Promiscuous Neurotheologist, vol.6-ish

[Due to the concurrent State of the Union address on one side of a split-screen, and the real-life film noir shoot-out of a disgruntled ex-LAPD on the snowy mountainside 90 minutes outside Los Angeles, we join another episode of the OG already in progress.]

...about a passage from Tom Robbins's first novel, Another Roadside Attraction:

Jesus: Hey dad.

God: Yes, son?

Jesus: Western Civilization followed me home this morning. Can I keep it?

God: Certainly not boy. And put it down this minute. You don't know where it's been.

Darwin Day From Here On Out: Feb.12: Pass It On!
As I write this, it's a few minutes Pacific Standard Time after Darwin Day has passed. February 12 was Charles Darwin's 204th birthday, and it's the latest volley by those who seek to push-back against the Creationists. (Those of us persuaded by scientific thought may be aware of others who do not - 46% of Unistatians in one poll said they believed in a "Young Earth" theory of creationism: God created the Earth about 10,000 years ago. The article linked to earlier in this 'graph seems mostly about a Creationist from Australia named Ken Ham, who is largely responsible for the rather clueless folk among us seeing pictures of Adam sitting next to his vegetarian dinosaur...in case you are interested in that reality tunnel..)

Karen Armstrong Enlightens Me
As Karen Armstrong wrote in A History of God, "Science has been felt to be threatening only by those Western Christians who got into the habit of reading the scriptures literally and interpreting doctrines as though they were matters of fact." (p.379) Ms. Armstrong then goes on to cover a period of theology I hadn't known much about before: the radical theologians of the 1960s who embraced Nietzsche's "God is dead" idea. In a book I have not read, Thomas J. Altizer's 1966 The Gospel of Christian Atheism, Armstrong quotes Altizer: "Only by accepting and even willing the death of God in our experience can we be liberated from a transcendent beyond, an alien beyond which has been emptied and darkened by God's self-alienation in Christ."

This reads like mumbo-jumbo to me, but then I'm no trained theologian; the lucid thought and prose of Ms. Armstrong unpacks it for me. There had to be a silence around God before He could become meaningful again. Altizer had gone on, mystically, about the pain of suffering and the dark night of the soul. Yes, but...why again? Armstrong: "All our old conceptions of divinity had to die before theology could be reborn. We were waiting for a language and a style in which God could once more become a possibility. Altizer's theology was a passionate dialectic which attacked the dark God-less world in the hope that it would give up its secret." (p.380)

I'll note that this book came out one year before Derrida made his first big splash in Unistat. I mention Derrida here because this Altizer dude, as filtered through Armstrong to my reading eyes, seems well-fed enough of an intellectual to entertain such ideas about "god." Armstrong mentions that the 1960s "death of God theologians" were criticized for their affluent, middle-class white America perspectives.

From my perspective, the idea there were intellectuals with the theology degree who had embraced Nietzsche's "God is dead" idea is marvelous enough. Armstrong also cites Paul Van Buren's 1963 The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, which argued that we can't talk about God acting in the world anymore because science and technology had become a myth that had superseded God. The best we can do is hold on to Jesus, and forget God; Jesus at least taught us liberation, and how to be free.

                                                       Karen Armstrong

Yet another 1960s theologian who embraced God's death was William Hamilton, whose contribution to  a book of essays, Radical Theology and the Death of God (1966), co-written with the aforementioned Altizer, found no God in the world of Unistat in the Sixties. Furthermore, Unistat had never had a great theological tradition of its own, and was always more utopian. Hamilton noted that Luther abandoned his cloister and went out into the world of people, looking for... not God but the spirit of Jesus among them. Hamilton says this was the way to be a theologian in Unistat in the Sixties: find Jesus in the City, among his neighbors and among technology, power, money, and sex.

Easy Remarks: Sure, these guys were white, privileged and steeped in...I'm guessing Heidegger. But they sure make a hell of a lot more sense than whatever sort of "Hate thy neighbor and the poor/Rich Folks are where it's at and by the way science and rational thought is for godless heathens and I can't wait to see 'em fry in Hell" that I see in far too many Unistatians these days.

A Brief Word On Fred N.
Nietzsche's "God is dead" seems to have become his most popular catch-phrase, but the one that's always seemed more interesting - almost zen koan-ish - is his notion and phrase "Will to power." So far my favorite definition of it is from (surprise!), Robert Anton Wilson, who parsed it out thus:

"The spirit of abundance and creativity, which is not One, not a final principle or a God-in-disguise, but the resultant of the forces that make up the mesh of Chaos." - from "A New Writer: F.W. Nietzsche"

[We now join As The World Turns, already in progress.]

William S. Burroughs and Giambattista Vico on Immortality, and Other Ragtag Observations on Death

First: A Gnostic: Simon Magus
In Jacques Lacarriere's little gem of a book, The Gnostics, he's discussing the diffusion of gnostic ideas "along the great routes of the Orient," on "the road to Samaria," and the wonderfully odd figure of Simon Magus, one of history's uber-heretics. His ideas contradicted the ideas of the Apostles quite radically. For what would turn out to be the orthodox view, the Apostles said a human's soul is immortal, no matter what he or she does; we are all condemned for eternity to burnish or tarnish that soul, know the depths of hell, or paradisical delights. Simon preached, or railed rather thus: We all have a fragment of God in us. We are special creatures because, for example, we can use language and reason. But these are potentialities, not eternal. We must use it or lose it. (In the 20th century, we found that if a child was not exposed to any language by age seven or so, their brain's innate language acquisitive feature soon dissipates. And who really "reasons" much even these days?) Simon says: we have the capacity for speech, grammar, and geometry...but it's up to use to seize the day and work that stuff, get really good at it. The point is: we have the capacity. Simon seemed to think we also had the capacity for immortality, but time's a wastin': let's get to it, figure it out...

We must cultivate an attitude towards our aptitudes. That spark of he Divine in us is not eternal. It can only become eternal if we feed that spark, make it into a fire. Otherwise, we revert to nothingness.

And here's how the eloquent Lacarriere unpacks Simon Magus's heretical view of immortality: "For the gnostic, the die is cast, here, before death. (No wonder Simon Magus was hated by the orthodox! - the OG) Which is why he feels this sense of anguish in the face of time and the brevity of the human span, a feeling that is so characteristic of the Gnostic sensibility, and one which is only remotely related to the melancholy Jeremiads of the poets who lament the passing of the days: every moment of our lives is counted, for each is a door opening on to immortality or the void." (p.49)

Another gnostic heretic, Valentinus, is quoted: "Make death die."

