Miten puolustaa Jumalan hyvyyttä pahan olemassaolosta huolimatta?

Tästä kaavakuvasta puuttuu yksi ja kakkein olennaisin 'kaava' [ja sen mukana kaikki muu], joka ilmaisee, mitä D.B Hart tarkoittaa kristillisen näkemyksen perustalla kirjoittaessaan: The Christian vision of the world, however, is not some rational deduction from empirical experience, but it is a moral and spiritual aptitude – or, rather, a moral and spiritual labor. The Christian eyes see (or should see) a deeper truth in the world than mere “nature”, and it is a truth that gives rise not to optimism but to joy. - - Hmm. - - Kyseessä taitaakin olla jotain, mitä ei noin vain kaavalla pystytä ilmaisemaan - ei ainakaan kadottamatta sitä, mitä haluttiin kuvata ja määrittää [tämä on deskription, logiikan ja matematiikan paradoksi suhteessa subjektiiviseen luottamuksen kokemukseen uskona, toivona ja rakkautena].

I
Miksi perinteisen teodikean ongelman ratkaisuyritykset puhuvat kristinuskon kannalta ikäänkuin ongelman vierestä eivätkä siten kosketa itse evankeliumin sanoman ydintä. Lainaus on David Bentley Hart'in kirjasta: The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?

'A sound ‘natural theology’ is by definition sober and (ideally) mildly depressing: since it cannot assert anything more about the world than that it possesses a marvelous complexity of design, nor anything more about God than that he is an immersurably wise and powerful engineer, it has far more room in its arguments for the economy of life and death (in all its brutality) than it has for “paradise.” In fact, the principal task of theodicy is to explain why paradise is not a logical possibility. The Christian vision of the world, however, is not some rational deduction from empirical experience, but it is a moral and spiritual aptitude – or, rather, a moral and spiritual labor. The Christian eyes see (or should see) a deeper truth in the world than mere “nature”, and it is a truth that gives rise not to optimism but to joy' (pp. 57-58).

http://www.amazon.com/Doors-Sea-Where-Was-Tsunami/dp/0802829767#_

II
1
Lukija voi nyt varsin konkreettisesti pohtia, miten ja miksi D.B.Hart'in patristiikasta ammentavat näkemykset kristillisen uskonnonfilosofian ehkä tärkeimmässä kysymyksessä: miksi kaikkivaltias ja hyvä Jumala sallii viattomien kärsimyksen, eroavat reformatorisen perinteen, etenkin kalvinismin laki-skolastisista saivarteluista, jotka tekevät Jumalasta hirviön, jolla on syynsä ja oikeutuksensa sallia paha ja jopa aiheuttaa sitä.

Tällainen - ihmisen syntisyyden [ja kaiken muunkin] ennalta määrännyt sekä harvojen pelastettujen että lukemattomien kadotukseen tuomittujen kanssa kissa-hiiri-leikkiä pelaava sadisti-Jumala toimii tietenkin myös kalvinistisen soteriologian perverssinä mallina, jonka piilo-pelagiolainen ihmiskäsitys oikeuttaa asettumisen muiden ihmisten yläpuolelle esimerkiksi älykkyysosammäärän ['parempien' geenien], taloudellisen menestyksen tai ylipäätään [sosiaali-]darwinistis-memeettisen [pseudo-normatiivisen] paremmuuden nimissä.

Poleeminen mutta hienostunutta kieltä käyttävä Hart ei kirjoita sentään aivan niin karkeasti kuin minä, mutta me jaamme yhteisen inhon kalvinismin egoistista moraali-nihilismiä kohtaan, joka implikoi mm. erään seikan, josta olen itsekin kirjoittanut: kalvinismi ja karman kerääminen ovat pelastusopillisesti ja moraaliperiaatteena hyvin samantyyppisiä asenteita.

Toistan, että Hart ei kirjoita juuri näin [vaan minä], mutta luvusta II 2 löytyvän sitaatin kolme esimerkki-'kristittyä' ovat mielestäni kaikki saman kalvinistis-reformatoris-sadistisen Jumalan/ihmisen edustaman pelastusoikeuden ilmentymiä.

Olen täysin vakuuttunut, että Hartin edustama kristillisyys sen sijaan näkee pahuuden ongelman juutalaistyyppiseen laki-kalvinismiin verrattuna paljon aidomman kristillisen perinteen pohjalta, jonka ytimessä on armo, toivo ja ilo eikä abstrakti argumentein oikeutettu tekopyhä optimismi suhteessa Jumalaan, joka kuitenkin [oikeutetusti?] käyttää pahaa saavuttaakseen omat [hyvät?] päämääränsä, juridinen [joskin ennalta määrätty] tuomio sekä episteemis-antropomorfistinen moraali-saivartelu, joka mielestäni ilmentää pohjimmiltaan 'uskovan' narsistisen ylemmyydentunteen oikeutukseen/legitimointiin pyrkivää fundamentalismia - eikä siis lopulta kristillisyyttä lainkaan - paitsi ehkä lahkolaisena harhaoppina.

