The way to approach an understanding of God

Discuss philosophical questions regarding theism (and atheism), and discuss religion as it relates to philosophy. This includes any philosophical discussions that happen to be about god, gods, or a 'higher power' or the belief of them. This also generally includes philosophical topics about organized or ritualistic mysticism or about organized, common or ritualistic beliefs in the existence of supernatural phenomenon.
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The Beast
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Re: The way to approach an understanding of God

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In Kierkegaard thesis we encounter the concepts assigned to three stages of life: aesthetic stage, ethical stage and religious stage.
It is a new day. I do live in an Oak Forest home to the stellar Fairies. I could say Ethereal if that is your understanding. Although I live in this world, I know of others. My favored one is the gorge in the middle of a homestead home to the largest tree of sunken southern top where the prevalent wind allowed the lichen to grow tinting the bark powder golden. In the branches, the fruticose would allow the moisture to paint the lascivious green. The gorge full of chickweed, rockrose, briar root and much lupine sprung in the spring give refuge to a number of songbirds singing the story of the new day away from ravens, magpies, and crows. “A kestrel for a knave”. But it is nothing like my world where I know the Fairies by name. Are there stages in your thought/understanding?
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Re: The way to approach an understanding of God

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The Beast wrote
In Kierkegaard thesis we encounter the concepts assigned to three stages of life: aesthetic stage, ethical stage and religious stage.
It is a new day. I do live in an Oak Forest home to the stellar Fairies. I could say Ethereal if that is your understanding. Although I live in this world, I know of others. My favored one is the gorge in the middle of a homestead home to the largest tree of sunken southern top where the prevalent wind allowed the lichen to grow tinting the bark powder golden. In the branches, the fruticose would allow the moisture to paint the lascivious green. The gorge full of chickweed, rockrose, briar root and much lupine sprung in the spring give refuge to a number of songbirds singing the story of the new day away from ravens, magpies, and crows. “A kestrel for a knave”. But it is nothing like my world where I know the Fairies by name. Are there stages in your thought/understanding?
I invite you to rephrase the question. If you are alluding to sensuous and imponderable aesthetic (not at all in the way Kierkegaard means this term) dimension as a response to the question of God, then you are on the right track, by my lights. But you would need be clear: what is it in descriptive fantasizing that addresses the matter of God?
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Re: The way to approach an understanding of God

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I was thinking that I could write a poem with just one emotion so you might feel it. However, I am just asking you about the place where the birds are singing. Is it a real place.?
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Re: The way to approach an understanding of God

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The Beast wrote
I was thinking that I could write a poem with just one emotion so you might feel it. However, I am just asking you about the place where the birds are singing. Is it a real place.?
You mean, the world of actuality? I mean it is here, in this world, unquestionably, that poetry transfigures rocks and hills and barn doors.I would say, first, the world is always already "poetized", for what we call the aesthetic is in the perceptual act itself. An electrician, for example, sees the circuitry of a house's wiring, and what attends this event implicitly is a wealth of technical knowledge, practical knowledge, skills, insights, subtleties of engagement and so on; and THESE are inherently aesthetic. To splice a wire is inherently aesthetic, then to reattach in an integrated act of understanding all this is part of is inherently aesthetic. And consider that to know in the simplest way is inherently aesthetic. Dewey's Art As Experience, is a very good read.

One could go this way, but the passage of descriptions you gave is much more interesting than plain affairs. Knowing the fairies by name? Is this a poetic world, or a delusional one? For the former, perhaps you refer to a romantic experience whereby the "facts" of the world yield to an natural aesthetic. The interesting thing about this is that when something is experienced as a higher order in which there is a depth of feeling such that words like sublime and profound seem to apply, do we simply dismiss this, as science and analytic philosophy do, as subjective and something that gets in the way of clear thinking about the world, or do we take this as philosophically important? I say, not only is this important, it is the most salient feature of our existence.

Ask a question like, what is real? at the levelof foundational philosophy, and you run into something that seems to defy analysis. But here is a question: imagine our existence free of all affectivity, and a world of facts, states of affairs of a scientist's kind. You see?: No affective meanings at all, only true and false propositions, and those propositions yet to be determined. But nothing matters, because the mattering is bound up with affect, caring, feeling, valuing, and so on. The question I put to this world is, does it exist? In the trivial sense, yes; but wouldn't my, say, experience behind the microscope or opening and closing doors or going to sleep at night--how would these experiences manage generate an acknowledgement of the world? that is, wouldn't the I, the perceiver, be reduced to an object, and nothing more? And my experiences be nothing other than causally relational? My "knowledge" of anything would be no more an acknowledgement of what is real, than the "knowledge" a dented car fender has of the offending guard rail.

