tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post9164410793919498012..comments2024-02-13T12:50:30.457-05:00Comments on Rants Within the Undead God: Cosmicism, Tragedy, and Greek MythologyBenjamin Cainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-10933001479807187002018-03-12T10:20:37.943-04:002018-03-12T10:20:37.943-04:00I haven't read Hobbes in years, but that artic...I haven't read Hobbes in years, but that article which refreshed my memory points out that Hobbes is inconsistent on these points, which is what I said above. <br /><br />You say there's nothing in Hobbes that indicates he thought everyone is self-interested, but the article furnishes this quotation: "I obtained two absolutely certain postulates of human nature," he says, "one, the postulate of human greed by which each man insists upon his own private use of common property; the other, the postulate of natural reason, by which each man strives to avoid violent death" (De Cive, Epistle Dedicatory). <br /><br />So it looks like he can be read in different ways, but I suspect you're right, that the reductive interpretation is oversimplified. Materialistic science was new in his day, so at times he might have been overenthusiastic in supporting it.<br /><br />I'm not committed that Oedipus's or Antigone's solutions to tragedy (self-destruction or self-mutilation) are ideal. What matters here is that they've outgrown anthropocentrism and have acquired the transhuman perspective of life's tragedy. Oedipus's tearing out of his eyes suggests to me a horrific moment of enlightenment, not a punishment of himself as though his endpoint was all his fault, as though fate and causality hadn't brought him there with indifference (or to right prior wrongs in Thebes and thus reestablish cosmic balance). Likewise, I've spoken positively of degrees of asceticism or of withdrawal from conventional routines to remind ourselves that the world is absurd and that our primary mission is anomalous (anti-natural). <br /><br />Instrumentalism or pragmatism makes sense only in considering the means, not our ultimate ends. The prior question is whether we should be conservative (as in ancient Greek teleology) or progressive (satanic or promethean) in our overall outlook. These ultimate, philosophical goals are chosen by a leap of faith or by cultural character or something like that, not by pragmatic calculation (contrary, for example, to Pascal's wager). But once we settle on a philosophical perspective, we can be wily and Odyssean in achieving those ultimate goals. <br /><br />For example, we can paradoxically attempt to make our anti-natural rebellion sustainable, thus combining elements of conservatism and progressivism. We can be conservative in not wanting to destroy ourselves, but for progressive reasons since we'd be indispensable in representing sentient disgust with nature's mindless indifference to our survival. <br /><br />What should Oedipus have done? The damage was already done, but what strikes me as crucial is that he went through a stage of horrific recognition. I've said that "enlightenment" or the gaining of a philosophical perspective begins not just with awe but with horror for our existential predicament and with disgust with the world and the masses. <br /><br />But theoretically, what should someone do if they find themselves by chance or mistaken identity in such an absurd situation as Oedipus's? After horror should come comedy. Ideally, everyone involved should laugh off nature's nonsense, and then they should work together to create something new and superior, such as a kingdom that isn't fated to pay for wrongs done by their ancestors. But if you don't first tear out your eyes, as it were, you likely don't comprehend the enormity of your situation. I've written about horror or angst as the philosopher's calling card, as proof of having entered the esoteric circle. But as Nietzsche said, the hero overcomes. Benjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-77267998250933301602018-03-10T22:21:55.087-05:002018-03-10T22:21:55.087-05:00What you've said here clarifies your article f...What you've said here clarifies your article for me greatly. <br /><br />As far as Hobbes, I think the view that he was a vulgar naturalist in the sense that he denied the virtual miracle of human creativity is a common misreading. If you start from Hobbes' definitions in his introduction and first part of his Leviathan, and interpret everything he says afterward in those precisely defined terms, it can be seen that for him any system which takes in external data and uses it to make decisions which draw it "toward" some inputs and "away" from others, satisfies his definition of an animal. Among other things this implies that an algorithm for buying and selling stocks automatically is as much an "animal" as any biological creature, and on the other hand that every large animal is itself composed of smaller animals such as organs, which we know now are composed of even smaller animals known as cells. Just as all of these cells combine to form what in relation to them, if they could understand, must seem the mortal god of the human body, so too can human animals unite in a state, in doing so ceasing to be merely themselves by becoming also the cells of a greater animal. Of course this greater animal (in terms of power) is itself guided by a merely human will, but nonetheless it is made in a virtually miraculous defiance of the status quo, and it provides us with