2
'Mildly instructive to me were some remarks sent to Christian websites discussing a Wall Street Journal column of mine from the Friday following the earthquake. A stern if somewhat excitable Calvinist, intoxicated with God’s sovereignty, asserted that in the—let us grant this chimera a moment’s life—“Augustinian-Thomistic-Calvinist tradition,” and particularly in Reformed thought, suffering and death possess “epistemic significance” insofar as they manifest divine attributes that “might not otherwise be displayed.” A scholar whose work I admire contributed an eloquent expostulation invoking the Holy Innocents, praising our glorious privilege (not shared by the angels) of bearing scars like those of Christ, and advancing the venerable heresy that our salvation from sin will result in a greater good than could have evolved from an innocence untouched by death. A man manifestly good and devout, but unable to distuingish providence from karma, argued that all are guilty through original sin but some more than others, that our “sense of justice” requires us to believe that “punishments and rewards [are] distributed according to our just desserts,” that God is the “balancer of accounts,” and that we must suppose that the suffering of these innocents will bear “spiritual fruit for themselves and for all mankind.'[tekstin muokkaus/rr]

[Kappaleeseen on tehty pieniä sanamuutoksia In the Aftermath-essee-kokoelmassa 2008 ilmestyneen viimeisimmän version mukaan. Muuten teksti on kopioitu The D.B. Hart Appreciation Blog'ista].

III
Tsunami and Theodicy [David B. Hart]

This is the companion piece to the Wall Street editorial 'Tremors of Doubt' and the book 'The Doors of the Sea.'

No one, no matter how great the scope of his imagination, should be able easily to absorb the immensity of the catastrophe that struck the Asian rim of the Indian Ocean and the coast of Somalia on the second day of Christmas this past year; nor would it be quite human to fail, in its wake, to feel some measure of spontaneous resentment towards God, fate, natura naturans, or whatever other force one imagines governs the intricate web of cosmic causality. But, once one’s indignation at the callousness of the universe begins to subside, it is worth recalling that nothing that occurred that day or in the days that followed told us anything about the nature of finite existence of which we were not already entirely aware.

Not that one should be cavalier in the face of misery on so gigantic a scale, or should dismiss the spiritual perplexity it occasions. But, at least for those of us who are Christians, it is prudent to prepare ourselves as quickly and decorously as we may for the mixed choir of secular moralists whose clamor will soon—inevitably—swell about our ears, gravely informing us that here at last our faith must surely founder upon the rocks of empirical horrors too vast to be reconciled with any system of belief in a God of justice or mercy. It is of course somewhat petty to care overly much about captious atheists at such a time, but it is difficult not to be annoyed when a zealous skeptic, eager to be the first to deliver God His long overdue coup de grâce, begins confidently to speak as if believers have never until this moment considered the problem of evil or confronted despair or suffering or death. Perhaps we did not notice the Black Death, the Great War, the Holocaust, or every instance of famine, pestilence, flood, fire, or earthquake in the whole of the human past; perhaps every Christian who has ever had to bury a child has somehow remained insensible to the depth of his own bereavement.

For sheer fatuity, on this score, it would be difficult to surpass Martin Kettle’s pompous and platitudinous reflections in the Guardian, appearing two days after the earthquake: certainly, he argues, the arbitrariness of the destruction visited upon so many and such diverse victims must pose an insoluble conundrum for “creationists” everywhere—although he wonders, in concluding, whether his contemporaries are “too cowed” even to ask “if the God can exist that can do such things” (as if a public avowal of unbelief required any great reserves of fortitude in modern Britain). It would have at least been courteous, one would think, if he had made more than a perfunctory effort to ascertain what religious persons actually do believe before presuming to instruct them on what they cannot believe.

In truth, though, confronted by such enormous suffering, Christians have less to fear from the piercing dialectic of the village atheist than they do from the earnestness of certain believers, and from the clouds of cloying incense wafting upward from the open thuribles of their hearts. As irksome as Kettle’s argument is, it is merely insipid; more troubling are the attempts of some Christians to rationalize this catastrophe in ways that, however inadvertently, make that argument all at once seem profound. And these attempts can span almost the entire spectrum of religious sensibility: they can be cold with Stoical austerity, moist with lachrymose piety, wanly roseate with sickly metaphysical optimism.