Consider that knowing the real IS affectivity in play in a perceptual event. So your fairy world, saturated with beautiful imagined entities could be understood as MORE real than the plain world of more common experience.
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Re: The way to approach an understanding of God

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In the big cities of asphalt and concrete, the shrillness of sounds is a different acoustic phenomenon. A random mix of voices which many times are unique to “the perceiver” in the form of being incapable of repeating themselves. Any crafting electrician with the technical lexicon in a sustained pattern of conversion might achieve what Aristotle said is Harmony. The rhythmical activity of the thoughts in the wave forming melic verses could have agents that are exposed but not understood. Nevertheless, it is a personal interpretation in the texture that they may be agents of an understood history. They might also be subliminal to the perceiver’s agents that are composing content. I could smell the purest Jazmine to go with it. The agents or muses' methods of perception might respond to the convergence’s cadence (mine) but they do not reconcile my human nature. I cannot do the impossible that is the errorless. However, we can achieve a moment.
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Re: The way to approach an understanding of God

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The Beast wrote
n the big cities of asphalt and concrete, the shrillness of sounds is a different acoustic phenomenon. A random mix of voices which many times are unique to “the perceiver” in the form of being incapable of repeating themselves. Any crafting electrician with the technical lexicon in a sustained pattern of conversion might achieve what Aristotle said is Harmony. The rhythmical activity of the thoughts in the wave forming melic verses could have agents that are exposed but not understood. Nevertheless, it is a personal interpretation in the texture that they may be agents of an understood history. They might also be subliminal to the perceiver’s agents that are composing content. I could smell the purest Jazmine to go with it. The agents or muses' methods of perception might respond to the convergence’s cadence (mine) but they do not reconcile my human nature. I cannot do the impossible that is the errorless. However, we can achieve a moment.
And what is the point you are making?
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Re: The way to approach an understanding of God

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And what is the point you are making?
Sure. It is clear then that thought is related to moments. Making a point is complementary to the moment. A point of substance following the theories of Heisenberg. This way Thought making a point of substance is a fluctuation aimed in a direction. It is a vector. In an electrician it is governed by the personal Techne in the general sense that includes the skill, his virtue, and all the other dispositions associated with Techne. It is making the point of existence in the thesis of Kierkegaard. And why is it that it could have the notion of the Observer turning the Techne onto itself? It is an exploration of the dual nature of thought and matter and the eventual dissolution of this union.
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Re: The way to approach an understanding of God

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Hereandnow wrote: September 15th, 2022, 12:15 am Hi Thomyum2, nice to hear from you again. Hope all is well and you have survived covid unscathed.
Hello Hereandnow! I don’t know if any of us survived ‘unscathed’, but I’m doing well enough! Hope you are too. Appreciate your sharing your thoughts here. As you may remember from our past conversations, I’m a little slow to compose my thoughts and respond on these topics, so as you see, nothing has changed in that regard. I find very little to disagree with in what you’ve posted – you and I think in similar terms about many things - but I do see some points that I think are worth exploring a bit more.
Hereandnow wrote: September 15th, 2022, 12:15 am
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.
I think I agree with what you’re saying regarding logic here, though I’ve not heard it put in quite this way before. It’s certainly true that logic can’t stand on its own (a point that’s too often forgotten in philosophical arguments :) ) - logic can only tell us what follows from a given set of premises. I take it that what forms premises is what you’re calling ‘content’ here? To a certain extent, yes, experience does give us the content or foundations on which we build our knowledge of the world. Simple empiricism would say that we can use the knowledge gained from our physical senses to create our foundational premises. But at the same time, it’s a feature of human experience that we discover that how things are and how things appear are not always the same thing – that we have to learn to discern between illusion and reality. So we can’t, and never do really, rely completely on experience of the senses, but rather inform that knowledge with the set of values that we bring to that experience.

So in the context of understanding God, as I see it, understanding of God emerges out of our relationship with what we experience, not from our reaction to what we experience, if that makes sense. And a relationship, whether with a human or with God, requires a level of trust or faith, which is not something that can be obtained by senses, but something which has to be given, by us or to us, and with our consent. A relationship isn’t an empirical matter and is based on a premise that is not obtained through the physical senses.

I'd note that I think it’s unfortunate that in the English language we’ve devolve the idea of ‘knowing’ into a single word and it’s helpful to remember that there are at least two senses to this, which in the Latin languages each have their own word – in Spanish, for example, the distinction between saber and conocer. We can ‘know’ a fact or about a thing or how to do something (saber) which is a finite kind of knowing. But we ‘know’ a person (conocer) by acquaintance and relationship. This is a ‘lived’ kind of knowing – it can’t be gained by language or proposition – it requires an active interaction. And we know God the way we know each other, through relationship, not through the acquisition of information through our senses of the objects in the world, even though the world may serve as the medium in which that relationship unfolds.