It is because of the Gnostics, the Sufis, the Taoists, much of Buddhism, some mystical Judaism, and some Hinduism and certain Christian mystics that I find a line of the so-called "new atheism" interesting, and that line says something like, "Religion is too important to be left to the believers, the faithful." See Alain de Botton's views in this article, which also mentions Nassim Taleb.

It would seem the Extropian/Transhumanist manifestoes echo certain things some gnostic sects were already groping towards, in the first two centuries of the Common Era.

A Quick Thought and/or Inchoate Koan
Let's say the worldwide army of scientists working on the Death Problem solve it. A few huge key findings fall into place, the rest is like knocking over dominoes, and WHAM!: we've got immortality. Is this something like Sisyphus pushing his stone all the way to the top of the mountain, and over the edge, finally, wiping his hands and going home?

Burroughs and Vico
After Norman Mailer published his book Ancient Evenings, Burroughs, from roughly 1972 till death, showed a Mailer influence with an Egyptian-based death as mythic antagonist, which comes out in unique Burroughsian full-force with his use of the "seven souls" one has and must deal with correctly in the afterlife, largely derived ultimately from The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Here, have a listen to Ol' Bill reading from his novel The Western Lands, accompanied by the fantastic electronic-world music of Bill Laswell's band Material:

Here's the lyrics as WSB reads them; he added a few bits here and there as improv, like "Sort of thing you might see on a screen in an Indian restaurant in Panama." I confess the first time I heard this piece I went into an altered state, and when WSB says the first three souls are immortal and go back to heaven for another vessel, but the last four souls must "take their chances with the subject in the land of the dead," I was floored. O! The primal poetry of it all!

My blogging colleague Oz Fritz is all over this soul-after-death bardo trip, and I eagerly refer to his recent post HERE.

Throughout Burroughs's dazzling oeuvre, there's an obvious obsession with memory and vital, sexual young men (some of this for obvious reasons); but he also liked to remember himself as young and vital when he was an old man. He thought and wrote about death in ways that few of the candidates for Great American Novelist did. And apparently, from at least around the time of the appearance of the book that would make him famous, Naked Lunch, in 1959, he'd dreamed about afterlives. Personally, I do not think much about an afterlife, possibly because of my overweening materialism and non-religiosity. But I'm fascinated by what cultural anthropologists have told us about the various beliefs about death. Someone once said, "We are all greater artists than we realize." When it comes to religious ideas about life and death I see them as sort of collective artworks, and who knows? Maybe I'm just lacking imagination, and some of these ideas are "right"? How hilarious! How ironic! How...marvelous to contemplate.

Back to Burroughs.

In his book from 1995, (he died in 1997), My Education: A Book of Dreams, WSB recalls a dream he'd had right after Naked Lunch was published:

Airport. Like a high school play, attempting to convey a spectral atmosphere. One desk onstage, a gray woman behind the desk with the cold waxen face of the intergalactic bureaucrat. She is dressed in a gray-blue uniform. Airport sounds from a distance, blurred, incomprehensible, then suddenly loud and clear. "Flight sixty-nine has been----" Static... Fades into the distance... "Flight..."


Standing to one side of the desk are three men, grinning with joy at their prospective destinations. When I present myself at the desk, the woman says: "You haven't had your education yet." 


The semantics of "education" seem vital here: by 1959 WSB had long dropped out of Harvard, where he studied medicine and anthropology, and had travelled and written a couple of novels and many later-to-be-published letters of literary delight to weirdos like myself. Aside from formal education, he had earlier astonished young Ginsberg and Kerouac with his erudition, and shaped their thinking - and other notable "Beat" types - mostly via his learning of Arcane Things and WSB's spectral presentation of himself. It's easy (and valid, methinks) to surmise the dream's semantics of education had to do with imagination/narrative/tapping into post-terrestrial circuits of brain/magick/experimentation.

It was much later that WSB began to concentrate on the cosmi-comic high drama of Death as the Adversary, like a character in multifaceted forms. And he drew from many sources regarding this, not just the Egyptians. Emotionally, a very strong actuating force for his thoughts about death had to do with his beloved cats. I recall reading once - I forget where - that Burroughs thought nuclear annihilation would be particularly horrible because then his cats would die.

(At this point in my rambling little blogspew I'm quite tempted to link to articles on cats and taxoplasmosis and its potential to make humans quite a bit odder than they would've been, if only for the irony of someone I thought was maybe Unistat's greatest writer during the second half of the 20th century, and who used the metaphor of language-as-virus extensively, but I will just link this and you go ahead and make of it what you will. Hmmm...Ezra Pound loved cats too, feeding them all over Rapallo...)

Yes, but what about Vico? He had something to say about immortality and the afterlife too? Of course he did.

Vico thought a looming large and distinctive feature of human law, as opposed to natural law, was that we humans bury our dead. And with ceremony. (We have good reason to believe Neanderthals did too, but there was no way Vico could've been on to that.)

Vico:


Let us imagine a brutish state in which human corpses are left unburied as carrion for crows and dogs. Such bestial behavior clearly belongs to the world of uncultivated fields and uninhabited cities, in which people wandered like swine, eating acorns amid the rotting corpses of their dead kin. This is why burials were rightly defined in a lofty Latin phrase as "the covenants of the human race," foedera humani generis, and were characterized less grandly by Tacitus as "exchanges of humanity," humanitatis commercia."

Then Vico enumerates many books he's had the privilege to get hold of, about peoples from far-flung areas of the world. What all these books prove is that "all pagan nations clearly agree in the view that the souls of the unburied remain restless on the earth and wander around their corpses: which is to say, souls do not die with their bodies but are immortal." Vico doesn't have much at all to say about what happens to anyone's soul after death. But I do like his proto-ghost/zombie vision idea. I like it in the same way Burroughs talks about the at-times treacherous roads to the Western Lands. I don't "believe" it, but it makes for tremendous poetry.