Mildly instructive to me were some remarks sent to Christian websites discussing a Wall Street Journal column of mine from the Friday following the earthquake. A stern if somewhat excitable Calvinist, intoxicated with God’s sovereignty, asserted that in the—let us grant this chimera a moment’s life—“Augustinian-Thomistic-Calvinist tradition,” and particularly in Reformed thought, suffering and death possess “epistemic significance” insofar as they manifest divine attributes that “might not otherwise be displayed.” A scholar whose work I admire contributed an eloquent expostulation invoking the Holy Innocents, praising our glorious privilege (not shared by the angels) of bearing scars like those of Christ, and advancing the venerable heresy that our salvation from sin will result in a greater good than could have evolved from an innocence untouched by death. A man manifestly good and devout, but unable to distuingish providence from karma, argued that all are guilty through original sin but some more than others, that our “sense of justice” requires us to believe that “punishments and rewards [are] distributed according to our just desserts,” that God is the “balancer of accounts,” and that we must suppose that the suffering of these innocents will bear “spiritual fruit for themselves and for all mankind.”

All three wished to justify the ways of God to man, to affirm God’s benevolence, to see meaning in the seemingly monstrous randomness of nature’s violence, and to find solace in God’s guiding hand. None seemed to worry that others might think him to be making a fine case for a rejection of God, or of faith in divine goodness. Simply said, there is no more liberating knowledge given us by the gospel—and none in which we should find more comfort—than the knowledge that suffering and death, considered in themselves, have no ultimate meaning at all.

The locus classicus of modern disenchantment with “nature’s God” is probably Voltaire’s Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne, written in response to the great earthquake that—on All Saints’ Day, 1755—struck just offshore of what was then the resplendent capital of the Portuguese empire. Lisbon was home to a quarter million, at least 60,000 of whom perished, both from the initial tremor (reckoned now, like the Sumatran earthquake, at a Richter force of around 9.0) and from the tsunami that it cast up on shore half an hour later (especially murderous to those who had retreated to boats in the mouth of the river Tagus to escape the destruction on land). An enormous fire soon began to consume the ruined city. Tens of thousands were drowned along the coasts of the Algarve, southern Spain, and Morocco.

For Voltaire, a catastrophe of such indiscriminate vastness was incontrovertible evidence against the bland optimism of popular theodicy. His poem—for all the mellifluousness of its alexandrines—was a lacerating attack upon the proposition that “tout est bien.” Would you dare argue, he asks, that you see the necessary effect of eternal laws decreed by a God both free and just as you contemplate

Ces femmes, ces enfants l’un sur l’autre entassés,
Sous ces marbres rompus ces membres dispersés

“These women, these infants heaped one upon the other, these limbs scattered beneath shattered marbles”? Or would you argue that all of this is but God’s just vengeance upon human iniquity?

Quel crime, quelle faute ont commis ces enfants
Sur le sein maternel écrasés et sanglants?

“What crime and what sin have been committed by these infants crushed and bleeding on their mothers’ breasts?” Or would you comfort those dying in torment on desolate shores by assuring them that others will profit from their demise and that they are discharging the parts assigned them by universal law? Do not, says Voltaire, speak of the great chain of being, for that chain is held in the hand of a God who is Himself enchained by nothing.

For all its power, however, Voltaire’s poem is a very feeble thing compared to the case for “rebellion” against “the will of God” in human suffering placed in the mouth of Ivan Karamazov by that fervently Christian novelist Dostoevsky; for, while the evils Ivan recounts to his brother Alexey are acts not of impersonal nature but of men, Dostoevsky’s treatment of innocent suffering possesses a profundity of which Voltaire was never even remotely capable. Famously, Dostoevsky supplied Ivan with true accounts of children tortured and murdered: Turks tearing babies from their mothers’ wombs, impaling infants on bayonets, firing pistols into their mouths; parents savagely flogging their children; a five-year- old-girl tortured by her mother and father, her mouth filled with excrement, locked at night in an outhouse, weeping her supplications to “dear kind God” in the darkness; an eight-year-old serf child torn to pieces by his master’s dogs for a small accidental transgression.

But what makes Ivan’s argument so disturbing is not that he accuses God of failing to save the innocent; rather, he rejects salvation itself, insofar as he understands it, and on moral grounds. He grants that one day there may be an eternal harmony established, one that we will discover somehow necessitated the suffering of children, and perhaps mothers will forgive the murderers of their babies, and all will praise God’s justice; but Ivan wants neither harmony—“for love of man I reject it,” “it is not worth the tears of that one tortured child”—nor forgiveness; and so, not denying there is a God, he simply chooses to return his ticket of entrance to God’s Kingdom. After all, Ivan asks, if you could bring about a universal and final beatitude for all beings by torturing one small child to death, would you think the price acceptable?