Hereandnow wrote: September 15th, 2022, 12:15 am
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.
This all brings to mind for me Buber’s I and Thou and I have to ask if you’ve had it in mind as you wrote this. I think he hits on what you’re saying here early in the book: “As experience, the world belongs to the primary word I-It. The primary word I-Thou establishes the world of relation.” And he goes onto consider a relationship with a tree an explores this just as you have: “It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up relationship to it. The tree is now no longer It.” So, yes, the things of the physical world, can be ‘mundane’ if we experience them as objects or commodities, but when understood in the context of a relationship to us take on a very different kind of existence.

So I think what I’m trying to say here is not that the experience of the physical senses are wrong, but rather that they are incomplete. I like to use the old analogy of the three blind men and the elephant to illustrate this as I think it works well in that it shows that each of the blind men could have a true and valid experience of the elephant, but could not know the elephant in the way we know are able to know it having sight. When we rely solely on the physical senses and experience the world as no more than a collection of objects, of things that can be known in the finite sense, we won’t begin to find God there. We must bring that additional faculty that I’m calling a ‘spiritual sense’, but which could go by many other names - a sense of beauty, of love, of wonder, etc. – to be able to recognize the world as its true expression of God or Spirit.

This is what St. Ignatius Loyola described as learning to recognize that "all of things in this world are gifts of God, created for us, to be the means by which we can come to know him better.” So again, and maybe we’re saying essentially the same thing, but it’s not a case of God ‘in the world’, but rather of the world as the means or medium through which we may know God who is beyond the world. To quote another Saint, Ste. Therese of Liseux, “The world is thy ship and not thy home.”

Hereandnow wrote: September 15th, 2022, 12:15 am 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 agree with you about the ‘hopeless’ nature of that dialectic! I’ve always thought that the notion of infinity contains an inherent paradox. As you’ve said above, finitude is by definition, determinacy. It’s interesting to look at the roots of these words: that define means ‘to place limits or boundaries on’, that determine means ‘to put an end to’, so both of these mean essentially the same thing, i.e. ‘to make finite’. So that which is ‘infinite’ is also, by definition, ‘undefined’ and language relies on definitions to make sense, so how can we speak of what cannot be defined? As you say, we go around in circles.

There’s more that could be said, but I’m running on, so will wrap here.

I enjoyed doing the Kierkegaard reading with you a while back. Would you by chance be interested in doing another selection? If so, let me know. Maybe the Buber I and Thou? I also have a copy of Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing that I’m thinking of starting soon. Or any other suggestions are welcome.
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Re: The way to approach an understanding of God

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Hello Thomyum2.

“Sin is ignorance” Here we might apply the understanding of how we know what sin is or that we understand sin. (Saber, conocer). Although Kierkegaard was a young man when he died, he had a conceptual sin as an induced state. IMO, in the Kierkegaard first stage of life, the state of ignorance provides sensible discovery. Do we really understand? As we experience the life’s forming concepts and correlating political culture the division is clear. “Sin is not a negation but a position”. I might have a dual nature of understanding and not understanding in a battle where sin is understood as the undesirable position. The perception of the undesirable position correlates with the degrees of freedom (or lack of it) of a function by the induced sin performing in the timeline. The strong allure of sin is in the timeline a changing concept much like the young becomes old. It takes experience to understand sin. “Think about your Creator in the days of your youth” so that you can have a battle in your old days when the apple is ready to fall from the tree and is lucky (not rotten of maggots). It will be helpful to have a good mother, a good culture, and a good education. Wasn’t Socrates accused of corrupting the youth? It is a paradox, a strange misunderstanding, or the blindfolding of the youthful intelligence. Therefore. I do not fully agree with; “Understanding of God emerges out of our relationship with what we experience, not from our reaction to what we experience”. Do you mean the position of the existence of God?
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Re: The way to approach an understanding of God

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The Beast wrote: October 6th, 2022, 4:48 pm Hello Thomyum2.

