Thomyum2 wrote
What I find puzzling is the notion of God ‘in-the-world’, and in addition, the idea that this could be somehow understood through the concept of indeterminacy. A proper understanding of God, in my mind, is not of a God in the world, but beyond the world. The world is understood as a created thing, and how can the Creator be ‘in’ the creation? Rather, I think what we experience of the world emanates from God, and as such it may reflect God or the qualities God, so in that sense we may find that the things of the world can point us toward the God that is the source of those created things. But in my mind, it’s mistaken to identify those created things of the world with God without subscribing to a pantheistic type of belief.
Hi Thomyum2, nice to hear from you again. Hope all is well and you have survived covid unscathed.
I will simply put the matter squarely: Everything, from fence posts to cosmology, is metaphysics at the basic level of inquiry, and not only is the basic level not less authoritative than the familiar science based theses, but is more so. And the question I would put to all is, can finitude be shown, demonstrated as a meaningful description of the world? It may strike one as an odd approach, for it is eternity that usually is taken as something ineffable and impossible to explain, but I am saying, affirm our world's' finitude and you find in the attempted justification for this nothing but indeterminacy, and finitude is by definition, determinacy.
God is, in a word, metaphysics, that is, when one faces the world at the basic level of assumptions, and realizes that all attempts to make a knowledge claim is impossible, one thereby faces an issue about God.
The quote from St John of the Cross I think is relevant to this idea but unfortunately when taken out of the context of his full text, as was done here, is somewhat misleading. Of course, St John is not arguing for the impossibility of knowing or understanding God or that there is an infinite gulf between man and God that can never be bridged in this life – indeed the stated purpose of The Ascent to Mount Carmel, from which this quote is found, is to explain ‘how to reach divine union quickly’. When the rest of his text is read, he is understood to be stating that God cannot be known through the physical senses alone – via the appetites or through human reason or intellect when those are based purely on the knowledge gained from the physical world via the senses.
But what does it mean to understand through reason? Reason gets a bad rap often in talk about religion because it is assumed God, divinity, holiness, faith and other nonempirical religious ideas are irrational. But they are not. They are wholly and necessarily conceived in logic. Nothing is conceived as a stand alone logical idea because such a thing doesn't exist, and this is because content is required for logic to be presented at all. So what of content? This goes to experience, sensory intuition, value, affectivity, and so on, and even the most mundane ideas are about the that-which-is-not-logical side of an experience. Pain, e.g., is not a logical experience qua pain, but we start talking about it, affirming it in propositions, relating it to other things, and so on, and we are deep in logic in all of it.
The point is, logic is a necessary part of having an experience at all, and rationality is simply part of the strutcure of experience itself. So it is not reason that stands counter to religious affirmation, it is content. But what content? Herein lies the division, defining mundane content contra transcendental content, but this asks for an accounting of the difference, how the line is drawn, for it is not the presence of reason in the former and its absence in the latter. It comes down, then, to what there is about "physical senses" that is decidedly NOT divine in nature, and this is, to me, where the rub is. What is it to apprehend the world such that one, in doing so, is absent God? This inquiry leads to an analysis of mundane experience.
And this is true inasmuch as God is incorporeal and isn’t an ‘object’ which can be perceived with the senses and then studied and understood. Knowledge of an incorporeal being can only be received through a ‘spiritual sense’, i.e. through an inner subjective experience, and indeed it’s in our nature to be able to do this. The qualities of God – love, goodness, beauty, justice, etc. – are not found ‘in the world’, that is, they are not qualities of the objects of physical perception, but rather come from beyond those objects, and as human beings we know and recognize these qualities, and it is this sense that can lead us toward that 'divine union'.
Are they not qualities of the objects of physical perception? In my view, the objects before me, the trees and stars and so on, are what they are in the conscious apprehension of them. A tree can be a revelation, or it can be a commodity. Dewey once complained that art had a distorted presence in the modern world in that it had been relegated to museum, and out of daily affairs. Theology has done this with religion, placing it in churches and gatherings and in institutions for marriage and death, and so on, thereby removing it from awareness out of these contexts. What makes the sky mundane? I remember once in India (where I taught once) and we went to a small retreat in the Palini Hills where, as we ascended in the evening, I witnessed the sun pouring an extraordinary light on the fields, that looked exactly the light of Christ depicted in a constructed image in a Bible. Quite an extraordinary experience. One has to understand this, I claim: What makes the world mundane is the mundanity IN the perceptual encounter. As a scientist, I might have been classifying botanical samples, or as am anthropologist I might be looking for signs of indigenous culture; but when the mind turns to its
noncategorical openness, and openness that suspends presuppositions, knowledge claims, andall the rest that figure into familiar categorical and pragmatic thinking, and allows the world to be a catalyst for "divine union" rather than an obstruction, then the objects of physical perception, as Emerson put it, can make one "glad to the brink of fear" (see his little book called Nature. Emerson was something of a crank by philosophical standards, but I will take him any day over the vacuous clarity of analytic philosophy. Emerson understood the essence of religion as he placed God IN the world, but this was not to deflate God, but to elevate the world! Consider: the world is an evil place, no doubt, when one considers the evil in it, and I mean evil in the, if you will, Biblical/Platonic sense: as an absolute rather than a construction of social values. But behold the world as Wordsworth did, or Emerson or Walt Whitman, or Thoreau, or Friedrich Holderlin (Heidegger's favorite) and on and on (how about as Jesus did?) and the world is transfigured.