Voltaire’s poem is not a challenge to Christian faith; it inveighs against a variant of the “deist” God, one who has simply ordered the world exactly as it now is, and who balances out all its eventualities in a precise equilibrium between felicity and morality. Nowhere does it address the Christian belief in an ancient alienation from God that has wounded creation in its uttermost depths, and reduced cosmic time to a shadowy remnant of the world God intends, and enslaved creation to spiritual and terrestrial powers hostile to God. But Ivan’s rebellion is something altogether different. Voltaire sees only the terrible truth that the actual history of suffering and death is not morally intelligible. Dostoevsky sees—and this bespeaks both his moral genius and his Christian view of reality—that it would be far more terrible if it were.

Christians often find it hard to adopt the spiritual idiom of the New Testament—to think in terms, that is, of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, of Christ’s triumph over the principalities of this world, of the overthrow of hell. All Christians know, of course, that it is through God’s self-outpouring upon the cross that we are saved, and that we are made able by grace to participate in Christ’s suffering; but this should not obscure that other truth revealed at Easter: that the incarnate God enters “this cosmos” not simply to disclose its immanent rationality, but to break the boundaries of fallen nature asunder, and to refashion creation after its ancient beauty—wherein neither sin nor death had any place. Christian thought has traditionally, of necessity, defined evil as a privation of the good, possessing no essence or nature of its own, a purely parasitic corruption of reality; hence it can have no positive role to play in God’s determination of Himself or purpose for His creatures (even if by economy God can bring good from evil); it can in no way supply any imagined deficiency in God’s or creation’s goodness. Being infinitely sufficient in Himself, God had no need of a passage through sin and death to manifest His glory in His creatures or to join them perfectly to Himself. This is why it is misleading (however soothing it may be) to say that the drama of fall and redemption will make the final state of things more glorious than it might otherwise have been. No less metaphysically incoherent—though immeasurably more vile—is the suggestion that God requires suffering and death to reveal certain of his attributes (capricious cruelty, perhaps? morbid indifference? a twisted sense of humor?). It is precisely sin, suffering, and death that blind us to God’s true nature.

There is, of course, some comfort to be derived from the thought that everything that occurs at the level of what Aquinas calls secondary causality—in nature or history—is governed not only by a transcendent providence, but by a universal teleology that makes every instance of pain and loss an indispensable moment in a grand scheme whose ultimate synthesis will justify all things. But consider the price at which that comfort is purchased: it requires us to believe in and love a God whose good ends will be realized not only in spite of—but entirely by way of—every cruelty, every fortuitous misery, every catastrophe, every betrayal, every sin the world has ever known; it requires us to believe in the eternal spiritual necessity of a child dying an agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines. It seems a strange thing to find peace in a universe rendered morally intelligible at the cost of a God rendered morally loathsome. Better, it seems to me, the view of the ancient Gnostics: however ludicrous their beliefs, they at least, when they concluded that suffering and death were essential aspects of the creator’s design, had the good sense to yearn to know a higher God.

I do not believe we Christians are obliged—or even allowed—to look upon the devastation visited upon the coasts of the Indian Ocean and to console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. For while Christ takes the suffering of his creatures up into his own, it is not because he or they had need of suffering, but because he would not abandon his creatures to the grave. And while we know that the victory over evil and death has been won, we know also that it is a victory yet to come, and that creation therefore, as Paul says, groans in expectation of the glory that will one day be revealed. Until then, the world remains a place of struggle between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, life and death; and, in such a world, our portion is charity.

As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy. It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes—and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, 'Behold, I make all things new'.

IV
Responses to 'Tsunami and Theodicy'

Here is a letter in response to 'Tsunami and Theodicy', followed by David B. Hart's response.

http://davidbhart.blogspot.com/2006/03/responses-to-tsunami-and-theodicy.html
*
http://davidbhart.blogspot.com/2006/03/david-b-harts-tsunami-and-theodicy.html
http://pentecostalworker.wordpress.com/2010/04/22/book-review-d-b-hart-the-doors-of-the-sea/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bentley_Hart
http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pahan_ongelma
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy
http://www.ortodoksi.net/index.php/Teodikea
http://www.deeperstudy.com/link/issue009.html

'God speaks God, and creation occurs within that speaking, as a rhetorical embellishment, a needless ornament' - [luominen kauneutena ja retoriikkana - David Bentley Hart kalvinistien pahennuksena]

Alussa oli Sana. Sana oli Jumalan luona, ja Sana oli Jumala [...] Sana tuli lihaksi ja asui meidän keskellämme.