The end of the section of The New Science in which Vico here discusses burial as a human law, culminates with this quote from Seneca:

"When we discuss immortality, we must grant considerable importance to the consensus of humankind, who either fear or worship the spirits of the underworld. I follow this general belief." (section #337)

Nietzsche On This Topic...
...Seems to lead us by some sort of circumambient commodius vicus of recirculation to Nietzsche's The Antichrist, and back to a quasi-Simon Magus-like gnostic view. In section #58, Fred N. rails against the quasi-Neoplatonic "life is better up there" crowd, where the real immortality lies. For these weak, unimaginative folk, the Good Life is to be found after death. And before orthodox Christianity became the master of Rome, Epicurus had already battled against these types. I will leave it to the better minds who know the gnostics (such as Simon Magus) and Nietzsche to say just where and how they diverge with regard to immortality, but clearly, in The Antichrist, Fred N. doesn't dig the Christian version either:

"One should read Lucretius to comprehend what Epicurus fought: not paganism but "Christianity," by which I mean the corruption of souls by the concepts of guilt, punishment, and immortality. He fought the subterranean cults which were exactly like a latent form of Christianity: to deny immortality was then nothing less than a real salvation."

Final Thoughts: Professor George Carlin
"When I die I don't want to be buried, but I don't want to be cremated either. I want to be blown up. Put me on a pile of explosives and blow me up. Or throw my body from a helicopter. That would be fun. One stipulation: wherever I land, you have to leave me there. Even if it's the mayor's lawn. Just let me lie there. But keep the dogs away." - N&S:9


"If I had my choice of how to die I would like to be sitting on the crosstown bus and suddenly burst into flames." - N&S:10


"Isn't it time we stopped wasting valuable land on cemeteries? Talk about an idea whose time has passed: 'Let's put all the dead people in boxes and keep them in one part of town.' What kind of medieval bullshit is that? I say, plow these motherfuckers up and throw them away. Or melt them down. We need the phosphorus for farming. If we're going to recycle, let's get serious." - N&S:79

Intellectual Reputations: The Long View

I'm going to take as the paradigmatic case ancient Greek philosophers.

Socrates willfully quaffed some hemlock, probably in 399 BCE. He'd gotten busted. The charge: not believing in the gods and corrupting the youth of Athens. You know it's a lousy political climate when those in charge go for this kind of persecution. And so it goes. For the next 100 years philosophy exploded all over Greece, with the founding of many diverse schools, and almost all of them were founded by followers of Socrates, who never wrote a book in his life. (That we know of.)

Who were the most influential figures following in Socrates's wake? The Skeptics, The Cynics (which, every time I read about ancient Greek history, I still think sound like a punk rock band...and there is a very technically adept and thrilling - in my view - heavy metal band right now called Cynic, but I digress...) had as their founder Antisthenes, who was a known associate of Socrates. Antistenes listened to another of Socrates's pupils say there was a realm of Pure Being out there somewhere, and said bullshit: there are only bodies and pain, and that pain is true and good and beautiful, just look at all the great hero stories. (Why did the Pure Being guy seem to "make it big" while Antisthenes is...well, who evuh hoidda the guy, am I right?)

Diogenes of Sinope, AKA Diogenes the Cynic, can be traced to Antisthenes although there is no proof they ever met. Diogenes was said to admire Antisthenes's thought. Diogenes the Cynic said local culture is arbitrary and not special and he declared himself a cosmopolitan. His father had minted coins but Diogenes defaced them, made a virtue of poverty by living in a tub and carried a lantern around during the day, declaring he was searching for just one honest man. What a character! What a classic wise-ass! In his day Diogenes of Sinope was a major player, mocking Alexander and getting away with it (see Colbert, Stephen, White House Press Club Dinner Speech), and making Plato's life miserable by calling him out on his bogus use of Socrates's good name. Picture some guy as a mixture of Abbie Hoffman and Don Rickels, in a ragged not-quite tunic, and you have my interior image of Diogenes. (Of course he's still speaking some language I don't understand at all, but his rhythm is so deadly, his delivery so masterful, I laff at everything.) The way Chomsky has consistently attacked intellectuals in our lifetime? Diogenes was his day's intellectual anti-intellectual. But I get the feeling his tone was more Carlin than Chomsky. O! Diogenes the Cynic! We hardly knew ye. (And the textbooks for Philosophy 101 don't mention him these days, do they?)

Euclides of Megara - not the same "Euclid" who wrote the foundational text on geometry - was a celebrity philosopher and friend/pupil of Socrates too. He founded a school that made a big deal about argumentation and debate, and the Megarians did pioneering work in logic.

                                         Here's a rendering of what Socrates supposedly looked like. Nietzsche said 
                                        in Twilight of the Idols that Socrates was ugly, and questioned if he was even 
                                        Greek at all. Then Nietzsche mentions current 19th c. ideas about ugly people 
                                        as criminal types, which is still a popular notion, though refuted by science.
                                        Did Nietzsche feel threatened by Socrates for some reason? I doubt it.

Some of you may have studied a dialogue called Phaedo. Phaedo was another follower of Socrates, who  founded his own school at Elis, which was hot for awhile but burnt out quickly. The major approaches to knowledge were questioning everything, debate, and a big topic was the value of life itself.

Another one influenced by Socrates was a figure known as Isocrates, whose main game was the development of rhetoric, a man after my own heart.

We're still not to the year 300 BCE yet.

Aristippus was yet another disciple of Socrates, who founded the Cyrenaic school, which carried on in Socrates's tradition of omniquestioning and dialectic. This school culminated with two divergent philosophical stars, Hegesius and Theodorus. Then this school fizzled around 330 BCE. Aristippus was a serene character who thought only our feelings exist for us, and that we were responsible for our own happiness. (Why didn't this catch on in a bigger way and develop down to our time? My answer below.)

Lemme see...who am I missing here? I know there was one more student of Socrates who made a splash, but I just can't re...Oh right: Plato. Plato seemed to notice that Socrates's name was hallowed all over the greater metropolitan Athens area. Plato was not, as an adult, all that taken by his teacher's omniquestioning act; he was a rich kid, much more interested in metaphysics, which were heavily influenced by those extreme weirdos the Pythagoreans. Plato was also interested in aesthetics and politics, which were peripheral concerns among Socrates's students' competing and far more popular schools.

So Plato made Socrates his mouthpiece, even though Socrates was long dead and never really showed much interest in Plato's ideas. A ballsy move, that.

Aristotle studied under Plato, and he took philosophy in yet another direction. You may have heard of this Aristotle guy...He made it to The Show.

Here's the question: Why are Plato and Aristotle the Big Deal these days, and not Aristippus, Diogenes, Phaedo, Euclides, or Theodorus?