“Sin is ignorance” Here we might apply the understanding of how we know what sin is or that we understand sin. (Saber, conocer). Although Kierkegaard was a young man when he died, he had a conceptual sin as an induced state. IMO, in the Kierkegaard first stage of life, the state of ignorance provides sensible discovery. Do we really understand? As we experience the life’s forming concepts and correlating political culture the division is clear. “Sin is not a negation but a position”. I might have a dual nature of understanding and not understanding in a battle where sin is understood as the undesirable position. The perception of the undesirable position correlates with the degrees of freedom (or lack of it) of a function by the induced sin performing in the timeline. The strong allure of sin is in the timeline a changing concept much like the young becomes old. It takes experience to understand sin. “Think about your Creator in the days of your youth” so that you can have a battle in your old days when the apple is ready to fall from the tree and is lucky (not rotten of maggots). It will be helpful to have a good mother, a good culture, and a good education. Wasn’t Socrates accused of corrupting the youth? It is a paradox, a strange misunderstanding, or the blindfolding of the youthful intelligence. Therefore. I do not fully agree with; “Understanding of God emerges out of our relationship with what we experience, not from our reaction to what we experience”. Do you mean the position of the existence of God?
Hello M. Beast,

I don't completely understand what you're saying here. I find the topic of sin a rather confusing one that would really require its own thread or threads. So I'm not sure I see how it ties into the post I made above since I wasn't really addressing that. I don't know that I would equate sin with ignorance as you have here, although certainly if we understand that sin is the rejection of or opposition to God, then certainly inasmuch we are ignorant of God then it follows that we will be ignorant of sin too. But sin can be malicious and intentional as well as simply ignorant. I'm not familiar with the meaning or context of your quote that 'Sin is not a negation but a position', so I can't really comment on that, but aren't negations and positions just flip sides of the same coin?

Regarding my statements that “Understanding of God emerges out of our relationship with what we experience, not from our reaction to what we experience” - my language here is admittedly a bit clumsy and I can try to clarify. I wasn't speaking of the position of the existence of God, but rather of the nature of knowing God. The English language, in my view, doesn't capture this adequately with the word 'know' as there are subtle differences in how we use the word. In this case, I'm distinguishing between the way we know God (or other persons) and way we know the world, which I think of as a difference between a 'knowing' and a 'knowing about'. When it comes to the physical world, of which we learn by the use of our physical senses, we 'know about' the world, i.e. we collect and store facts and information about it that may serve our purposes in the future. But when it comes to our relationship with other sentient beings - including God and our fellow humans - it's not limited to a 'knowing about' (saber) but extends to a 'knowing' in relationship (conocer). This kind of knowing, the I-Thou relationship that Buber describes, includes and awareness of another living being and is very distinct from the I-It relationship which is simply a 'knowing about'. In other words, though we might take a 'position' with regard to another person or facts about another person, there is a dimension to our relationships with persons that goes beyond mere 'positions'. We recognize that another person is a living and evolving being that cannot be captured by a collection of facts about them, and that a position about a person, or about God, is always going to be provisional. Put another way, I think we can't really know God by just learning about God - we have to actually get to know God through relationship.
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Re: The way to approach an understanding of God

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Hello again. “Despair is sin” or where is the understanding? If it gives pleasure to the King: “In the foregoing there is steadily pointed out a gradation in the consciousness of the self, first came unconsciousness of being an eternal self, then a knowledge of having a self in which there is after all something eternal and under this there were again pointed out gradations… the point is this: the theological self, the self directly in the sight of God” Kierkegaard. What is your interpretation of Kierkegaard starting with the purity of heart and whether your position might include gradations to the understanding?
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Re: The way to approach an understanding of God

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The Beast wrote: October 7th, 2022, 7:16 pm Hello again. “Despair is sin” or where is the understanding? If it gives pleasure to the King: “In the foregoing there is steadily pointed out a gradation in the consciousness of the self, first came unconsciousness of being an eternal self, then a knowledge of having a self in which there is after all something eternal and under this there were again pointed out gradations… the point is this: the theological self, the self directly in the sight of God” Kierkegaard. What is your interpretation of Kierkegaard starting with the purity of heart and whether your position might include gradations to the understanding?
Hello again to you too,

The meaning of 'despair' is to lose hope. The Catholic church teaches that root of sin is a lack of trust in God's goodness, so yes, in a certain sense to despair is akin to losing trust in the goodness of God and His creation. But again, I think the topic of sin is more expansive than this and defies any simple definition.