1
'God is, so to speak, infinite discourse, full of the perfect utterance of his Word and the limitless variety of the Spirit’s ‘reply.’ Here, in the most elementary terms, is Christian metaphysics: God speaks God, and creation occurs within that speaking, as a rhetorical embellishment, a needless ornament'.
*
Hart positively detests Calvin’s picture of God as 'the omnipotent despot … who not only ordains the destiny of souls, but in fact predestines the first sin and so brings the whole drama of creation and redemption to pass (including the eternal perdition of the vast majority of humanity) as a display of his own dread sovereignty'.

2
If you are not familiar with Hart, you should be. Why? Well consider that his first book [The Beauty of the Infinite, 2003] received the following commendations: “David Hart is already the best living American systematic theologian” – John Milbank; “A remarkable work…This magnificent and demanding volume should establish David Bentley Hart, around the world no less than in North America, as one of his generation’s leading theologians” – Geoffrey Wainwright; “I can think of no more brilliant work by an American theologian in the past ten years” – William Placher.

3
The Beauty of the Infinite is a splendid extended essay in “theological aesthetics.” David Bentley Hart here meditates on the power of a Christian understanding of beauty and sublimity to rise above the violence — both philosophical and literal — characteristic of the postmodern world.

The book begins by tracing the shifting use and nature of metaphysics in the thought of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lyotard, Derrida, Deleuze, Nancy, Levinas, and others. Hart pays special attention to Nietzsche’s famous narrative of the “will to power” — a narrative largely adopted by the world today — and he offers an engaging revision (though not rejection) of the genealogy of nihilism, thereby highlighting the significant “interruption” that Christian thought introduced into the history of metaphysics.

This discussion sets the stage for a retrieval of the classic Christian account of beauty and sublimity, and of the relation of both to the question of being. Written in the form of a dogmatica minora, this main section of the book offers a pointed reading of the Christian story in four moments, or parts: Trinity, creation, salvation, and eschaton. Through a combination of narrative and argument throughout, Hart ends up demonstrating the power of Christian metaphysics not only to withstand the critiques of modern and postmodern thought but also to move well beyond them.

Strikingly original and deeply rewarding, The Beauty of the Infinite is both a constructively critical account of the history of metaphysics and a compelling contribution to it.

4
D. B. Hartin teologia on haastavaa luettavaa ainakin reformoidun kristinuskon perillisille - kuten nyt tälle Laura Smit'ille, joka on Assistant Professor of Theology at Calvin College - http://www.laurasmit.com/

http://www.laurasmit.com/downloads/Hart%20Review.pdf

5
The Beauty Of The Infinite: The Aesthetics Of Christian Truth

God’s impassibility [apatheia]is the utter fullness of an intimate dynamism, the absolutely complete and replete generation of the Son and procession of the Spirit from the Father, the infinite “drama” of God’s joyous act of self-outpouring – which is his being as God.

Within the plenitude of this motion, no contrary motion can fabricate an interval of negation, because it is the infinite possibility of every creaturely motion or act; no pathos is possible for God because a pathos is, by definition, a finite instance of change visited upon a passive subject, actualizing some potential, whereas God’s love is pure positivity and pure activity.

His love is an infinite peace and so needs no violence to shape it, no death over which to triumph: if it did, it would never be ontological peace but only metaphysical armistice (p. 167).
*
Creation’s “series,” its [akolouthia] (vide infra), is at an infinite distance from the “order” and “succession” of the divine taxis, but that distance is born of God’s boundlessness: the Trinity’s perfect act of difference also opens the possibility of the “ontico-ontological difference,” as the space of the gift of analogous being, imparted to contingent beings who, then, receive this gift as the movement of an ontic deferral.

God’s transcendence is not absence, that is, but an actual excessiveness; it is, from the side of the contingent, the impossibility of the finite ever coming to contain or exhaust the infinite; the soul must participate in it successively or endlessly traverse it, “outstretched” by a desire without sucrease, an “infinition” of love; but God pervades all things, and all is present to his infinite life. Because the difference between God and creation is not simple metaphysical distinction between reality and appearance, but the analogical distance between two ways of apprehending the infinite – God being the infinite, creatures embracing it in an endless sequence of finite instances – the soul’s ascent to God is not a departure from, but an endless venture into, difference.

The distance between God and creation is not alienation, nor the Platonic chorismos or scale of being, but the original ontological act of distance by which every ontic interval subsists, given to be crossed but not overcome, at once God’s utter transcendence and utter proximity; for while the finite belongs to the infinite, the converse cannot be so, except through an epektasis toward more of the good, which can be possessed only ecstatically; possessed, that is, in dispossession (pp. 193-194).

Similarly:

God’s transcendence is the supereminent fullness of all blessings, which gives analogical expression to itself in creation: God sets it at a distance – and so it is created – but is himself the infinite distance that measures out all its differences within the abundant harmony of trinitarian peace.