The answer - my answer, my educated guess as of the date above - is: the general turns and trends in thought far after these guys were dead have made them immortal thinkers; they had no idea they were going to be a big deal! A lot of it seems like luck to me; they had great ideas, but I don't think the one and only reason they "won out" was because they were "really" the best ideas. There were other fantastic ideas, now long out of favor. These guys - Socrates/Plato/Aristotle - were passionate thinkers, creative, lots of energy, created relatively detailed and coherent systems, and cultivated a large enough network of associates and pupils, but this never guarantees lasting fame. The most we can assume is that, whatever the content, immortal thinkers created a large enough thought-space for subsequent thinkers to play in. Lasting fame seems to me more like a chance operation than what we're led to believe by the textbooks, which tend to enshrine and encourage the idea that, as soon as these guys hit the public stage as Thinkers, a particularly bright star was seen to appear in the East, and a chorus of angels gave the high sign by singing something in four-part harmony, like a Bach fugue. No. Worse: the notion that these guys are big-time because their thought somehow very closely "corresponds" to "the truth"...

(Speaking of J.S. Bach: he had no idea he would be a god to us now. In his day he was thought of as merely the dude who totally shreds on organ. That weird old dude with tons of kids, all hopped up on coffee and smiling, could improvise on the spot a fugue on any given theme: dude's a MANIAC! But Bach had no inkling of what he'd be to us...and he died in 1750 CE. This business of posthumous reputation is a tricky one. We ought to say something similar for the person named William Shakespeare, who died in 1616.)

Back to Socrates/Plato/Aristotle: their reputations waxed and waned and had all kinds of colorful turns before they reached us.

Socrates as an influential figure largely died out around the year 100 CE, probably because he hadn't written anything, but who knows? He's known to us as that iconic figure who appears in Plato's books, first as probably something like how he really was (although Xenophon and Aristophanes should definitely be consulted on this), later as the speaker of Plato's own ideas, which diverged quite a bit from his beloved teacher's.

Plato turned out to be a huge influence on Christianity, Neoplatonism (of course!), gnosticism, the occult, mathematics, and Bertrand Russell's esteemed colleague Alfred North Whitehead said that the history of Western philosophy consisted of "a series of footnotes to Plato."

Aristotle, after minor stardom, got bigger and then, in his old age, scored a chart-topper by being Alexander the Great's tutor. There are stories he was a "millionaire" in his day, but when Alexander died he had to flee for his life in 323 BCE. He had the most interesting road to our day. In his day his ideas - a solution of Platonic idealism dissolved in some materialism - were fairly influential for a couple generations after he died. Then for the next 100 years or so his "school" became more interested in empirical science. Then his school fizzled as Rome became a bigger deal. His own texts were rediscovered around 75-50 BCE and his fame rose again, but the intense ferment of ideas around Greece and Rome (this latter where you went to "make it" as a philosopher, much like rock bands used to go to Hollywood) had his ideas mixed in with Plato's and other's to such an extent that Aristotle (called "Arry" by Ezra Pound) kept moderate fame for the first 600 years of the Common Era, but was thought of as a quasi-Platonic thinker. 

Then, a lull for what is usually known as the Dark Ages in Europe. 

The Muslims recovered Aristotle's texts, transcribed them, and his star shot through the roof. Arry was on top of the world. He was suddenly big in Baghdad. Who could've predicted that? His texts filtered back into medieval Europe, and St. Thomas Aquinas calls him simply "The Philosopher." Arry had a tremendous influence on what we now call Catholicism. That was big-time for Arry's reputation. In the Renaissance, one faction of Humanists idolized him, and used him against a self-described "modern" group of philosophers. 

Aristotle's been the big winner, it seems of all those pupils of Socrates. (Arry was a pupil of a pupil.) But Plato's not far behind. 

I think Aristotle's actual texts have been hugely influential on all our lives, whether we know it or not, a large reason for this being his enormous contribution to logic and especially the Law of the Excluded Middle.

On the other hand and whereas, the diverse interpretations of Plato's texts may have an even bigger influence, because of what I'll call the Legacy Software of his thought. To be absurdly perfunctory about it: the notion that abstract notions, ideas that we can create out of nothing, just imagination, are reified, and have some Real reality somewhere else, but "appear" as a sort of washed-out copy of a copy in our mundane reality. By doing certain things, we get closer to the real Reality. This notion seems hyperseductive to a certain caste of mind. (I see it largely as a mistake in understanding the role of language and metaphor in our nervous systems, but as I say: it's complicated. There are some otherworldy-smart mathematicians who'd dispute me on this, and I'd lose the argument, probably.)

This all seems like a wonderfully perplexing puzzle, which I might try to tease out some other day here, playing the OG role. Suffice: Plato is probably, along with Nietzsche, the greatest writer in Western philosophy, which is ironic because Socrates taught that writing was debased speech and harmed memory and put us further away from getting at the Truth, which was best gotten at by a fierce talking style with others called dialectic. It could be that great writing so dazzles various audiences and readers down the vast channels and throughout history that their ideas will be picked up like shiny objects on a vast beach and used in ways the writer never intended. Or it could be that some aspect of the human nervous system prefers ideas like Plato's metaphysics (in fact, I think as history has marched on we humans have gravitated more and more to a sort of self-medicating psychotropy, whether in thought, or in engagement with others, via technology, or drugs...we want to feel good), and once someone's metaphysics get used by other Leaders and New Schools, under pressure of historical forces and with an insurgent rise in the need to Dream Big...ahhh...but this is blah-blah-blah speculation.

One wonders how large figures like Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Frederic Jameson, and Jacques Lacan - who were major philosophical stars on college campuses in Unistat and Europe in the late 1970s through to around 2000 - will loom in history of philosophy textbooks 100 or 200 years from now? 

I have not proven anything about intellectual reputations in philosophy, but I have tried to make some interesting assertions, and let my Dear Reader(s) do with them as they wish.

A Short Spiel on Axiology

I have previously touched on axiology, or the study of values, HERE. I think I was trying to emphasize a version of the old saw "The personal is political." Among other things I was trying to say...

Jeez: it's difficult to communicate about Big Ideas. Haven't you found that to be true in your own life? We all have passions. I assume most of the people who read this blog know, in some deep way, that what's good for the well-being of their neighbor is often good for oneself. What's good for you can be good for strangers you'll never meet. And substitute "good" for "bad" in those sentences too. But what is "good" or "bad" here?