Of course, this kind of thinking has a name, which is romanticism. I think Christianity, properly conceived, is romantic idealism, God is love, no? And where is that which makes love meaningful word? In the world.
So unless I’m misunderstanding you, I don’t see how the idea of indeterminacy relates to understanding God. Saying that something is indeterminate to me only means that that its future observable (by the senses) behavior can’t be predicted. It isn’t really sensible to me to speak of determinacy in this context, since the experience of God only takes place inwardly and in the present moment – there is no God to be found in what I see as the purely human concept of the future. Then again, perhaps we’re essentially saying the same thing in different ways here though, as what you’re describing as ‘indeterminacy’ may be the same as I’m conceptualizing as an experience where there is simply no consciousness of a future state.
Indeterminacy takes the matter back to philosophy. Our reading likely does not align so it makes things a little difficult. All inquiry leads to indeterminacy in all knowledge claims, so the assumptions that populate what it is that makes the world so familiar fail at the level of basic questions. There is a childish game deconstructionists play, the "what is that?" game, in which whatever answer you give to a question, any question at all, never is allowed to settle, for there is always a further question on which a question rests. There is no "center" that one finally achieves in any matter whatsoever. Take space: I am in a room. Where is the room? In a house? Where is the house" In LA. Where is LA; and so on. Eventually you get to eternity, and the questionr terminates there into a pure, intuitive indeterminacy. Intuited eternity is, frankly, easy to encounter, but once there, it is rarely understood, one has cancelled all spatial designations that eternity subsumes. Of course, in a world of contextual references, space is still very mundane, but where do these references get their authority? they get it only from constructions of contingency. Some thing is under the couch if the couch itself is somewhere such that a thing can be under it, and under is not above, and so above is played against under for under to make sense. We are in what has been called a world of binary constructions, and not a world of solid, unassailable assertions.
So, what is a cat? You can see how such a question can go round and round with references to scientific classfication, taxonomic placement, anatomical descriptions, and so on . Does language ever reach the cat itself? If not, how can language be about the cat? Even calling it a cat at all seems to fail in this essential connection. But we live in absolute confidence that our language IS about the world, even though our knowledge claims cannot escape this intra-referentiality. The point about God? You remember Kierkegaard and how he criticized the rationalists for failing to see that language was not the actual world, that reason was not the actual and there is a
qualitative difference bwteen a proposition and, say, sitting by a fire feeling the warmth. This error we make, that out language gives us the world as it is, is the reason we cannot acknowledge God. the language and the culture we live and breathe is our inherited "sin". Or better, sin arises when we "posit" the finitude against eternity and realize we are aliened from God, even in this grand "Christendom" of ours. Prior to positing, we are like animals, innocent but lost.
As I see it, all human understanding of or discussion about God is necessarily a posteriori – it is the expression of the individual’s response to it after the fact and not the substance of the experience itself. Not that it is useless to talk about these experiences, but in a sense, any philosophy of God is 'dead on arrival' because it can never be more than commentary on past experiences. (I think this is the meaning captured in your quote from Meister Eckhart - "I pray God rid me of God." - that we can only experience God in our present and can never rely on memories, past accounts, or old conceptions to grasp a God who is a living and new being in every moment.)
As far as this notion of ‘infinity’ - in the context of what I’ve said above I'd offer that there are perhaps two conceptions of infinity: one that is a human conception of the infinite which is based on and coexists with the finitude of the physical sense, that is, an idea of a postulated infinity existing beyond those limitations we experience in the physical world; but the other, and the converse, an ‘experienced’ infinity, a state of a present eternity where lose our conception of the finitude and limitations within space and time that are based upon our physical senses, and we experience our existence as being, not as infinite in the sense of extending forever in time and space, but simply as whole and without boundaries.
Enough for now, but I’m glad to see you again here and it’s good to be taking up the discussions again.
I am saying, this extraordinary move to affirming God in the hopeless dialectic between the finite and the infinite, one tries to be a knight of faith (speaking here as K might) not by ascending to heaven, but by staying here, in the world, a butcher, banker, etc., but transfigured in existential faith something K said he himself could not do. To do tis, one needs to acknowledge the foundational indeterminacy of the world, which is essentially what Kierkegaard was talking about.
I just now accidently hit a key and things were jostled around. It's late and I don't have the time to redo anything. Hope it is not to awful. And apologies for all the writing. I did lose some content in the jostling. Alas.