As Trinity, his is always somehow a determinate infinity, so that each thing’s determinateness is actually an advance “quantitatively” toward the fullness of the infinite he is; but each thing is also always at that qualitative distance that makes it free, determinate, finite, pleasure, and gift. Indeed, the infinite qualitative difference is, in a sense, an effect of the infinite quantitative distance: not, that is, because God is simply the coincidence of every series (in a pantheistic sense), but because he is the infinite in which every series moves, and lives, and has its being.

For Gregory [of Nyssa], therefore, the always remaining infinity is not simply the interval between created and divine natures (statically conceived), but is the ever new infinity of the ever present God in distance, and the infinite dynamism of one nature being transformed toward another. This is so because divine infinity is that infinity, full of form, that belongs to the Trinity, whose unity is also a differentiating love (p. 210, emphasis added).

http://www.amazon.com/Beauty-Infinite-Aesthetics-Christian-Truth/dp/080282921X
*
http://www.godisbeautiful.com/Hart.htm
http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/2006/08/david-bentley-harts-beautiful-theology.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bentley_Hart
http://theologyforum.wordpress.com/2008/07/25/david-bentley-hart-on-trinitarian-infinity/
http://theologyforum.wordpress.com/2008/07/11/david-bentley-hart-on-the-trinity/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beauty-Infinite-Aesthetics-Christian-Truth/dp/080282921X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1295780536&sr=8-3
http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorios_Nyssalainen
ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_of_Nyssa
[Gregorios Nyssalainen on Hartin ehkä tärkein teologinen lähde ja innoittaja]
http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/2006/11/analogia-entis-makes-comeback-david.html
http://www.biblicist.org/bible/terms.shtml
http://www.michaelramseyprize.org.uk/titles.php#dbh
http://www.michaelramseyprize.org.uk/titles.php
http://cruciality.wordpress.com/category/david-bentley-hart/
http://theovertonsalon.com/2010/07/14/review-david-b-harts-the-beauty-of-the-infinite/
http://www.artloversnewyork.com/zine/the-bomb/2009/06/06/casey-jex-smithlaviola-bank-opens-to-nite/

The Beauty of the Infinite - David Bentley Hart'in esteettinen teologia

The Aesthetics of Christian Truth
*
[Website of Dr. John K. LaShell]

I found this a difficult book even though I have a PhD from Westminster Seminary and am quite comfortable with Augustine, Calvin, Luther, and Edwards. I read New Testament Greek fairly well, and can make out a little German and Latin, all of which were helpful. The primary reason this book is a hard read is that the author writes in the idiom of the post-modern philosophers whose positions he is critiquing, and much of their terminology is unfamiliar to me. A secondary problem relates to Hart’s style of writing. Here is a sample sentence, which is actually a good bit clearer than many others:

“Perhaps then it is Hegel—the most ambitious metaphysician of all—rather than his critics, who effected the transition from the Parmenidean to the Heracleitean orthodoxy of the day: precisely because the Hegelian system is the most unrestrained, regal attempt to bring the dynamism of becoming into the fold of magisterial metaphysics, precisely because it absorbs time and history into the epic of the Idea, violence—indeed, warfare—is imagined as inextricable from being; strife, conflict, conceived as one or another process of negation, dialectical determination, and the endless labor of thought, belongs no longer to Plato’s realm of the simulacra—ideality’s defatigation in time and matter—but to being’s truest, most necessary story: the diremption of Idea into finitude and the cooperation of finitude into Geist (p. 38).”

The Encarta dictionary on your computer will not help much with the vocabulary in sentences like these. I recommend that you keep the Oxford English Dictionary handy, along with good dictionaries of classical Greek and Latin. To his credit, Hart often provides a few explanatory phrases to qualify key terms that are essential for his argument. If you keep a stack of 3 x 5 cards handy, you can make a useful file of foreign and unfamiliar words (including his neologisms). I should also note that alongside of Hart’s tortured, complex sentences, one often finds short summaries of stunning cleverness and clarity.

The foregoing comments not withstanding, this is a very significant book for our times. The following is a rough summary of the text.

Introduction

Post-modernism, following the lead of Nietzsche, has rejected metaphysics and all explanations of the world that seek to include everything under one unifying principle. As Hart cogently notes, the post-modern “critique of metaphysics is often only another metaphysics.”

In this context, Hart defends a Christian understanding of an objective reality that finds its original in the Triune God. Utilizing post-modern terminology, he insists that beauty is the true form of distance. God’s approval of creation as beautiful depends on the fact that creation is distinct from the God who regards it. The distance between God and His creation is implicit in His evaluation of the world as “very good.”

