Posted on 11/10/2008 11:37:17 AM PST by betty boop
Yet as President of the United States, he will be required to govern (not "rule") in First Reality. I sure do hope he's up to it.
ping for future study
This entire election was a textbook example of the Hegelian Dialectic.
bookmark for later
Chuck Hagel? /s
Here's something I wrote nearly six years ago...
Occultism is more about the belief that nature, and the various entities/personalities that inhabit it, can be successfully manipulated by humans into granting said humans some favor.In short, all of creation is humankind's personal vending machine, and the whole magic thing is just about learning how to use exact change.
Christianity isn't a religion of manipulation - it's a religion of ethics. Our relationship with God is based on our ethical standing before Him. No amount of relics, or icons, or potions, or incantations can change that. God is not some impersonal force that we can manipulate if we're skilled enough. The occultist's beef with Christianity is that it places humankind permanently subservient to a single diety, instead of allowing them to pick and choose their leaders (and allegiances), as if they were simply voting for their next senator.
Indeed.
Hegel has been enormously influential in the post-Enlightenment period. It seems to me he has two major lines of intellectual descent, the Nietzchean and the Marxian, and both are, to my mind, pernicious to the health of a decent, well-ordered society committed to the preservation of liberty under a rule of law of equal justice for all. To put it mildly.
The line of descent through Friederich Nietzche led to anarchism as further developed by such notable anarchists as Mikhail Bukhanin and Antonio Gramsci. The line of descent via Karl Marx led to communism, and to such notables as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, et al., and in contemporary times to Saul Alinsky.
Since I still don't know the first thing about BHO from his own mouth (and any inferences I might draw from his past radical associations are Verboten (unless you want to be labeled a racist), I cannot say whether he's read "the masters" on the above little list. But somehow I feel assured that his handlers, such as David Axelrod, are intimately familiar with the anarchist/socialist/communist literature.
Salamander, I just LOVE your tag line!!! LOLOL!
That seems to sum it up pretty well, Alex Murphy!
Thank you so much for your excellent insights!
It’s good to study up on eschatology and how Hegel built off an understanding of Daniel. Unfortunately, the humanistic basis of Hegel, Kant and Marx have led to many a miserable political conclusion in our worldly systems of government.
Obama must be challenged daily to witness that he is a fallen creature saved only by the blood of Christ. Any other answer is demonic, yes, demonic.
You’re invited to the party!!! Hope you can come if you’re free to join us, and have the interest....
The first thought you provoked today has to do with Ayn Rand: I think that, despite her claims to the contrary (that she was an Aristotelian), her system of Objectivism actually reduces to a fundamentally Hegelian system....
Along those lines, Whittaker Chambers famously dimissed Ms. Rand's philosophy as a cheap knock-off of Nietzsche's, and in that he was probably correct. But I was struck by how well the following seems to describe the basis of her philosophy:
The first “partner” of the Great Hierarchy that had to go was God. This was necessary in order to make room for Hegel as the “new Christ” who would usher in the “third religion” of his System of Absolute Science, so to be the Messiah, the New Christ, of the new age a-borning. The point here is that with God “gone,” man himself becomes a pure abstraction and, as such, an ideologically manipulatable entity and nothing more.
When you look at her work with a critical eye, it is fairly evident that Rand selected a set of axioms that seemed to fit a pre-selected conclusion. (Her axioms might best be described as the 10 Commandments, carefully edited to remove those pesky references to God). I've long thought that the fatal weakness of Rand's philosophy was the inability of her "fundamental" axioms to withstand careful scrutiny. In that context, it's instructive to assess Rand's supposedly reality-based conclusions in the light of the scientific evidence for evolution (which Rand's philosophy would presumably consider to be determinative). Her axioms do not fare well at all. For example, in a world where evolution holds sway one can quite logically argue that we are necessarily a means to our children's ends and not, as Rand would have it, a means to our own ends.
