and other), because relationships are, well, relational or perspectival. There is no such thing as neutrality. Points of view, both for the philosopher and the psychologist, begin with the Self/I; then they expand to include the immediately surrounding environment.

The bellybutton, both as a material and then as an intellectual location of the individual, allows us to pinpoint our position within the cluster of relationships and gridlines that crisscross the map of our Life, to determine where exactly the Self is with respect both to the earth (physis), and to the world fashioned by our understanding (kosmos). On this very special map, however, there is no true and unmoving North Star; there is only us standing alone at a very odd Corner where the earth and the world intersect. This is the intersection of the Lost & Found, where sometimes we find the Self we seek, and sometimes we lose it; but the truth is that all the possibilities of our life meet and crisscross at that Corner.

            The bellybutton is the fulcrum of the individual’s mooring, the starting point at the interior of the circles from which he is able to see his world, and then to create it. The bellybutton therefore is as interesting as it is important. It is interesting because of the onion-skinned nature of our reality, which means that according to our Will and Whim we can flip, or invert, the various layers of interpretation and meaning. This is one reason why Art, in all of its forms and manifestations, intrigues us so; because both conceptually and materially, Art asks of us that we should apprehend truly, that we should actually see both with our body’s eyes as well as with our mind’s eye, the world as transformed, as turned on its head. Human perception of the material world is essentially a bellybutton type of experience, because it is centered upon and framed around the mind’s activity of reality-construction.

            We live in a rather curious moment of human history, a moment when the world has become small. The big, wide ‘World’ has been transformed into global village, which in turn demands from us that we very deliberately invert from the Self outwards, both philosophically and psychologically, the normative and natural order of embracing our world … where we are asked to include the Self rather as an integral piece of the surrounding world… where we are asked to consider a dissolution of the Self into the interests of the whole. Welcome to the Lost & Found.