Friday, September 23, 2011
Bad companions
Remembering my affection for an old Alan Watts book, I searched online and found several downloadable copies. Having done that, I started to "page" through it in Adobe Reader and landed on this page. Which was about the very same issue my posting was about...The True, the Beautiful and the (problem of) the Good.
This conception (of Satan), so marvelously peculiar and sinister, brings
into sharp contrast the Christian sense of the goodness of God.
For what the Christian consciousness sees in all the trappings
of glory, of shekinah, of the blinding radiance of the Trinity,
is not so much beauty, or even truth, as goodness. Beauty has
seemed a deceptive attribute, shared alike by God and Satan,
who also knows the truth and trembles. What belongs
essentially and exclusively to God is inflexible righteousness,
and historical Christianity simply has not tolerated any notion
of God as an Absolute "beyond good and evil" Thus the
Being of being, the Ultimate Reality, has for the Christian
mentality a definite character, a specific and particular will,
such that goodness does not exist merely in relation to evil
but is, from everlasting, the very essence of God. As we shall
see, this conception is as monstrous and sinister, in its own
way, as that of the Devil. It represents the crucial point at
which historical Christianity is "aberrant" among the great
traditional doctrines of the world, though the aberration is not
so much from any defect of the myth as from the minds of those
who have been its official interpreters.
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5 comments:
The aberration surely is from Plato: the idea of the Good — terrifying as that idea may be to certain geniuses — beyond Being.
Nietzsche: Christianity is platonism for the folk. BGE preface
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P.S. Myth bringers are defective in wishing to demote the good as ultimately merely the shadow of evil and-or vice versa, while they expect still to be accredited as good (merely 'bad' as in authentically bad-ass etc etc)?
Lao-Tsu: admittedly, the tao that is good is not the eternal good, but the tao that is a tao is still somehow "good." Good does all the heavy lifting. The true (shem and ham), the beautiful (japheth) and the good (canaan)?
I suppose our genealogical aiôn must necessarily replace the true the good and the beautiful with the true the good and the noble (gennaios, vornehm).
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Japheth must undertake genealogical beauty -- or there will be no sublation of obtuse reconciliations of dualism as in idealistic moral good with evil qua bad-ass.
Marcuse: "good" is both bad (repression or repressive tolerance) and good (desublimational 'honesty,' Canaanitization. He doesn't need bad or evil at all. Marcusean Christianity: before the beginning was bourgeois repression (Freudian thanatos); then »In the beginning, God said "Let it all hang out." And God saw the bloated honesty, that it is worth value-neutral wonderment.«
Nietzsche: the true, the good and the noble (vornehm, gennaios) religiously estin the obedient One of will-to-power (Will to Power ¶822).
Marcuse's clamour for affirmation of the 'honest' desublimational sublime(?) requires the Ego sum quis ego sum to politically disobey his religious formation.
Pascal understood that the honest, the good and the beautiful would not, could no suffice. Honnêteté conceals the truth that the ego or son (Prodigal, Oedipus) is hated and for hating (negating) in filial obedience to the father Self. (The Elder son, Martha, Shem-Ham, stand outside the tent [seculum olam aiôn] in the cheled of 'this' world. If honesty sufficed, they would not flee (cheled) the tent. Japheth and Canaan are inside in the "outer" the "external" the really real (ontôs on).
I guess.
»In all the gûnê joints in all the towns in all the world Canaan walks into a mine«?
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