C: Excellent rap, it really made me think. I find your own views both more comprehensible and more interesting than Derrida. I would enjoy him more if he would dial back the pretentiousness in his presentation about 10 notches! I have spent some time with philosophers and ideas do not have to be explained in such a convoluted way if the goal is to convey understanding. In the Wikki article about him it claims that he has little influence on philosophy but was mostly taken seriously in other areas like literature. I am not sure if that is true or not but he comes off as unnecessarily obtuse to me. You on the other hand are dealing with complex issues in a clear way I can relate to. I would like to use a few paragraphs as a discussion prompt.
A: I know, that this is heady stuff, and I don't claim at all to understand everything of it. But for me, as a boy, reading the science of being, and agreeing about the impersonal being, as some kind of last reality, didn't imply to become religious. But then it might be seen as such by other's. So there is this grey zone between philosophy and religion. And according to that, you may find yourself, at various points of your life on either side of that line between religion and philosophy. C: That last sentence is too true! I hold the assumption about Being that is claimed by Maharishi and other Hindus to be essentially religious in its source. It is an appeal to the scriptures as an authoritative source for knowledge which is religious epistemology. (philosophers would refer to it as incomplete or assumptive epistemology.) In Maharishi's system, the ultimate revelation of the nature of reality as the Self does not come from innocent direct experience. It is the organization of belief about your experience that is triggered by the mahavakyas which are supposed to organize your experience through this assumption about reality. That is really significant and is often lost to people who believe that it is just the growth of experience that accomplishes it. It begins with being instructed that the silence you experience in meditation is your true Self. I am That, thou art that, all this is that. He even talks about how studying the Brahma sutras stitch together all threads of unity into the cloth of Brahman. It is a leap of understanding. That reveals Maharishi as a teacher of a belief system about our experience. I have rejected his assumptions about the supremacy of the Vedic philosophy model and the Hindu religion. I do not view the self experienced in meditation to be a transpersonal reality, although it can feel that way sometime. I don't have any experience that forces me to view it as more than a style of functioning of my own brain and mind. A: And you might agree with me, that the difference between the belief of a stone-age-man in his 'god' is very different from the belief of a philosophical theologian, and that Heidegger, who obviously believed in god, is somehow closer to the atheist Sartre, than to the stone-age-man. In this sense, the demarkation-line between belief and non-belief is somewhat artificial, I think. C: In end result they are more similar than in the process that produced them. In philosophy it is the difference between ontology (what exists) and epistemology (how we can be confident about our knowledge) If you dig into most people]s statements about a version of God belief, no matter how philosophically complex or subtle, you can find the epistemological assumptive jump them make to get there. Often they just state them as first principles. The atheist says, If I can imagine it otherwise then I don't need to accept this assumption as a necessity. It must be proven through other means. Staying on that course is what defines atheist thought IMO. A:That's one point. The other point is, that you do not necessarily have to regard atheism AS a belief in and of it-self, as it defines itself as a negation of belief (but then what belief exactly?). C: Excellent point. That is how I think of atheism, as different from a belief. Not accepting a belief is not the same thing and has different epistemological rules than asserting one. So I am not sure I go along with the idea that it is for the atheist to define what belief he is rejecting exactly. This is because of the distinction I made above between ontology and epistemology. Religious beliefs are rejected for me on epistemological rather than ontological grounds so the details of their conclusions are not as important as their method of acquiring their beliefs. I can't know if there really is a God or not, I can just say that so far no one has made a case convincing enough for me to accept it as a belief for good reasons. A: But, I think that everybody makes conscious or unconscious or half-conscious assumptions about the nature of reality. And in this sense has beliefs. C: Totally on board here. It is our cognitive gap ridden nature to do so. This is why keeping an eye on the processes we use that we can be conscious of seems so valuable. We will bullshit ourselves on a moments notice and atheism is no guarantee of avoiding that. A: To say that you know about all of your beliefs is an assumption. It's not that atheism is a belief, but you make assumptions, I believe, about nature and the world, which in my view pass as beliefs. C: I think there are two levels here. On one level, our unconscious biases are always in play in our thinking. But I believe that the process of making your beliefs explicit and spelling