the peace necessary to seek goals greater than mere survival and conflict, such as art, literacy and science. <br /><br />Similarly, I think the claim that Hobbes saw humans as egotists can be misleading. Hobbes indeed claims that good and evil are subjective, and our opinions regarding them derive from our individual appetites and aversions. He goes on to claim that certain appetites and aversions derive from the universal laws of preserving our own natures, including seeking peace and keeping covenants made, which rationally imply the necessity of a State to safeguard our nature better than we could alone. <br /><br />But Hobbes also sees humans as having very diverse personal appetites and aversions, and for him they are bound together primarily by the fact that all of them require us to be alive and secure in order to pursue them (he sees inclination toward suicide as a madness, again according to his very particular definition, which basically reduces to the view that no one can trust such a person to remain peaceful towards others, since they lack the motive of self-preservation, and consequently they are also enemies of the sovereign). The point being there is nothing in Hobbes account which presupposes that humans are only self-interested, only that they must be so to some extent in order to be trustworthy, and in order to pursue any other goal, altruistic, artistic or otherwise. E.g. even artists must eat, or else they will not at any rate produce much art before expiring.<br /><br />I agree though with your criticism of Odysseus' concern for ignoble social conventions as his highest and ultimate goal. I think what confuses me is that Antigone does indeed provoke her own death in order to briefly challenge the gods and the decree of the king, and Oedipus tears out his eyes. I see your point that they recognize something is wrong, but they also destroy themselves in the process of registering their protest. The question then is under what circumstances, if any, the wily and pragmatic means of Odysseus should be abandoned in favor of the absolute stand on principle of Antigone, even if such a stand means accepting one's own death as a consequence? <br /><br />Similarly, should Oedipus have accepted the necessity of all things, with Spinoza and perhaps like Odysseus, and merely done his best to rectify his absurd and terrible situation, rather than tearing out his own eyes in anguish? <br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-87550889879023255852018-03-08T11:04:14.592-05:002018-03-08T11:04:14.592-05:00So what I reject in the story of Odysseus isn’t th...So what I reject in the story of Odysseus isn’t the goodness of the fact that his rationality makes for a sustainable enterprise. I’m opposed instead to the counterfactuality of the myths that dictate his main goals in life. Odysseus cares about returning home to his family because he knows his place according to ignoble social conventions, which he accepts. According to the myths, he lacks the hubris to attempt to transcend his station and to threaten the world with chaos. This conservatism is opposed to social progress, to novelty, and thus to art. Greek mythology is all about social stasis, the wisdom of maintaining the status quo. But the real status quo is the Hobbesian state of nature in which we function as animals or as deluded automatons. I would prefer a sustainable, more enlightened way of life that needn’t resort to myths that conflict with cosmicism (that is, with the upshot of philosophical naturalism). <br /><br />https://www.iep.utm.edu/hobmoral/#H4<br /><br />http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2018/03/outer-and-inner-gods-encroachment-of.html<br /><br />http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2015/08/the-incoherence-of-naturalism.html<br /><br />http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2017/11/reason-progress-and-frankfurt-school.html<br />Benjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-53004912977908735212018-03-08T11:03:59.908-05:002018-03-08T11:03:59.908-05:00You distinguish between Odyssean and Promethean ap...You distinguish between Odyssean and Promethean approaches, but I don’t think that’s the right distinction exactly (unless you mean “Promethean” to be synonymous with “Satanic,” which it’s not in the context of Greek mythology). Mind you, both Prometheus and Satan are punished for violating the established order, according to the myths. But the issue, again, is the anthropocentric assumption of obsolete myths (mass fictions). In Greek mythology, Prometheus figures in a cautionary tale against rebelling against the natural order. In that respect, I’d put Prometheus in the same category as Odysseus, Aristotelian ethics, and Daoism. Hobbes might be in the same boat, if you read him as being a vulgar naturalist and a Philistine who denies the virtual miracle of human creativity. The problem for these naturalists is that our inner nature is paradoxically free to create higher, anti-“natural” orders governed according to special laws that take account of their emergent properties. The fact that the universe is carved up in this way (not just on Earth and in human societies) makes metaphysical naturalism somewhat empty, as I’ve argued (link below). The chaos or irrationality of subatomic doings makes them as free as us, in some respect, which is why nature isn’t static but evolves different orders of being (from physics to chemistry to biology to sociology, etc.). Still, natural creativity is monstrous whereas ours is honourable, given the standards of tragic heroism.