#antinomies

[lnrewlbrj3krj23]

Conspiracy Theories, Ideology, and Metaphysics in the Metamodern Era

Sensemaking for the 21st Century: Part 3

[ahumourlessworld]

“To resolve the antinomy, indeed, means to find God. However, no matter how hard I try, I can only think of God as the solution to all antinomies: as knowledge fulfilled. Yet, if such a theory were true, and I knew for a fact that God really existed, with this certainty I would resolve all my problems, and I would be one with God: for knowing the existence of God would mean to be assured of the essence of God, which is knowledge. The problem, of which the revealed religion had an intuition, has been resolved through the testimony of the word of God, of the logos. Consequently, without this testimony religion would collapse. The believer is not capable of overcoming the positivist base of his faith constituted by the fact of revelation. The unbeliever may not place himself on a different plane and consequently accept the religious positivism—that is, the criterion of the fact of revelation—and notice that this fact does not exist because the presumed divine word is not the whole divine word and it cannot therefore reveal the divinity by remaining particular. From this point of view, the historical criticism of revelation is superfluous, and all documentation placed as foundation of religion can be considered accepted as true. What one questions is the possibility of demonstrating the existence of God with the fact of revelation understood in the traditional sense. Even if that fact repeated itself today before my eyes and I were sure of not dreaming, faith could not emerge in me in a rational way. That fact would be a phenomenon that is added to the infinite other phenomena which I experience, miraculous and mysterious as the others, even if, different from the others, is absolutely new for me. If a being with or without human features appeared and resuscitated the dead or stopped the course of the sun, I would certainly find myself before a new problem. However, I would not be able to place it on a level different from the one involving the problem of birth, growing up, and death of a person. If this being talked and revealed itself to be God, I could not give that God other meaning than that of being different from us, more powerful than all other human beings; I could attribute to him all the powers conceivable as supernatural but not for this reason I could recognize him as God and see in him the realization of the world. The antinomy would remain unresolved as the fact that in the same soul of the religious person at times resurfaces the perennial but, and consequently, next to God, other gods are placed or against God the devil grins. The gods are seen as the multiplicity in which the unity of God is divided while the devil represents the antithesis of the thesis, the illusion before reality, the resurface of the antinomy that seemed resolved.

In order for doubt not to reappear and for me to be sure that I am before God and not before the devil, I would need God to talk to me and reveal the solution to all my problems, to give me all his knowledge, which will dispel my doubts so that no other antinomy can emerge until I know the reason for my and God's existence, the reason for our relationship, and the rules that should guide my actions. Only then will I know that God really exists and that I am no different from him because his wisdom will be my wisdom.

Otherwise, I have no knowledge and I limit myself in believing in a God who talked, who gave laws wrapped in dogma and mystery. The God in whom I believe, and who should represent the greatest spiritual value of all, that is, spirit itself, becomes nature and, therefore, a problem—just like everything else in nature. As my God, he tells me: do not kill unless you wish to lose your soul; as fire, he tells me: if you get too close, you will burn. I am a slave of God in the same way I am a slave of nature, and just as I stand before nature, I am either resigned or rebellious. My enslavement only ends when I succeed in loving God to the extent that God becomes everything for me: spirit, value, goals. God is no longer a problem but a solution, peace for my soul and the solution to a series of antinomies that would give no rest to my thoughts. Such a love, which is not merely the blind passion of a weak soul, can only be imagined by me as the shadowless light of pure rationality. If this light is out of reach, my faith becomes yet another fact to be placed alongside other facts about me, like the color of my hair or the strength of my muscles: a mere fact of my conscience, not unlike my instinct of self-defense, the pleasure to satisty my body, love, hatred, and all the other passions. I don't know why I must not kill. If I knew, I would not kill even without God's Commandment. God either commands me like a slave or he must explain the reason of this Commandment by explaining the world to me. This is the antinomy of religion, and I don't see how I can overcome it. Above all, I don't understand what the merit of the believer may mean.

In reality, the admiration that is reserved to religious people is directed to the effort that they make to find the true God by rejecting the contingent solutions or by moving from antinomy to antinomy toward the achievement of the final solution. In this manner, faith of having found with faith and the anxiety of finding are intertwined in human judgment. If we understand God as the principle or the essence of the world, we cannot deny this principle without denying the world so that the difficulty is not to admit it rather to admit it as solution or as problem. Religious people who have faith in revelation believe that they can admit it. However, they recognize that the revelation is not complete, that the antinomies are not all resolved, and that the dogma or mystery persists. Consequently, solution proves to be apparent, and the true God resurrects in their soul as dogma or mystery, that is, as problem. If revelation is the presupposition of religion, I cannot be religious because God did not reveal himself to me. If revelation is not necessary, the more religious I am, the more intensely I posit God's problem, and the more I try to find a solution. As far as the partial revelation that we assume present in a particular religious myth, I have no reason to reject it since the whole world that surrounds me is a miracle, is partial revelation, and being such, transforms itself into antinomy. What I don't understand is how this partial revelation can be used as orientation since it does not lose its partiality or its problematicity; how its word can acquire for me a meaning that overcomes materialism and becomes a spiritual value. Being, value, and God are still far away while antinomy reaffirms itself relentlessly. ...” - Ugo Spirito, ‘La vita come ricerca’ (1937)

“The relationship between the universality and the particularity of contradiction is the relationship between the general character and the individual character of contradiction. By the former we mean that contradiction exists in and runs through all processes from beginning to end; motion, things, processes, thinking—all are contradictions. To deny contradiction is to deny everything. This is a universal truth for all times and all countries, which admits of no exception. Hence the general character, the absoluteness of contradiction. But this general character is contained in every individual character; without individual character there can be no general character. If all individual character were removed, what general character would remain? It is because each contradiction is particular that individual character arises. All individual character exists conditionally and temporarily, and hence is relative.

This truth concerning general and individual character, concerning absoluteness and relativity, is the quintessence of the problem of contradiction in things; failure to understand it is tantamount to abandoning dialectics.” - Mao Tse-tung, ‘On Contradiction’ (August 1937)

[holy-jocker-blog]

Antinomies. Totems

Versio GIF

[holy-jocker-blog]

Antinomies. Totem animals

Versió: Litografia en paper d’alumini

[lnrewlbrj3krj23]

Freedom within the limits of Reason Alone

In order to know you are free, you must ignore the fact that by context you are causally constrained. In order to know you are determined you must ignore the fact that you can make decisions based on any random criteria you choose. This is one of Kant's antinomies, meaning that you reach a logical contradiction when you try and apply reason beyond the limits of human experience. A consequence of these antionmies is that in order to have knowledge you must logically exclude the possibility that something is not how you know it to be. In other words, knowledge of the color red means that we ignore the multiple indeterminate shades of color that red is and is not, in order to solidify the condition of knowledge, so that we can have truth. This is a limit of reason itself, not a problem of the world, but of how we know anything. In a sense, this demonstrates that human beings are generic thought machines, regardless of “facts”.  This then becomes an existential argument for freedom, as Kant fully realized.  That true freedom is thought itself.

[bygone]