Posts by Kracklite
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Hi Giovanni, yes I have.
Gregory Benford once said, in response to Clarke, that technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced, which is Erik Davis' point, I take it. I've had some good discussions on the topic with a transhumanist friend.
And I get booze into myself far too often or not often enough.
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Personifying forces of nature and culture becomes animism by default.
Could go on about the concept of Genius loci and (the neoplatonist) Plutarch's essay on Socrates Daemon. I'm sure there's a paper to be written on the projection of or attribution of consciousness to the external world and the development in later centuries of anthropocentric humanism.
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I think your introduction of Renaissance Humanists into the discussion was an attempt to avoid answering my question about Animists. But it turns out that you think the Humanists were Animists. Whatever next?
As a matter of fact, I do think that they were animists, according to my definition above. Not consciously so... though there are many indications that some were deliberate about it. Personifying forces of nature and culture becomes animism by default. I tend to use classical or classically-inspired examples because the Greeks and their Renaissance followers tended to be very self conscious and articulate about their beliefs and we have access to their literary legacy.
'An attempt to avoid'? Oh dear. You do have a conspirational view of people. In biology, there are two kinds of taxonomist - 'lumpers' and 'splitters'. Lumpers see every new specimen as a representative of an already described species, splitters see every new specimen as a representative of a new species. I'm a linker. I am interested in finding correspondences and discordances between things. Any thing considered purely on its own terms reveals nothing new or interesting.
Maybe I'm not even a linker. My Master's supervisor warned me off studying deconstruction, saying that it came too naturally to me.
You appear to be making rationalism synonymous with utiopianism
Yes, if you like. I regard rationalism, specifically scientific empiricism as an extremely useful methodology, but to treat it as an exemplar for all fields of perception and behaviour is absurd in my opinion. 'Utopian' in another word.
I wonder, do strawmen compare penis sizes?
Probably while dancing on the head of a pin.
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Hmmm, patronising? Consider your own manner.
Really, you should read more on the study of myth and religion. It is quite illuminating and entertaining.
You know, I brought that up because I think that pleasure is involved in classical studies. I was actually trying to be encouraging. It is a pity that you should interpret that as a sneer, but then that seems to be your default mode, so you can be forgiven for attributing it to everyone else perhaps.
No doubt you do know about Renaissance art, but sorry, I never got into comparing penile lengths at intermediate school and I'm not going to indulge now.
Yes, I do take a liberal view of religion as a category. I don't stick to explicit signs such as incense, tonsures and tiaras, but statements of creed and mythos. Perhaps you need to define 'rationalism', and in doing so you would have to detach it from a large number of self-declared 'rationalists' who have preached change, revolution (a euphemism for apocalypse) and utopia in a manner indistinguishable in form from innumerable religious proponents. 'God', 'historical inevitability' and 'the invisible hand' are one and the same as far as I'm concerned - both speak of a certainty of an overriding, coherent force. The first has a bearded face, the others hide theirs, but are effectively the same. Sorry, but that's the admittedly rather tired 'If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...' argument, but I'm sure that Alan Turing would understand. Again, try Gray and come back to me.
It's too late at night/too early in the morning to bother with talking about how Bruno, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola et al found the idea of a single superior God unsatisfactory and reverted (so to speak) to resort to populating the cosmos with personified intermediate forces and principles immanent in the physical, spiritual and cognitive phenomena of the world and their delicate negotiations with the church (failed, in Bruno's case) or their infleunces on artists such as Bronzino or Botticelli. By you own boast, you should be well aware of all this.
Animism is in my definition on a continuum with theism, holding that there are sentient forces immanent in the phenomena of nature, which may be negotiated with in some manner, whether to appease or to establish a relationship of allegiance or comprehensive identification.
I am not going to bother with preces of Plutarch, Yates, Couliano, Joscelyn Godwin's translation of the Hypnerotomachia or even bloody Paglia. Read them and tell me what you think.
Mind you, I do feel the urge to make a gratuitous Battlestar Galactica reference...
...and didn't you say that you were going to ignore me in future?
Nighty-night.
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We seem to talking past each other. :)
Maybe not :)
somewhat bleak implications of the atheist-existentialist thing
Well, there's always Kierkegaard..., er, but he's rather bleak, and a Dane, like Hamlet. Maybe not...
(Mind you, a Dane I know thinks that that play is really indelibly English.)
We can tell stories.
Ah yes, I think that that defines us, not sapiens , but storytelling. My Latin's too poor to articulate 'Storytelling Man (in the non-gendered sense)' as opposed to 'Wise Man'. Stories are our immortality and transcendence (still, as Woody Allen said, not dying is still preferable as a method).
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I personally don't find the probabalistic approach helpful, but that is just me.
Well, that's the nature of faith, or trust - under the framework of Christian theology and morality, calculation subverts faith and trust by inserting raw quantified self-interest. To harp on about Pascal, he'd actually go to Hell for his argument for believing in God for that reason!
BTW, I have no idea if you are a person of faith.
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And who was it who introduced 'primitives' and their brains to the argument? Not me
Sarcastic use of the term 'noble savage' does so. You are being disingenuous.
given your liberal use of the word 'religion.
That is my point. I could add the prefix 'crypto' if you wish - but I already have. Repetition would be redundant. Unfortunately, the point I concede to John Gray (in Black Mass ) is that many explicitly political ideologies are in fact covertly apocalyptic religions.
And do these books on anthropology say that animists did not hold their beliefs sincerely
Really, you should read more on the study of myth and religion. It is quite illuminating and entertaining. The books in question are far too numerous for me to single out any one, but at the the more literary end of the scale, I'd recommend Roberto Calasso's exegeses, starting with The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony . There is a substantial element of play and irony involved in the interpretation of transcendental symbolism, especially as practised in Neoplatonist influences on Renaissance art and Florentine philosophy. Frances Yates' books on the subject, starting with --The Art of Memory__ give a good historical and philosophical grounding on the use of mythic symbolism's applicability to mnemonics for starters.
I do in fact have many disagreements with John Gray's argument on points of detail (which are irrelevant here), but his fundamental thesis is one that I support.
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WH,
a paradox that may lead to further discussion... philosophically, one cannot prove a negative, therefore, as an honest atheist, I cannot say therefore that there is no God, merely that I have no need for the hypothesis that God exists. As a corollary of that, I cannot say that the Judeo-Christian God as described in the Bible is tenable according to my understanding of the universe as described by the empirical scientific method.
On the other hand, day-to-day, the systems and metaphors of theology provide me with a means of articulating the contexts and choices of my existence... and I will admit to subscribing to Pascal's wager 0.001%. :-)
Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, after all.
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I meant to say that some people have recently commented on the fact that certain ways of talking about strong atheism have come across as... uh, inflexible, to others.
You might mean Richard Dawkins, at a guess? His rather sweeping comments on superorganisms and group selection have annoyed some nominally in the same camp as himself.
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Actually, I have to say that your definition of 'sincerity' is very narrow. One can 'sincerely' believe in, say, the observations of Dickens on the lives of the poor without 'sincerely' believing that there really was an individual named 'Oliver Twist'. The former might be 'true' but the latter is not... but the untruth of the latter is irrelevant to the practice of sincerity itself.
One need not believe that there is some higher force governing one's appreciation of aesthetics, but can still appreciate Bach's sense of order and beauty without subscribing to his religion, for example.