<br /><br />But if we’re talking about “satanic wisdom” or the gambit of creating a new world in defiance of nature-as-wilderness (or as consisting of clichéd regularities), then yes, we should recognize that there’s no guarantee that this adventure is viable. In the context of neoliberalism, technoscience and instrumental reason (utilitarianism, which leads to mass consumerism and population growth) do seem self-destructive, which is the environmentalist’s point. I often describe that fact without prescribing it. I would prefer a sustainable form of existential rebellion, but because of the “satanic” nature of our undertaking, we should recognize our tragic potential; we’re up against a monstrous universe, and history is a high-wire act.<br /><br />The basis of your question, then, is the ambiguity of Odysseus’s rationality. Even satanic rebels against the natural order should be wise enough to attempt to avoid self-destruction. In that sense, we should be instrumentally rational. But that’s not really what instrumentalism is about, according to the Frankfurt School (link below). The hidden point of instrumentalism is that the masses think only of means, leaving the choice of ends up to the masters of society (as in Marx’s view of the ideology supporting the social superstructure). So Odysseus succeeds in reaching his family and his home and in resisting the temptation to transcend that animal mission (to be godlike or posthuman), but in that respect he’s left the choice of his ultimate values up to Greek culture, to the anthropocentric myths that serve mainly the power elites of his day (as opposed to women or the slaves, for example). <br />Benjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-39390763789934480912018-03-08T11:03:15.224-05:002018-03-08T11:03:15.224-05:00You’ve presented me with an interesting challenge ...You’ve presented me with an interesting challenge for clarification. I believe I see the source of the problem. <br /><br />First of all, no, I don’t advocate a short-sighted, careless and suicidal attempt at transcendence, as opposed to the careful and rational aspects of the Odyssean handling of nature. This is why I reject antinatalism, because I’m in favour of preserving the anomaly of our species. What I reject in Homer and Greek mythology isn’t the wisdom of being careful enough to avoid self-destruction (if that avoidance is possible). Instead, I reject the dehumanizing lie of Greek mythology which sustains that conservatism. The problem is the anthropocentrism, because it conflicts with cosmicism. So the question is how to sustain technoscientific progress or instrumentalism (the rational getting of what we want) so as to facilitate our existential authenticity as opposed to subduing the masses with myths that falsify our relation to nature. I’m opposed to anthropocentric stories because they’re clichéd and they foster arrogance and other such vices. Now, ancient Greek culture is complicated, as emerges in Ferry’s book and in the above article, because the Greeks had their myths but also their tragic poems and plays. If Odysseus could have sought to return home with a tragic mindset, as opposed to conceiving of his mission as a God-given duty to maintain cosmic order, to work with the gods as opposed to creating a new, transcendent world, I’d have no problem with him.<br /><br />Hobbes also complicates matters because his writing is confused or unclear on some of these issues, as you can see from the encyclopedia article linked below (see sections 4.a and c). (I don’t discuss Hobbes in the above article, but I do say something about him elsewhere, also linked below.) The question about Hobbes is whether his naturalism entailed that we’re robots or that we have the capacity to transcend the animal life cycle. This was the same issue that stood between Scott Bakker and me. I think we should oppose natural regularities in so far as they’re commonplace or repulsive, and that includes human nature. But here we encounter a semantic issue, which is the difference between metaphysical naturalism and nature (wilderness) as it figures in the distinction between “natural” and “artificial.” Metaphysically, everything is natural in so far as it’s indirectly or directly explained by scientific methods. Thus, our capacity for transcendence, for creativity, artificiality and revolt against the wilderness would be part of the living-dead flow of nature, since it would derive from our brain which will one day be fully explained by cognitive scientists. But that broadest sense of “natural” becomes clumsy since it precludes us from taking note of the virtual miracle of artificiality, of the existential rebellion against the undead world, that is, against the world that’s only mindlessly creative and that thereby mocks sentient creativity with its simulations of intelligent design that surpass our works and thus disgust enlightened folks by reminding us of life’s absurdity and tragedy.<br /><br />So Hobbes says we’re machines and egotists, but the bulk of his account recognizes the opposite, which is that we we’re miraculous (anti-natural) in our ability to transcend our base nature (what I’d call our undead, animal side), and to act as godlike artists. Those living in the state of nature are the true robots, whereas with the social contract we rise above “the natural” in the second, non-metaphysical sense. That is, we create an artificial world that’s opposed to nature-as-wilderness. This artificial world of the social contract is supported by myths of morality (to support the anomalies of altruism and self-sacrifice) and absolute sovereignty—except that instead of concealing how society works with noble lies, Hobbes is modern in revealing the unsettling truth to the masses who aren’t ready for it, which would be Leo Strauss’s criticism. For Hobbes, the sovereign has only natural, not divine rights.<br />Benjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-59840739334305056702018-03-08T03:11:11.389-05:002018-03-08T03:11:11.389-05:00Hello Ben,