Beauty evokes desire, so that a biblical ethics based on beauty is contrary to Kant’s insistence that virtue only flows from a disinterested sense of duty. The world around us contains real beauty that reflects God’s beauty, so the Christian cannot take a Gnostic, otherworldly approach to life. A true appreciation of God entails a loving appreciation of His creation. Thus, beauty is linked to a real world in which real events take place. If we want to see the beauty of God, we cannot reduce the life, death, and resurrection of Christ to mere symbols.

Part 1—Dionysius against the Crucified: The Violence of Metaphysics and the Metaphysics of Violence

Nietzsche’s polar opposites, Apollo and Dionysius, form the backdrop for Hart’s analysis of post-modernism. The Greek god, Apollo, stands for the stability and order forcibly imposed by an all-encompassing metaphysics. Dionysius represents the wild abandonment to freedom that comes from throwing off the tyranny of Apollo, and Christianity is the most oppressive manifestation of Apollo. Christianity has turned the pagan noble virtues of pride and courage on their heads, replacing them with humility and patience. “Christianity is the gospel of castration” (96), and Christian morals are good only for slaves and the weak. Thus, the willing submission of Christ to the crucifixion represents the triumph of weakness as a virtue. As Hart clearly demonstrates, Nietzsche’s understanding of Christianity reflects nineteenth century liberalism rather than the New Testament. However, Nietzsche’s claim that Christianity is oppressive has become the new gospel of post-modernism. In the view of post-modernism, all persuasive language is a violent attempt to bring others into subjection, and no language is more violently subversive of individual freedom than religious language. Thus, Hart’s project is a defense of “the beauty to whose persuasive power the Christian rhetoric of evangelism inevitably appeals” (1).

In order to overthrow the Christian concept of beauty, post-moderns have drawn on Kant’s distinction between beauty and the sublime. The perception of beauty implies a true, rational fit between the mind and the object regarded as beautiful. An experience of the sublime, however, transcends reason, for it comes when one is presented with “an immensity, grandeur, or force that exceeds representation” (45). In the post-modern adaptation of Kant, the sublime is an invitation to freedom that goes beyond the rational representation of reality; it is the abolition of beauty. Whereas beauty involves order, the sublime leaves freedom for change, even for chaos and for Nietzsche’s unbridled will to power. On the other hand, the sublime can lead back to a Kantian ethics of disinterest. Impressed by the unrepresentable infinite, one simply does his duty. However, as Hart points out, “Modern prejudices aside, obligation flows from love or the possibility of love, and love (in both its strength and its indigence) is never devoid of eros” (83).

Christianity stands in stark opposition both to Apollo and to Dionysius. All philosophy rests on the assumption that the world is necessary or self-existent, but the Bible teaches that creation was a free act of God. If the world simply is, the violence is an inevitable aspect of existence. According to the Bible, however, violence is not a metaphysical necessity. It is an aberration resting on a violation of God’s covenant of light. In opposition to Dionysius, there is an order in creation that reflects the order of the Trinity. On the other hand, creation does not embody the static order of Apollo. Rather, the beauty creation is “a Trinitarian beauty that is motile, various, creative, abundant in signs of peace. The violence of finitude may often be unavoidable, but it is never necessary” (142).

Part 2—The Beauty of the Infinite: A Dogmatica Minora

Hart’s critique of post-modernism (Part 1) occupies the first third of the book (~150 pages). His constructive theological response in Part 2 (~260 pages) continues to interact with post-modernism to some extent, but its focus is on the church fathers—preeminently, Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius the Areopagite, but also Irenaeus, Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, and others. Part 2 is superbly summarized in the table of contents, from which I draw the following paragraphs. Afterwards I will offer a few observations.

I. The Trinity

1. The Christian understanding of beauty emerges not only naturally, but necessarily, from the Christian understanding of God as a perichoresis of love, a dynamic coinherence of the three divine persons, whose life is eternally one of shared regard, delight, fellowship, feasting, and joy.

2. The Christian understanding of difference and distance is shaped by the doctrine of the Trinity, where theology finds that the true form of difference is peace, of distance beauty.

3. In the Christian God, the infinite is seen to be beautiful and so capable of being traversed by way of the beautiful.

4. The infinite is beautiful because God is a Trinity; and because all being belongs to God’s infinity, a Christian ontology appears and properly belongs within a theological aesthetics.

II. Creation

1. God’s gracious action in creation belongs from the first to that delight, pleasure, and regard that the Trinity enjoys from eternity, as an outward and unnecessary expression of that love; and thus creation must be received before all else as gift and as beauty.