And thus, "it’s interesting to note that many students of the [Rand's philosophy] consistently over time have reported that to be drawn into the “magic circle” of this enterprise is to enter into a perfectly logically self-consistent construction — so long as one does not use the criteria of First Reality to judge it." Where Rand's ideas are concerned, Libertarians are the most obvious example of this phenomenon, but we conservatives are prone to it as well.
There is much in your discourse that is useful for us conservatives, in this time when we find our philosophy in a terrible state of disarray.
You correctly observe that Mr. Obama's campaign is a fine example of a "Second Reality" movement. I would say that we conservatives are guilty of the same thing, albeit we're a lot worse at the process than the Democrats seem to be. Our "conservative" tenets seem to have been reduced to the level of slogans and catch-phrases -- they're like Hegel's "magic words," in that we seem to repeat them over and over, hoping that they'll create the desired effect. (That we keep repeating them to less and less effect may suggest that we could be headed toward Mr. Nietzsche's unhappy fate.)
What we really need, is a return to our own "First Reality." We need to expound what the Declaration of Independence proclaims: "We hold these truths to be self-evident...."
And we need to convince people of the truth of what John Adams famously said:
"We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."
It is difficult to imagine a politically "conservative" society such as we all claim to desire, operating within the context of a society that is "unbridled by morality and religion." Well, guess what: we live in a society whose culture is very much influenced by media and entertainment organs for whom Adams' brand of "morality and religion" are onerous at best. While I don't believe that the main body of the American population is actually opposed, much less irredeemably lost to "morality and religion," many people aren't actively for them, either.
I would propose that what "conservatism" needs most, is what one might call a "First Reality Project." We need to understand the reality we actually inhabit rather than assuming (pretending) that we live in a reality that we claim to desire.
We also need to figure out how to effectively expose and explain a "Second Reality" such as is being propounded by Mr. Obama -- without falling into a "Second Reality" trap of our own. (The fall of Mr. Newt Gingrich comes to mind....)
Though by no means comprehensive, the line of descent is from Lenin, Derzhinsky (?sp), and Lucacs (inventers of the bogus Marxist thinktank, the Frankfurt School) to Gramsci, the Frankfurt School (invited to the USA by progressive John Dewey), to Alinsky, to BHO.
I have no idea about what you or Hegel are talking about.
I was afraid of that. Which is why I continue to pray for you.
Bless you : ) I need all the prayers I can get. I am having a really tough time deciding on a vacation, diving in Belize or diving in Palau? I need God to tell me where the diving will be better.
Just simply brilliant insights, r9etb! I just knew you would come at this problem from an "interesting angle!" And I think you (and Whittaker Chambers) are right, that "When you look at [Rand's] work with a critical eye, it is fairly evident that Rand selected a set of axioms that seemed to fit a pre-selected conclusion."
Doctrinal thinking (or "system-building" in general) usually does not disclose its most fundamental premises/presuppositions; instead, it masks them by appeals to "axioms." But it sure knows where it wants to go — to the end or purpose it seeks to justify. If it's got a great big libido dominandi behind it (as arguably was the case with Hegel), then it can effectively be established without an appeal to reason or actual experience at all.
Ayn Rand, as influential as she's been, simply wasn't in that class of ideologue. Her main problem (it seems to me) is she hadn't mastered the Greeks well enough. If she understood anything of what they were really up to, she wouldn't have turned Plato into a Socialist (or even Communist), and Aristotle into a Libertarian.
Jeepers, she lost me right there.
Thank you so much for your elegant, brilliant essay-post!
Well then, I pray He shall not disappoint you!
Bon voyage!
p.s.: In short, conservatives need to be reminded of exactly what they are "conserving." If it isn't the foundations of American culture and the Constitution, then I don't know what it could possibly be.
And yes, Newt Gingrich is a most instructive case. His analysis of the ills afflicting the Body Politic had it all right; but finally, he gave free rein to his ego. And so the problem was no longer about what is right, what is just, but only about how Newt could best ride the tide of his own genius.
Human nature is "frail" indeed — even among the "great ones."
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