As a longtime reader of your blog I ha...Hello Ben,<br /><br />As a longtime reader of your blog I have always understood your view to be that humans reject the inhuman world in the sense that they seek to replace it with artificial worlds (noosphere and technosphere, etc.) even though we know our quest is almost certainly doomed on the cosmic timescale. <br /><br />I read this article a few days after finishing reading Hobbes' Leviathan, and what struck me was that you seem to be saying here that the Satanic or Promethean character of modernity involves not only all that, but also a rejection of what Hobbes would call the laws of preserving our own natures (the laws of nature) because of the manifest inhumanity of the universe in relation to us. <br /><br />You seem to claim that as in Antigone, the modern world's struggle against the indifference of the natural order is actually consciously (or nearly consciously) suicidal. We destroy the systems which support human life on earth in order to achieve a brief moment of glory as masters of a planet and defiant venturers beyond it. In punishment our descendents will perhaps be tied to a much more barren planet in which perhaps pollution or radioactive waste eats at their liver rather than Zeus' eagle as in the story of Prometheus. <br /><br />Do you really mean to say that this sort of self-destruction is really in some sense superior to a more moderate, careful quest for mastery of the cosmos along the lines of the Odyssean approach to achieving goals? I am of course starting from the pragmatist (and Hobbesian) perspective that holds that while it might be that the goodness of human goals from the view from nowhere is philosophically dubious, there is nothing dubious about those goals being good to humans, and on the other hand it seems hubristic to think that humans could even possibly abnegate our parochial perspective to such an extent that our goals become less human-centric. I don't see how this satanic rush for power, or even the aesthetic perspective, is any less anthropocentric than living in accord with the laws of sustaining our own nature, or how anything else could be either. The distinction between the Odyssean and Promethean approaches as you describe them then, seems to me to be merely a longterm perspective vs a short term perspective. We can trudge along towards greater and greater sustainable power carefully, or we can burn briefly in glory and extinguish ourselves after burning up all our fuel. What is superior about the second approach? If we follow Hobbes in claiming that the God revealed by nature, who appears personal to humans because they are social creatures, "declares" it a law of nature to seek peace (in Hobbes' sense of the term, closer to Pax Romana than to pacifism), and places violent death as the natural(istic) punishment for transgression of the law, why is it naive to obey, even if that God is objectively impersonal? The natural punishments accrue all the same, and I am unsure where the honor is in self-destructing as a response to the world's indifference to our preferences. The logic here appears similar to hari kari. <br /><br />I say this all combatively, but I wouldn't raise the challenge at all except that I generally find your views very formidable and well-founded, and after digesting the article for a few days, I am still not sure whether I have misunderstood your basic point, just don't understand your line of argument in favor of it, or disagree with your actual view. <br /><br />My apologies if any of that is poorly written, I am a bit low on sleep at the moment.<br /><br />RespectfullyAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-85319324329899774182018-02-16T10:21:12.447-05:002018-02-16T10:21:12.447-05:00Thanks for the suggestion. At first glance, it loo...Thanks for the suggestion. At first glance, it looks like Upton is a traditionalist like Julius Evola or Rene Guenon. Just to clarify, Upton seems to demonize postmodernism in the cheap, childlike way, by taking satanism to be something other than a literary symbol or a rhetorical tactic. If he thinks Satan or the Antichrist is historically or theologically real, his views have nothing to do with mine. <br /><br />Modernity is clearly satanic in the sense that it's a Promethean rebellion against our naive conservatism and our nature worship and traditional notions of divine prohibitions. But "Satan" is only a literary device, not the name of a real person. Ditto for "God" and "Christ."Benjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-23059718084175033602018-02-16T04:59:24.200-05:002018-02-16T04:59:24.200-05:00Wow you would really enjoy Charles Uptons " T...Wow you would really enjoy Charles Uptons " The System of AntiChrist" , he's a Catholic turned Sufi mystic<br />Cheers !Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com