As to your question (which could be the topic of an entire dissertation, I imagine), my understanding of Kierkegaard is only in its early stages. I have read that in order to really grasp Kierkegaard, it's necessary to consider his entire body of writings as a whole, and I am nowhere near having accomplished that, so I'm not really able to state an interpretation with any kind of confidence or authority. But to tie back to my earlier post, I would just say that Kierkegaard's work can only be a reflection of his own personal experiences. However it is interpreted, it can still only give us 'knowledge about', as it is a second-hand account - a testimony and not a revelation, one might say. As goes the passage from the book of Philippians from which Kierkegaard drew his title: "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure." If we really seek to know God, it's up to each of us to do just that. Reading others' experiences may inspire us or help to point us in the right direction but can never substitute for finding out for ourselves.
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Re: The way to approach an understanding of God

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Hello Thomyum2. The quoting of Kierkegaard makes for some of the underlying belief in Free Will and in our overall concept of freedom. I find Kierkegaard’s notion of gradations useful. Perhaps somewhere between Kant and Kierkegaard there is a point. Kierkegaard qualified sin by being “before God” and Kant “declined to recognize God’s will as determining the moral law” and like any philosopher he wrote an Ethics. In speaking the relationship to God, Kierkegaard thought the self as “the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude which relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself, a task which can be performed only by means of a relationship to God”… then he speaks of finitizing and infinitizing (reincarnation?) and that “the self does not actually exist, and it is only that which it is to become”. When we go before God: How are we measure? In Kierkegaard’s “sin is ignorance” we might have a hint. IMO the measure of our free will is the only measure possible (becoming?).
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Re: The way to approach an understanding of God

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Thomyum2 wrote
I think I agree with what you’re saying regarding logic here, though I’ve not heard it put in quite this way before. It’s certainly true that logic can’t stand on its own (a point that’s too often forgotten in philosophical arguments :) ) - logic can only tell us what follows from a given set of premises. I take it that what forms premises is what you’re calling ‘content’ here? To a certain extent, yes, experience does give us the content or foundations on which we build our knowledge of the world. Simple empiricism would say that we can use the knowledge gained from our physical senses to create our foundational premises. But at the same time, it’s a feature of human experience that we discover that how things are and how things appear are not always the same thing – that we have to learn to discern between illusion and reality. So we can’t, and never do really, rely completely on experience of the senses, but rather inform that knowledge with the set of values that we bring to that experience.
Odd how all this works. Philosophy can be the death of wisdom as so many who take on the onerous reading are precisely those cannot abandon it when they are told that this is where inquiry goes. Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, and as a way of life, really, was an extraordinary person, for he was an aesthete as well as a brilliant mind, and this is an impossible situation to endure, for on the one hand, one sees clearly the arguments and their failures, but on the other, one is passionately engaged, even, as it was for Wittgenstein, overwhelmed by the need for "mystical" confirmation of some kind (no wonder he was suicidal). When he said that which cannot be spoken should be passed over in silence, it was the silence he wanted to announce to the world far more than the limits of logic. Most take it the other way around. For most philosophy is an indulgence of the intellect that will not be simply put down, certainly not after all that reading and writing! But for Witt all of this was to little avail. Like Kierkegaard, he was a tortured soul looking for God and unable to settle for less.

Language is a tool, but it is taken for the only way meaning can be understood. This is the worst mistake philosophers make, bound as they are to the "sense" that terms can make as terms. So concerned about conceptual meanings, and so little interested in "the world".

Then there are what I call the threshold philosophers, the ones who take us tp the jumping off places. Re. simple empiricism, two come to mind: the first is Eugene Fink and his Sixth Cartesian Meditation; the second is one of the central figures in the so called French theological turn: Michel Henry, who I am reading now, draws his basic inspiration from the phenomenological reduction, Husserl's epoche. I suspect you are a busy person, but if you have time, here is a terrific and brief presentation, and I don't think it presupposes too much reading in phenomenology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk3DkVg ... tevenNemes