out what they are founded on, which is the process of philosophy, is a way to examine ideas on their own. No matter how much emotionally driven assumptions I have about Christianity, the basis of the claims of Jesus' divinity can be known explicitly. They are founded on the assumption that the Bible is a different kind of book than other man made literature, and that the claims about Jesus' miracles and birth lineage (which rests on Jewish assumptions about the Messiah) are true. No matter what my predisposition toward Christianity, I can decide that I do not have to accept the authority of the scripture and that people often make shit up about leaders in their group. This is the same process I use to reject Maharishi's claims about God with some additional rejections of mystical experience as reliable. So I have more optimism that we can in fact get clear on ideas and evaluate their epistemological reliability beyond our own assumptions. Reading other people's views helps me. A:On the basis of that, at this moment, you declare yourself to be an atheist. That's fine, I have no objection to this really. I just think, it's not that simple. So I understand Derrida of saying, that this is an ongoing process, of refinement and possibly going back and force, an exploration, in order to come to a certain conclusion. If you just say: Now, I have decided that I am an atheist, is just as crude as saying, from now on I have decided that Allah is the Lord and Muhammed is his messanger, and you are a muslim, bingo. It's just not like that, I think. C: I think that was really a brilliant summation of his point. I disagree with him here. I think he is mixing up two levels. One is that epistemological humility is always appropriate, and to that end of his point I agree. We are flawed thinking creatures and prone to self bullshittery at every turn. But he is dismissing too much about the conclusions that philosophers come to as they analyze what beliefs are supported by good reasons and which ones to reject for a lack of them. We don't have to be so equivocal concerning our ability to determine that good reasons don't support a belief enough to adapt it. This is a major different between asserting a belief and rejecting one. It is a completely different process. I am not equivocal about there not really being a Santa Claus. I have determined that he is the product of human creative thought and do not have to be cautious in my rejection of his reality beyond that. There is no Santa Claus magical person. Though all the complexity of religious assertions about reality, if you just keep your eye on the epistemological ball, you can see what the claims are based on, and then decide if you accept those reasons or not. If you have rejected them as valid, you can be pretty sure you don't share those beliefs. That is how I became an atheist. Such an excellent rap. I am open to any of your thoughts or counterpoints if you want to keep it going, but in any case I will keep an eye on your contributions here. I enjoyed what you wrote. ---In [email protected], <[email protected]> wrote : ---In [email protected], <curtisdeltablues@...> wrote : That was interesting, thanks for posting it. Oh, great that you liked it. That was enough reason for me to post it He may be defining atheism differently than I do. I'm sure he does, I think that's really the whole point about it, how you define atheism. Or theism respectively. For example, just look at this quote of him: At the end of Being and Nothingness...[,] Being in-itself and Being for-itself were of Being; and this totality of beings, in which they were effected, itself was linked up to itself, relating and appearing to itself, by means of the essential project of human-reality. What was named in this way, in an allegedly neutral and undetermined way, was nothing other than the metaphysical unity of man and God, the relation of man to God, the project of becoming God as the project constituting human-reality. Atheism changes nothing in this fundamental structure. - [He is talking about Satre's book 'Being and Nothingness'] As you may know, both Sartre and Derrida pass as atheists. But from this it becomes clear that he views atheism very differently from you, and maybe very different from most non-philosophers. But that makes it interesting, I think. For me, I do know that I am an atheist because I don't hold any version of god belief. I am not saying that I know that there is no god, I don't believe I can know this. But I am certainly clear about my own mind and what beliefs I hold. So he may be defining atheism as a believe which he puts on a level with a belief in god so it is ridiculous to show overconfidence because a thoughtful person should always be aware of the alternatives to his position on anything. But atheism as I define it is not a positive belief so it s not intellectually presumptuous to say that: I know my beliefs and there aren't any versions of a god belief among them. Or maybe I just didn't understand the guy very well. ( I did listen twice and gave it a shot.) Great, thanks. Any thoughts? If you ask me, yes: I also listened a few times, also after your reply, because I didn't necessarily get where he is comming from immediately. Just that his vagueness about this issue sort of resonates with me, but I am coming from the other side, I don't reagard myself as an atheist. I would have called myself an atheist, when I was young, before starting TM, and still into TM right after