I think we all have values and strong, passionately held ethical ideas. And morality, which I will define here as careful thought and action about the idea that if we do A then Z might happen. I think thinking-on-your-feet morality is about thinking about what might happen if we do X. Are we ready to make that move, after having thought about it? Our actions will have consequences. And if we're over 18, often this just complicates matters.

And Shakespeare's "Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so," only gets us so far. Billy Shakes is right: we happen to be able to think about what's good or bad or in-between. I assume a cow or  Earth's six-legged majority do not think about good and bad, morality. We got saddled with that at some point in our evolution. (By the way, Montaigne said something along the same lines as The Bard, but earlier. And some scholars are sure Bard had a copy of Montaigne, but I digress...Anyway, I bet someone said something almost exactly the same before Montaigne. Like some Roman. Ovid or someone like that. It's the kinda thing that would get said, and repeated throughout history: can't you just feel it?)

And then there's the sociology of knowledge. Someone - like you or me - makes a strong statement in a group at a gathering. Let's say about some political matter. And someone else pipes up with a definite snarl, "Sez who?" Because they don't agree with something you think is a slam-dunk. Like raising taxes on the rich. Or banking reform. Or sending Cheney and Rumsfeld to The Hague. No. Somehow, your detractor thinks all those things are Bad Ideas. The poor are getting too much socialism, he says. And you nod, roll your eyes, and politely excuse yourself to go get another drink and mosey outside for air.

That's because, with the sociology of knowledge, ideas are shaped by many factors, possibly the largest one being the social and economic situation of the speaker. What's just plain no-brainer stuff to us is "nonsense" to others. And ain't that an existential bitch!

Which brings us back to a study of values, or what philosophers call "axiology." How did you get your values? Were they received from Daddy? From peers? Did you get 'em from reading a whole bunch of books? From a Man of God? Can we elucidate our values, if only to ourselves? Do we recall the personal evolution of some value or another? Do we remember what made us change our minds?

While we cannot alter, overnight, the operating values in our society, we can damned well do something about our own values. Thinking about them, for one. That seems like a biggie. Let us not underestimate the power of that.

I wrote in that earlier blog post about our own hierarchy of values. Because surely: when you think about what are the most valuable ways to "be" and treat other people, or your friends, your neighbors, the people in another area of your country, the people from some remote part of the world, your ideas about ownership, work, money, play, communication, humor, sex, how much is "enough," knowledge, rules, creativity, etc, etc, etc: you'll find you care about some things more than other things.

                          Abraham Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs. Elaborate your own eccentricities in there!

Which is not to slight the things toward the bottom of your hierarchy. They may prove much more important as time goes on. But there probably are a few values that really occupy your thoughts for a hefty portion of your waking day. (Who said "Sex!"?) They are at your top. And that was YOUR CHOICE, right?

And I bet, if you think about your top one or two or three, they have a lot to do with biology. Just a guess...

I said this was gonna be a "short spiel," but my Mr. Loudmouth prolixity and chronic verborrhea has once again gotten the better of me, and you were warned this guy is "overweening," so I end with Fred N:

"All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values."
-Genealogy of Morals


Nietzsche wrote that about 140 years ago. Have the "sciences" done their job? If not, why? Was Fred being too ironically Platonic in asking for "the true" hierarchy? Even if the "sciences" were supposed to underwrite that hierarchy? Has some conspiracy, Vast, Cool, and Unsympathetic, kept the hierarchy from being realized species-wide? If so, whodunnit? Is the hierarchy always and ineluctably a strictly personal thing? When is it not strictly personal? How the fuck do we get out of this mess?

GRAZIE!

Sombunall Philosophical Problems

I picked up the neologism "sombunall" from Robert Anton Wilson, who was heavily influenced by Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics. Because in the sensory-sensual phenomenal-existential world no one can ever say "all" about anything - we are almost always abstracting -  he advocated the practice of using "some but not all" instead, which turned into the new word "sombunall." So far, it has not seemed to catch on, but I'm putting in for sombunall right here, right now, and some but not all of you will find this idea worth practicing, if only to see how it might alter your consciousness over a week or three?

[Exercise: try to say all or "everything" about the gadget you're using now to read this. It's a digital gadget. It's some color or colors. It has words on it. These words indicate other words, people, ideas. If you're using, say, an Apple product, say everything about Steve Jobs: his life, character, his ideas, how he collaborated with others to get the gadget onto your table, lap, palm of your hand, etc. Then go into who influenced Jobs. Who were his parents? His parents' parents? What about the electronics inside the gizmo? What are they made of? Silicon? Who figured out that silicon was a good element to play around with when making gizmos? Do quantum mechanics figure into how your computer operates? How did those ideas come about? What about the idea of a "blog"? On and on and on: we CANNOT say "all" except in very restricted domains in which there are countings and everyone agrees upon the meaning of the countings and reasonings.]
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I've been reading Aristotle on meteorology, and have been having a blast, and I'll try to relate that blast here soon, but I've been thinking about philosophy as an endeavor, and how distasteful many professional thinkers and philosophers have found the pragmatic movement. It's easy to see it lambasted as an anti-philosophy, because it seems to do away with the 2500 year old questions, or many of them.

A sort-of current philosophically pragmatist line: If, since at least Plato, we have tried to find a definition of "truth" that satisfies everyone and we have failed, perhaps it's time to drop the inquiry and change the conversation. Pragmatists think the old philosophical question has ceased to qualify as "edifying discourse." They'd rather keep things interesting. Because pragmatists see human knowledge as always contingent, and our language games (influence of quasi-pragmatist Wittgenstein here, and we're talking Philosophical Investigations) indicate that language does not "copy" the world, and rather, we think metaphorically and whether we know it or not, we are heavily influenced by "strong poets."

I see the haters of pragmatism as something like drug addicts: don't you go around saying that the quest for the ultimate definition of beauty is a defunct mission! I've put my whole life into that problem! I'm strung out on beauty! Or rather, capital B Beauty. I will be the one who finally - somehow - gets to the One True Essence of Beauty. (il est ridicule!)

Cool. We're not saying you shouldn't "do" that pursuit; we're only saying you will not find a final vocabulary in which everyone will agree what "beauty" "really is." And fer gawdsakes: as least be a little playful in your quixotic quest. Your humorless thick academic prose about beauty seems unseemly!
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Beware the semantics of "pragmatic." You will see it used disparagingly, and often in a way that seems to want you to unpack it mentally as "soulless and uncaring and bureaucratic." This is not the pragmatism I'm talking about here.
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The briefest outline of pragmatic thought for further inquiry and delvers and the gloriously inquisitive: Charles Saunders Peirce (say "Purse") ----> William James ---->John Dewey----->Richard Rorty.

