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
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.
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.
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....)
It appears to be a drawn out assertion that there is no escape from theology - that even engaging in a conscious effort to avoid theology is an explicit expression of theology.
Philosophy may invalidate others’ reasoning due to logical fallacies, but it is impotent in establishing positive truth.
Voegelin's philosophy starts with an article of faith and therefore can only produce new articles of faith.
You got a lot about Hegel right, but you got Nietzsche entirely wrong. He despised Hegel’s notion of progress and took it to its most extreme so that we might notice its depravity.
Many people have referred to Obama as a "messiah" - tongue in cheek of course around here - but I suspect quite a few have fallen for the magic and believe his Second Reality is "real."
As you say, he will be held accountable for dealing in the First Reality. I predict many disappointments among his followers.
I'm pinging a few others for their insights.
I think Hegel is wrong, but he's wrong brilliantly and even helpfully.
I do NOT think that he tried to make philosophy the cookbook that he is accused of making it. I do think that often the lesser followers of a philosopher, even those who do not professedly turn him on his head, are more liable to a kind of spiritually blind defense of the philosopher's "system" which ends up making the system an idol and entirely misses the truth which the philosopher himself meant the system to serve and to portray.
I think SOME academics and those who try to take the life, love, and blood out of study, who are committed to study as an astringent and life-denying activity end up missing the point and tossing around amazing judgments and condemnations based not on what this or that writer actually said but on their extrapolation of philosophical musings into books of instructions. Some don't need Barron's Outlines or Cliff notes because they bring that approach to anything they read.
Can you tell I'm a tad peeved by this article? Having read (in March of 1971, as I recall -- get my my Geritol with a tequila chaser, please) Hegel's early explicitly Christian stuff, while I say again that I think he turns out to be wrong, I am not going to through him under the bus, at least not with the enthusiasm of this writer.
Applied philosophy ping
bookmark to read fully
Thank you Betty, for a most relevant article. I struggled through it several days ago and am just now re4ading the thread.
We are most certainly beseiged by the rule of godlessness in our highest government offices. The days to come will be dramatic and powerful and will almost certainly determine the future of our republic as a constitutional nation under God.
I am humbled that we have patriots of depth and wisdom among us. They will be sorely needed.
Thank you Jean. I got so much from the article. 1 John 5 — Who overcomes the world? And how? It surely isn’t by applying a dialectic . . .
This is excellent. Thanks for posting.