It is not a technical talk, mostly, but then, it does take one to an intuitive plane of relating to the world. Phenomenology is the key to "religious" disclosure at the foundational level, for it brings one to that primordial position of wonder, prior to knowledge claims and their pervasive presence in perceiving the world that Kierkegaard talks about a little in his Concept of Anxiety, though technically, wonder comes before "sin" which is the "positing" of the spirit. Strange language K uses, but he does take the nonsense out of a lot of Christian thinking. I think he is referring to the the child's adventurous reaching out without restraint that later reveals itself as an alienation eternity/God. eternity is not to be understood in the detached conceptual way; it is, as I argue (or describe? Phenomenologists simply try to present what is there before one. They want to clear the world of preconceptions), our foundational indeterminacy---this is what is realized, the beginning of "sin" as one's understanding is shown the distance between knowledge and the impossible underpinnings of the world. (Pseudo) Dionysius the Areopagyte invites us enter a "cloud of unknowing" as a prelude to some radical unfolding, and so, the question along these lines takes one away from speculation and into encounter, and this goes to my original comment about the reluctance of philosophers to make the dramatic "leap' away from theory and into the world. This can be done only aesthetically, or affectively; as Christians say: God is love (but what is love? This is a concept and it is filled with connotative value, and as with all concepts it has a degenerative/reductive effect on perception, that is, to put it in K's terms, it quantifies, contains, restricts to historically determined meanings: language is inherently historical and binds meanings history's finitudes; language is always part of the givenness of culture, what K holds to be the essence of "sin".
So in the context of understanding God, as I see it, understanding of God emerges out of our relationship with what we experience, not from our reaction to what we experience, if that makes sense. And a relationship, whether with a human or with God, requires a level of trust or faith, which is not something that can be obtained by senses, but something which has to be given, by us or to us, and with our consent. A relationship isn’t an empirical matter and is based on a premise that is not obtained through the physical senses.
Of course, you are climbing up Husserl's tree: intentionality. Dismiss all the murky interfering entanglements and try to see the purity of what lies before you PRIOR to knowledge claims laying hold. You say "God emerges out of our relationship with what we experience" and this brings the experience itself into view rather than the usual critical analysis that produces propositional results, and this is the kind of thing "mystics" like Wittgenstein wanted to underscore, namely, that God, divinity, the good, the absolute, metaphysics, and so on, are revealed in what is shown, and the showing altogether resists the telling. I tend to disagree with Witt on this because there is really a lot that can be, and has been said, but he is right to say, with Kierkegaard, that language and logic cannot possess the revealed world, that is, fit what is revealed into a determinate context of discussion, a "logos". Both W and K hold that the world is indeterminate at the level of basic questions.

Relationships are not empirical matters, and this I think is a powerful insight, but it needs looking at. As I see it, "empirical matters" are not empirical matters. This is the direction theological phenomenology takes us. I witness a cup on the desk, but this empirical relation with the cup, what is it? was it a cup prior to my taking it AS a cup? Wittgenstein is clear on this: I don't witness the cup as it is a cup as if the cup bore its identity independently, rather, the cup on the table is a fact, a "state of affairs" logically structured: WE do this when we in the act of perceiving. the actuality "out there" is utterly transcendental, as is the logic I deploy to acknowledge it. The whole affair is, at root, indeterminate, transcendental, metaphysical, and this is his principle point in the Tractatus. And he was right. My view is this: all relations are radically indeterminate, and further, we do not live in metaphysics, we are metaphysics, and this subsumes the finitudes of empiricism. The Kierkegaardian question is this: Can we bring this insight to actuality in our perceptual encounters with people, with objects, with everything and anything at all? This is, I would argue, to live as a knight of faith, but it is not a faith filled with vacuous hope. It is a solid affirmation of the divinity within in the living mundane moment. Nothing is therefore mundane after this movement is made.
I'd note that I think it’s unfortunate that in the English language we’ve devolve the idea of ‘knowing’ into a single word and it’s helpful to remember that there are at least two senses to this, which in the Latin languages each have their own word – in Spanish, for example, the distinction between saber and conocer. We can ‘know’ a fact or about a thing or how to do something (saber) which is a finite kind of knowing. But we ‘know’ a person (conocer) by acquaintance and relationship. This is a ‘lived’ kind of knowing – it can’t be gained by language or proposition – it requires an active interaction. And we know God the way we know each other, through relationship, not through the acquisition of information through our senses of the objects in the world, even though the world may serve as the medium in which that relationship unfolds.
And knowledge by acquaintance, certainly this is an important basic idea, but how does this work out? You are approaching Buber here, are you not? Here I am with my language apprehension of the world, and everywhere I go, the world yields to my categories of understanding and it's not just the formal dimension of reason; it's utility. I use the world, and that puts the world in the service of my desires, but then an Other comes along s/he is certainly a utility, as well, but this relational acquaintance has another dimension to it, and this is the ethical. Ethics is first philosophy, says Levinas. Here, I will simply state the matter directly: If Kierkegaard is somewhere in the vicinity of being right about our threshold existence that straddles between finitude and infinitude, and the latter being God, there has to be in the nature of God the foundation for ethics that is not arbitrary, and dogmatically authoritative. It must be intuitively apprehended (by us. After all, the attempt here is to bring out a compelling defense of God from our perspective) as an absolute, and here we are in the early Wittgenstein: value, ethics, logic and everything that stands before inquiry is foundationally indeterminate. Witt has been accused of being a mystic (by Russell), for analytic philosophers have no truck with this mystical foundational talk, what Rorty calls critically, "non propositional knowledge".