                                               John Dewey: merged pragmatism with Hegel
                                               and scientific inquiry: "Instrumentalism"

There seem very many interesting sidelights to these guys (all Americans, so maybe that's part of the distaste?), and I'm leaving out a tremendous lot of top-notch people thinking in the pragmatic vein.
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By way of tantalizing illustration: In an interview of Richard Rorty from 1998, in Munich, conducted by Wolfgang Ullrich and Helmut Meyert:

Q: How can we relate the idea of the heroic poet with the liberal ironic figure whose model we ought to emulate?

Rorty: In my book, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, I defined irony as recognition of the contingency of one's "final vocabulary." This is simply consciousness of the fact that the deepest convictions one holds are the result of past poetic and creative achievements. This goes along with the recognition that there will never be a final poem. There will always be space for self-creation, because no previous act of self-creation can be ratified by some nonhuman authority.

When it comes to philosophy, however, it doesn't always make sense to call the supersession of one poem by another a victory. Sometimes, within philosophical traditions, problems aren't solved --- they, along with the ways in which we formulate them, are simply forgotten. In Nietzsche's words, "Philosophical problems are not solved, they become frozen."

Nietzsche is completely right. Russell made the same point when he said that nobody had refuted Bergson, but everybody had become bored with him. Philosophical problems are transitory, as are the vocabularies with which they are formulated. For this reason, there will always be a tension between the clarity of the old languages and the crudeness of the new suggestions about how we might speak. - from Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews With Richard Rorty, p. 72
-END OF RORTY INTERVIEW SECTION-

                                  Richard Rorty, my favorite academic philosopher of the late 20th c.
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I've read a lot of Rorty, and he's open to someone finding some new way of reading, say, Bergson here, and opening up a novel and fruitful discourse on the phenomenon of how we experience time, or even humor, two topics Bergson wrote on. And there was a time when Bergson was on a hot streak. Henri Bergson had his halcyon days, aye.

One of the most difficult but rewarding books I've ever read was Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which provided a very convincing argument for something I had been piecing together for a long time, via my readings of the so-called "Great Books," yet Rorty articulated many tens of times better than I ever would or could have: our ideas and language do not "mirror" the "true world." The idea that we can arrive at truths that "correspond" to some putative "actual reality" somewhere "out there" has been an idea that has held sway in Western thought for around 2600 years at least. And the 20th century epistemologies strongly suggest it's wrong: language doesn't "copy" the world, it's a part of the world. We are natural beings who somehow, via the wonders of evolution, arrived at a seemingly freakish mode of symbol manipulation. And we mistake these symbolizings for Ultimate Reality. (Well, sombunall of us do. Others of us seem to have happily glommed on to Rorty's sense of "irony.")
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And for the present-day "neo-pragmatist" philosophical thinker, you consider sociopolitical problems as a species, your own and others' quest for self-creation and your own unique vocabularies as another species. How these two species meet seems up to you. But something like "Missing Public Discussions" seems to me NOT philosophical as a species. Rather, it seems to me entirely public, and of interest to everyone in anything that would seek to self-describe itself as a "democracy."

Here's 2 mins of Rorty on "Truth":

Thoughts On Nietzsche

I think Plato and Nietzsche are the two best writers of philosophy in the entire Western tradition. Yes, Plato thought writing harmed memory and was a debased form of speech, and took us further from those Eternal Verities in some Perfect Dimension...that's what's so funny about him!

Also: how could the dude who wrote The Symposium be the same guy who wrote The Laws AND Timaeus? Does anyone have a good explanation for such radical shifts in perspective within one body of writing?

But I wanted to write about Fred N.

- Reading Fred's rough life, I understand more about writing oneself out of the doldrums and into a heightened, almost drugged euphoric state. In this he isn't the only one, but he spotlighted this aspect of writing for me. There is a letter Vico (1668-1744) wrote to a friend, in which Vico was in a massive creative rush, heroic and exalted. It is easy to suppose a problem with mania there, but then look at most of the "geniuses."

- I was searching for something about McLuhan the other day, and in Marchand's biography there was a passage in which Neil Postman - a main architect of Media Ecology - addressed McLuhan's method of "probing," and asking question after question as part of these probes. Probes are not foremost about trying to get a "right" or even "good" answer; they are more about actuating thought about an idea we probably would not have pondered without the probe. And Postman said McLuhan's probes were similar to Nietzsche's style, and I think that's right. Nietzsche, in the 1870s or thereabouts, suddenly asks, "What if women are right?"

- One of my favorite lines is something like: "There are gods but there is no God - and this alone is divine." I have often picked up my Nietzsche books and randomly read in them, often not noting which book, but only seeking his voice for a few minutes. His tones, even in translations, are unmistakeable.

- I see Fred N. as the first postmodernist, because of his very clear takes on language and abstractions. At the same time, there are clearly paleomodernist ideas galore in N, and then there's the pre-Socratic stuff that's...a knockout, really. And again: one never really knows when or to what extent, he is putting us on. He obviously saw the role of philosopher as Public Nuisance...One professor I heard said many undergrads read Fred and see him as some hulking madman, muscular and threatening. But of course, Fred was always sick. He was fragile. He was socially awkward, partly due to genes, partly due to his family's uptight religiosity. He dressed like a dandy...

- And yet: he is Immortal. (And I assert, still often read poorly.) Fred Is Not Dead!

- Robert Anton Wilson wrote one of my favorite pieces on Fred, and it's here.

                         Fred, circa 1864. "Maybe if I philosophized with a hammer...?"

Hitler tried to use Fred as philosophical ballast for his Nazi Party. And I've seen - and read - plenty of writers (especially of Jewish heritage) who tar Fred with this. And I do not hold it against Jews or anyone else if they finger Fred as precursor to Holocaust. I do think it's a mistake, though. I think Fred would've been horrified at the Nazis. (See his letter to his sister, Christmas, 1887, and other writings from around the same time.)

I see Fred N's milieu and sure, he writes a lot about the Greeks - and especially Socrates and Plato - and all the Dionysian stuff, which I love. But I think the philology-trained Nietzsche saw the eminence of Hegel and was reacting to him: how to be original in Hegel's shadow? And Fred carried it off masterfully!