initiation for the first half year. Maybe YOU, according to a somewhat more informed view of atheism, according to your definition, wouldn't have called me atheist, because I was basically just rejecting a very naive, childish view of religion and god, which I think is normal at this age. At that time, I would have said, I am an atheist, but now, I am not sure, what I was. Then I read the SOB of Maharishi, and that was like a real revelation. Btw, all the references to a personal god in the book, I immediately dismissed as a sort of an appeal to the more religious minded, so I took none of it serious, to start with. And to this moment, Shankara is regarded as an atheist by the Hare Krishnas. Coming back to Derridas, he mentions two things in the video, which clue you in, about what it is really. He mentions 'ontotheology' Ontotheology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontotheology#Contemporary_writers and 'negative theology' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff%C3%A9rance#Negative_theology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff%C3%A9rance#Negative_theology. The whole quote, which starts the question is from différance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff%c3%a9rance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Différance You might read this to get a clue: 'For Heidegger ontotheology contributes to the oblivion or forgetfulness of Being. Indeed "metaphysics is onto-theo-logy," and Western metaphysics "since the beginning with the Greeks has eminently been both ontology and theology." The problem with this intermixing of ontology and theology according to Heidegger's analysis, and the reason why Heidegger and his successors sought to overcome it, is at least twofold. First, by linking the philosophical with the theological, and vice versa, the distinctiveness of each respective discourse is clouded over. As such, the nature of philosophy as a factually unknown and structurally unknowable path of thought is restricted by an economy of faith. Likewise with theology, as the science of faith, theology at its best testifies to the irreducible mystery of its source in revelation and to the unapproachable and incomprehensible aim of its desire in God. However, once theology becomes onto-theological that mysterious source and incomprehensible aim are reduced to the order of beings.'... This is Heidegger. But Derrida differs: 'Based upon this perspective, ontotheology is not so much a problem to be overcome as it is an inevitability of thought that is impossible to be avoided and that conditions all human inquiry, whether theological or philosophical in nature, or whether religious or secular in orientation. Yet Derrida claims in his essay différance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff%C3%A9rance that différance both exceeds and inscribes ontotheology.' I know, that this is heady stuff, and I don't claim at all to understand everything of it. But for me, as a boy, reading the science of being, and agreeing about the impersonal being, as some kind of last reality, didn't imply to become religious. But then it might be seen as such by other's. So there is this grey zone between philosophy and religion. And according to that, you may find yourself, at various points of your life on either side of that line between religion and philosophy. And you might agree with me, that the difference between the belief of a stone-age-man in his 'god' is very different from the belief of a philosophical theologian, and that Heidegger, who obviously believed in god, is somehow closer to the atheist Sartre, than to the stone-age-man. In this sense, the demarkation-line between belief and non-belief is somewhat artificial, I think. That's one point. The other point is, that you do not necessarily have to regard atheism AS a belief in and of it-self, as it defines itself as a negation of belief (but then what belief exactly?). But, I think that everybody makes conscious or unconscious or half-conscious assumptions about the nature of reality. And in this sense has beliefs. To say that you know about all of your beliefs is an assumption. It's not that atheism is a belief, but you make assumptions, I believe, about nature and the world, which in my view pass as beliefs. On the basis of that, at this moment, you declare yourself to be an atheist. That's fine, I have no objection to this really. I just think, it's not that simple. So I understand Derrida of saying, that this is an ongoing process, of refinement and possibly going back and force, an exploration, in order to come to a certain conclusion. If you just say: Now, I have decided that I am an atheist, is just as crude as saying, from now on I have decided that Allah is the Lord and Muhammed is his messanger, and you are a muslim, bingo. It's just not like that, I think. ---In [email protected], <[email protected]> wrote : Why do you say, - I rightly pass for an atheist - instead of just saying 'I AM an atheist'? (to Derrida) I think his answer is great. Jacques Derrida On Atheism and Belief https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcl00tc-WHc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcl00tc-WHc Jacques Derrida On Atheism and Belief https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcl00tc-WHc Mirrored video with Creative Commons Attribution license to enabled Embedding. View on www.youtube.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcl00tc-WHc Preview by Yahoo