You might object that tp call knowledge of others by acquaintance merely ethical misses the interpersonal dimension. I think yes and no on this. You sound as if you affirm this: to stand apart from all particularity and acknowledge the presence of the world as presence is exactly like standing before an Other person and the acquaintance relationship in both bears, call it an intimation, of divinity. Wordsworth called it an intimation of immortality in his famous poem, and he was not referring to an argument, but an actuality---Kierkegaardian wonder, K being a romantic, if rigorous, thinker. But the philosophical question in this is, what is value?

There is a fascinating book, God without Being, by Jean luc Marion. The penetrating gaze vs fixity of gaze. I see my cup on the table and this is where the matter ends, there in the knowledge fixity. But the religious idol carries "through" the physical, to what I call the existential indeterminacy of the one who looks, and in a sense, all things can become "idols": wondering what existence can possibly mean, I observe that the existence I "sense" in the cup is a latent inquiry into what is beyond the cup. One does not "see" existence, so where does this intuitively coercive acknowledgement come from? It is the presence of the self, the soul, if you like, but the unseen self of deep interiority that is at the heart of this affirmation. Now consider what it is to acknowledge an Other person, and the gaze penetrates the appearance through language and the face of the Other (Levinas). Language is here interpretatively "open", or better, an "openness' to the Other, and the relation of acquaintance is established as a true actual metaphysical encounter. Marion taught me, though not his point, that metaphysics is not the beyond of all things. Rather, it IS all things. One cannot make foundational divisions in the "gaze" that is removed from everydayness.

Just some thoughts on Marion aad others I though you might find interesting. I think if one wanted to explore the depths of religious thought and experience, phenomenology has an extraordinary perspective.
This all brings to mind for me Buber’s I and Thou and I have to ask if you’ve had it in mind as you wrote this. I think he hits on what you’re saying here early in the book: “As experience, the world belongs to the primary word I-It. The primary word I-Thou establishes the world of relation.” And he goes onto consider a relationship with a tree an explores this just as you have: “It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up relationship to it. The tree is now no longer It.” So, yes, the things of the physical world, can be ‘mundane’ if we experience them as objects or commodities, but when understood in the context of a relationship to us take on a very different kind of existence.
Buber is wonderful, isn't he? So mysterious, yet such is the world. To see the Other person truly is to penetrate beyond what the gaze witnesses in the crude perceptual moment (a kind of "war" Levinas calls it, to be this walking totality of desires and ideas, demanding all to bend the knee. Look into the faces of others and you find the foundation of ethics).

Again, I suspect you are a busy person, but if you have the time, see:
Jean luc Marion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCK49-G ... BrentKalar

It is not familiar territory for most, for there is that critical step one has to take which began with Kierkegaard: the world is not to be possessed by our language and when we think about the world we are already In the distance that separates the two, which is why Wittgenstein said he was speaking nonsense in his Tractatus. This "speaking" is inherently alien to the palpable world of experience. Hard, I have noticed, for philosophers to wrap their minds around this, and they mostly do not read this kind of thing. But phenomenology is the future of philosophy and religion, as the latter will eventually yield to the meaning of this "distance".
So I think what I’m trying to say here is not that the experience of the physical senses are wrong, but rather that they are incomplete. I like to use the old analogy of the three blind men and the elephant to illustrate this as I think it works well in that it shows that each of the blind men could have a true and valid experience of the elephant, but could not know the elephant in the way we know are able to know it having sight. When we rely solely on the physical senses and experience the world as no more than a collection of objects, of things that can be known in the finite sense, we won’t begin to find God there. We must bring that additional faculty that I’m calling a ‘spiritual sense’, but which could go by many other names - a sense of beauty, of love, of wonder, etc. – to be able to recognize the world as its true expression of God or Spirit.
This "spiritual sense" is, for me, a powerful presence. Often it is said that it will not be spoken, and their is something in this, of course. But, and this is a rather profound point as I see it: the incompleteness of the physical senses is not due to language's inherent deficit, for language does not, I am find of saying, following Hume, prohibit content. There is nothing in eternity that cannot be said outside of the presuppositions that language use rests on. That is, it's true that language cannot say what language is and logic cannot reveal what is presupposed in using logic, But actuality has no such limits. Very important for me here: the affective dimension of our existence may extend infinity toward broader and deeper meanings, and language would not in the least fail to "say" this, for the saying never was inhibitive to the possibility of affective meaning. Saying something depends only on shared experiences, and if one says he stood on holy ground before God, it would be the language that stands in the way of understanding; it would be the fact that the interlocutor has never had that kind of experience.