But here's the thing: the older I get the more strongly I feel that Nietzsche is one of those great philosophers of whom it is a huge mistake to read with an intent towards your own life and the social-political world outside; I see Fred N. as an almost ideal - speaking for myself here - thinker for one's private life. I think his idea that we must transcend ourselves is crucial, and is about how some of us seek to not be a copy of anyone else; we want to realize that spark of the infinite within us. We want to be private ironists, to borrow rather liberally from Rorty. We can also have our public lives, and we care about cruelty and liberty and egalitarian ideas. We still care about democratic ideas.

But our private lives of self-creation, of developing our own vocabularies, are where Nietzsche comes in. Let some other Great Thinkers inform us in our political lives.
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I tend toward the interpretation - my main way of unpacking - Nietzsche's "God is dead," thing along the lines of something like "As of the second half of the 19th century, we can see that people want to be Believers in God, but it's a choice, and only one among many. They do not 'believe' in the way people in the 12th century believed. Most people go to church because it's like eating broccoli when you don't really like broccoli: you eat it because it's supposed to be 'good for you.' And church is a nifty way to compare clothes with your fellow parishioners. It's also a good way to establish business contacts. And besides, we want the kids to have some sort of tradition. Finally: you never know. What if there really is a 'God'? Then accepting Jesus as our savior and going to church on Sunday for two hours is good fire insurance."

Furthermore, I don't read Nietzsche here as saying that God was dead for everyone; I assume he knew there were naive true believers out there. And Kierkegaardian ones, too.
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Because I often write here in a manner far too frivolous; I feel compelled to add some gravity, and once again, I invoke the Good Professor Carlin, this time on Nietzsche's (probably?) second most-quoted line: "Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger." Professor? Take it away!

"Here's more bullshit middlebrow philosophy: 'That which doesn't kill me makes me stronger.' I've got something a little more realistic: 'That which doesn't kill me still may sever my spinal cord, crush my rib cage, cave in my skull, and leave me helpless and paralyzed, soaking in a puddle of my own waste.' Put that on your T-shirt, touchy-feely, New Age asshole!" - Napalm and Silly Putty, p.78

[For those of you who never met Professor Carlin: he was a hulking, muscular, threatening behemoth of a man, the very picture certain neo-Nazi types have of the ubermensch. The above passage is clearly a critique of latter-20th century consumerist readings of Fred. Prof. Carlin died a couple years ago, and I'm told it was with great dignity.]

Still Caught in Time

Nice of you all to show up. It's good to see you. You look great. Now, I can see you all have much better things to do, so I'll try not to waste your time. Please take your seat and we can begin. Does anyone want any gum? 

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As a kid, I "invented"the idea that, after we die, we "come back" as some other living thing. I told a relative my great idea and she said "That's called reincarnation." Damn! I thought I was on to something good at 11 years old. 

I also invented the idea, around the same age, that, contrary to our idea that history goes in one direction, history and time go around in a circle. At some point, everything will die, then evolve back over billions of years to me, sitting in my living room, during a hot summer in the San Gabriel Valley. I don't recall telling anyone about this invention. But I do remember the feeling I had when I read that the ancient Hindus and Egyptians and some guy named Nietzsche thought something like the same thing, long before me. Jesus H. Particular Christ on a pogo stick! Was there anything that hadn't already been thought of before me?

The idea of cyclical time still intrigues me. Nietzsche seems to think (but we never know when he's joking!), based on passages in The Gay Science and Thus Spake Zarathustra, that you will be reading this Overweening guy's blog, sitting right where you are, with the same clothes on and everything! - in some unfathomably long time from now. Clearly he's trying to blow our minds, this Fred N. But in the extended contemplation and meditations upon infinitude, this all begins to seem - somehow - plausible. But we won't know we'd been "here before"! I don't believe this idea, but I like it. It's an artist's idea, and that's how I take it, for the most part. Esthetic ideas like this add inestimable value to my life...

With Eternal Recurrence, we have infinite time, which equals infinite space. Given that our universe will theoretically become so dispersed that energy will be so thinned out that nothing living can cohere anywhere - the Heat Death of our universe - tends to put a crimp in Eternal Recurrence's style.

Besides: if we have infinite space, why are real estate prices so high? (And why do we seem to automatically accept that someone can "own" the land? But I digress, and parenthetically, too.)

However: more and more cosmologists and astrophysicists think it plausible that our universe is just one in literally trillions of others: the Multiverse. And the laws of physics can vary from universe to universe. But there are so very many possible universes that it seems not too far-fetched that another "you" may be going about your business Somewhere Else, right now. If so, what does "time" really mean? 

I know, I know: you'll still get yelled at if you're late for the meeting tomorrow. I don't want to take up too much of your time.

            Dang! Will you look at the time!?

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For those of you who have a beef with the oppressiveness of "time," please seek out Jorge Luis Borges's short (five pages or so) essay "A New Refutation of Time," which I found in his Selected Non-Fictions. When you've read it, report back here on your findings! Borges pretty much agrees with William James, who said that, for himself, the great problems of philosophy are time, the reality of the external world, and understanding.

In physicist David Bohm's interpretation of quantum reality, there is an Implicate Order underlying our world of fundamental indeterminacy. The Implicate Order gives rise to time and space; they are mere epiphenomena, or something like the foam on top of waves you see when you look at the ocean. Think of what's driving the foamy waves. Think of what's "underneath" the waves. It's the Implicate Order. 

When I said I thought Nietzsche was thinking like an artist, I meant it as a compliment. Same thing goes for hardcore physicist Bohm here: he's a far greater artist than he probably ever realized.

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I leave us - jeez, the traffic is going to be miserable getting out of here, just take deep breaths, hum a merry tune and you'll be home in no time - uhh...what was I saying? Oh yea: Professor George Carlin questioned the reality of time once...see here...ah! Here it is. If you'll open your copies of Napalm and Silly Putty to page 163, and read along with me:

"Sometimes, in a playful mood, when asked if I have the time, I'll say, 'Yes,' and simply walk away. I do that because I hate to disappoint people. You see, there is no time. There's just no time. I don't mean, 'We're late, there's no time.' I mean, there is no time.

"After all, when is it? Do you know? No one really knows when it is. We made the whole thing up. It's a human invention. There are no numbers in the sky. Believe me, I've looked; they're not there. We made the whole thing up.

"So, when are we? Sometimes we think we know where we are, but we really don't know when we are. For all we know, it could be the middle of last week.

"And the time zones are no help; they're all different. In fact, in parts of India the time zones actually operate on the half hour instead of the hour. What is that all about? Does anybody really know what time it is?

"And never mind a piddly little half-hour difference in India, how about thousands of years? The major calendars disagree by thousands of years. To the Chinese, this is 4699; the Hebrews think it's 5762; the Muslims swear it's 1422. No telling what the Mayans and Aztecs would say if they were still around. I guess their time ran out."

Oh wow! Look at the time! I need to get into the surf on time, like the Beach Boys. Hasta luego!

"Free-Floating Intellectuals" and Their Enemies: Scattershot Take

One thing the relatively unattached free-floating intellectual (FFUI) is not is a specialist "expert." There now exists an entire shelf of books on Expertology (my current favorite is titled The Experts Speak), and I find them funny, then lamentable (not the books, the so-called "experts"), then galling. Galling because our culture is still so authoritarian that anyone with a modicum of knowledge and some chutzpah or maybe some sociopathy going on...can call themselves an "expert" and be paraded on TV "news" shows, interviewed by a failed actor/actress who was assured by the producers they themselves are "journalists" who aren't supposed to have an informed opinion anyway. And these "experts" get asked all the questions I would not have asked...and then, apparently, no one in the TV news media bothers to keep a track record of these so-called "experts." Because often, you and I could have prognosticated as well as the "experts."

Rather than "experts" it's more like "Here's someone to fill space in our broadcast, and the graphics you read right there on your screen and the books behind the space-filler say 'You can trust me to know something you're too lazy to have tried to find out for yourself. Trust me. I know.' Now relax and calmly tell yourself over and over, repeat after me: I am being informed...I am being informed...I am being informed.'"

Yea, apparently the TV "news" (nuzak?) -watching crowd needs to be told what to think by an "expert." I find this embarrassing. For one, their expertise usually isn't worth much, but worse: what's wrong with trying to figure things out for yourself? Hey all you citizens who watch Face The Nation: have you ever spent a few days trying to figure out, from the ground up, how the Finance Capital system really works?


Naw, didn't think so. Relax. Breathe deeply, exhale slowly, the serious white men will inform you.

Recently Daniel Bell died. He was a Man of Knowledge who was thought of as an expert and who didn't go out of his way to dispel the idea. In 1960 he published a book called The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties;with "The Resumption of History in the New Century", this linked book being his way of covering for himself. (Anytime you see a book called "The End of an abstract word," you can be sure you're looking at a book that will be an embarrassment to the author in ten years. Hello, Francis Fukuyama! How are your Neo-Con pals? Oh? They won't have you because you disagreed with them on some tenet? Sounds Stalinist to me...Oh? Oh! I see: you quit them.)


Get a load of Daniel Bell in an article in Commentary in 1964. He claimed - in 1964! - we had achieved, "The egalitarian and socially mobile society which the 'free-floating intellectuals' associated with the Marxist tradition have been calling for during the last hundred years."


First off, thanks for the longer pedigree. And what made you think we had achieved such a thing? And that it would apparently remain? Your reading of Hegel? (Here's an interview with Bell, probably his last before his death; it gives the flavor, in my opinion, of someone who was brilliant but too cozy with institutions - Bell was nothing close to free-floating - that supported him, and he seems incapable of saying, "Boy, did I get that wrong!" This is one of the reasons the 40-50 year reign of the New York Intellectuals as self-appointed Philosopher Kings was a world well-lost. Still, of all the New York Intellectuals, Bell was probably the best generalist and maybe the smartest of them all. Still: Welcome, Third Culture.)
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But even more welcome: the FFUIs and polymaths, synthesizers, flaneurs, multi-interdisciplinarians, systems thinkers, holistic versatile divergently-thinking cultural creatives, diligent magpie researchers, promiscuous and inveterate readers of fiction/ non-fiction/and everything else and your practiced syntopicalist methods of thought and writing, you brilliant cranky autodidacts with compendious minds, you historically-informed poets. Welcome, you homo ludens erudites and organic intellectuals with nonviolent stealthy methods for community, creativity, liberty, and love!
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I end with a sermon for the FFUI, from one Friedrich Nietzsche. The FFUI and any free-thinker's mind must contend with the mind-deadening act of the priest in an organized religion. (I realize there seem to be some very interesting exceptions.) He is a shepherd of his flock of sheep. He spreads his oral pox via the Word from on high...or so his act goes. Gosh, Father...thanks a lot! videlicet:


"I have been understood. The beginning of the Bible contains the whole psychology of the priest. The priest knows only one great danger: that is science, the sound conception of cause and effect. But on the whole science prospers only under happy circumstances - there must be a surplus of time, of spirit, to make 'knowledge' possible. 'Consequently man must be made unhappy' - that was the logic of the priest in every age.

"It will now be clear what was introduced into the world for the first time, in accordance with this logic: 'sin.' The concept of guilt and punishment, the whole 'moral world order,' was invented against science, against the emancipation of man from the priest. Man shall not look outside; he shall look into himself; he shall not look into things cleverly and cautiously, like a learner, he shall not look at all - he shall suffer. And he shall suffer in such a way that he has need of the priest at all times. Away with physicians! A Savior is needed. The concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrine of 'grace,' of 'redemption,' of 'forgiveness' - lies through and through, and without any psychological reality - were invented to destroy man's causal sense: they are an attempt to assassinate cause and effect. And not an attempt to assassinate with the fist, with the knife, with honesty in hatred and love! But born of the most cowardly, most cunning, lowest instincts. A priestly attempt! A parasite's attempt! A vampirism of pale, subterranean bloodsuckers!

"When the natural consequences of a deed are no longer 'natural," but thought of as caused by the conceptual specters of superstition, by 'God,' by 'spirits,' by 'souls,' as if they were merely 'moral' consequences, as reward, punishment, hint, means of education, then the presupposition of knowledge has been destroyed - then the greatest crime against humanity has been committed. Sin, to repeat it once more, this form of man's self-violation par excellence, was invented to make science, culture, every elevation and nobility of man, impossible. The priest rules through the invention of sin."
-section #49 of The Antichrist. 
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Wow! You don't get to hear a firebrand like that every day, do ya? I have some qualms with Fred's points here, but reading stuff like this is a tonic for the FFUI: sometimes we're just glad that someone said that, in that way, with that...style... even if maybe we don't go along with it 100%. (Or maybe you do? Really? Forgiveness is part of the priest's con? How "free-floating" are we?)