So what does one do with "that kind of experience"? This "spiritual sense". One has to free this experience from interpretative mistakes and render it as "objectively" as possible, which is what Emanuel Levinas and Michel Henry and Jean luc Marion do. Kierkegaard had a lot of respect for the medieval world, not because they got it right. Indeed, they got it "wrong" in so many ways (speaking of the narrative accounts as well as the philosophy); but they were not possessed by the presumptions of knowing that overwhelm the "scientism" of our da,, and were free and open to this "sense". A sense doesn't have much of an interpretative dimension to it. It is a "pure phenomenon" like being in love, irreducible, yet dependent on the, if you will, Zeit Geist of the period for contextualization (Hegel thought like this, ironically, because K was dead against Hegel. An interesting argument there). Imagine seeing the sun as a God. Marion tells us to put aside the error of this and think about what religious images do: they "transpierce" the physical. God Without Being is a fascinating book.
This is what St. Ignatius Loyola described as learning to recognize that "all of things in this world are gifts of God, created for us, to be the means by which we can come to know him better.” So again, and maybe we’re saying essentially the same thing, but it’s not a case of God ‘in the world’, but rather of the world as the means or medium through which we may know God who is beyond the world. To quote another Saint, Ste. Therese of Liseux, “The world is thy ship and not thy home.”
Not thy home, and "the true life is absent." But then, terms like "gifts" are beyond my reckoning. Why are we born to suffer and die? Suffering taken as a pure phenomenon, like love, joy, happiness and all the rest of the affective dimension of our existence, is simply not reducible to any theoretical analytic account. It is "there" a given, and how it is a gift defies understanding. You could say suffering opens the way to God, and I would argue with you on this, not against you (recalling Dewey, suffering is at the foundation of what it is to understand at all: it is in the obstructed desire that leads to the question--the question, the "piety of thought, says Heidegger-- and the question is the openness to possibility); but I cannot say why suffering is there, in this matrix of evolvement. I cannot affirm suffering as a gift on close inspection of its actuality. This is where faith comes in, one might say, but then, there is more, though I hesitate to go into it as I am already trying your patience. Nutshell: All is metaphysics, and there is no finitude. All finitudes are subsumed by metaphysics. this means the moral drama played out in human affairs is truly a meta-moral drama, and our apprehension of good and evil are not relativizable. Evil IS evil in some impossible absoluteness of evil; and good the same. To talk like this has only one consequence, which is that our moral world and its struggles really is WHAT IS.

It does go on.
I agree with you about the ‘hopeless’ nature of that dialectic! I’ve always thought that the notion of infinity contains an inherent paradox. As you’ve said above, finitude is by definition, determinacy. It’s interesting to look at the roots of these words: that define means ‘to place limits or boundaries on’, that determine means ‘to put an end to’, so both of these mean essentially the same thing, i.e. ‘to make finite’. So that which is ‘infinite’ is also, by definition, ‘undefined’ and language relies on definitions to make sense, so how can we speak of what cannot be defined? As you say, we go around in circles.

There’s more that could be said, but I’m running on, so will wrap here.

I enjoyed doing the Kierkegaard reading with you a while back. Would you by chance be interested in doing another selection? If so, let me know. Maybe the Buber I and Thou? I also have a copy of Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing that I’m thinking of starting soon. Or any other suggestions are welcome.
Two ways to think about infinity. One is mathematical, quantitative, the other is intuitive. I am interested in the intuition, which is not quantifiable. I don't know what it is. It is there, the intrusion of transcendence. Infinity is only as meaningful as its presence reveals, and it reveals itself to be a radical indeterminacy of all things. The "what is it" question meets its ruin in infinity, for no inquiry finds its finality.

Reading Buber sounds good. He is at the beginning of theology-philosophy analysis, I think. He is the one who started something many continued to talk about.
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The Beast
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Re: The way to approach an understanding of God

Post by The Beast »

A precise understanding of infinity is the understanding of its representation or its symbol. The knowledge of the symbol and its definition as “no beginning and no end” it is not the alpha and the omega as the beginning and the end. The intuition of infinity is a generational variable and a sign of individuality confined to the alpha and the omega. I have the intuition that the intuition of infinity and the intuition of mortality are related. We are born to feel and to understand. What is it that we understand? Infinite suffering or infinite happiness or infinite good or infinite bad. This is the same as understanding 1 or 1 apple. As reality is given by infinite choices of which have the intuition, we choose ours. We choose this or that. We choose. In the progressive understanding of my capacity to feel, I see this function (understanding) relative to a higher understanding of those questions you posited. I do understand the knowledge of my mortality or the intuition of infinity. This is a non-experiential knowledge derived by the understanding rooted in the evolutive/historical/intelligent/rational history of life as we know it.
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