2. As God is Trinity, in whom all difference is possessed as perfect peace and unity, the divine life might be described as infinite music, and creation too might be described as a music whose intervals, transitions, and phrases are embraced within God’s eternal, triune polyphony.

3. As God utters himself eternally in his Word, and possesses all the fullness of address and response, and as creation belongs to God’s utterance of himself (as a further articulation, at an analogical remove, of the abundant “eloquence” of divine love), creation may be grasped by theology as language.

III. Salvation

1. Salvation occurs by way of recapitulation, the restoration of the human image in Christ, the eternal image of the Father after whom humanity was created in the beginning; thus salvation consists in the recovery of a concrete form, and in the restoration of an original beauty.

2. In Christ, totality’s economy of violence is overcome by the infinity of God’s peace, inasmuch as one order of sacrifice is overcome by another: sacrifice as the immolation of the beautiful is displaced by a sacrifice whose offering is one of infinite beauty.

IV. Eschaton

Christian eschatology affirms the goodness of created difference, reveals divine truth to be inseparable from beauty, and exposes the totality as false and marked with a damnable finitude.

A Few Miscellaneous Observations on Part 2

1. Divine impassibility or apatheia is carefully discussed under the headings of Trinity and Salvation. How can God become a man, capable of suffering and dying, and yet abide in eternal and unchangeable bliss? Hart’s response is two-fold. First, God is not the undifferentiated, unmoved Mover of Aristotle. “God’s impassibility is the utter fullness of an infinite dynamism, the absolutely complete and replete generation of the Son and procession of the Spirit from the Father, the infinite ‘drama’ of God’s joyous act of self-outpouring” (167). The incarnation and the death of Christ, are not, therefore a change imposed on God from without, but are the freely chosen overflow of that eternal self-outpouring. Second, “as human being is nothing at all in itself but the image and likeness of God, then the perfect dwelling of the eternal image and likeness of God—the Logos—in the one man who perfectly expresses and lives out what it is to be human, is in no sense an alien act for God” (357).

2. As may be observed in the preceding paragraph, Hart holds to the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father alone. This is hardly surprising since he is an Eastern Orthodox theologian, but it makes little or no difference to his argument.

3. The Analogia Entis, or “analogy of being,” is not, as Karl Barth suggested, “the invention of antichrist, and the principle reason for not becoming Roman Catholic” (241). It is, rather, essential to understanding God’s relationship to the world. The triune God is the pattern and source all of creation’s individuality and beauty, but there is no continuity or gradation of being from God down to us, such as Neo-Platonism envisions. “In short, the analogy instructs us to see the world as creation, as God pouring himself inexhaustibly forth . . . giving distance to beings in the infinite distance of the Father’s self-outpouring” (248). The Analogia Entis also forms the basis for Analogia Verbi, the “analogy of the word” because “our logoi are eternally embraced in God’s Logos” (303). That is, the words we use as names for God are embraced in God’s eternal Word, the Son of God.

4. While I appreciated Hart’s discussion of salvation as recapitulation, that is, the restoration of the human image in Christ—which is the dominant image of salvation in Eastern Orthodoxy—I must dissent from his dismissal of substitutionary atonement. His eloquent descriptions of divine beauty leave little place for the wrath of God and for the propitiatory nature of Christ’s sacrifice. Indeed, it seems as if Hart would like to do away with hell altogether, if he were not constrained by his Orthodox commitments. One suggestion regarding hell that I found to be interesting and possibly true is the Byzantine conception that “hell is nothing but the absolute proximity of God’s glory without the interval of the gift: God’s glory encountered as sublimity rather than beauty” (272). This school of thought “makes no distinction, essentially, between the fire of hell and the light of God’s glory, and [it] interprets damnation as the soul’s resistance to the beauty of God’s glory, its refusal to open itself before divine love, which causes divine love to seem an exterior chastisement …. The ‘fire’ of hell is that same infinite display of semeia by which God is always declaring his love, misconstrued (through rejection) as the chaotic sublime rather than the beautiful” (399-400).

5. Hart considers Bach to be “the greatest of Christian theologians, the most inspired witness to the ordo amoris in the fabric of being” (282). He contrasts the inevitability of Wagner’s music with Bach’s freedom. “Is any music more fated than that magnificent arch spanning the course from Siegfried’s funeral processional to Brünnhilde’s immolation and the conflagration of the gods in Götterdämmerung? In Bach’s music, though, motion is absolute, and all thematic content is submitted to the irreducible disseminations that fill it out: each note is an unforced, unnecessary, and yet wholly fitting supplement….” Because of this combination of freedom and fitness, “Bach’s is the ultimate Christian music; it reflects as no other human artifact ever has or could the Christian vision of creation” (283).

Hart’s musical meditations, though sometimes elegant and instructive, nevertheless, contain a subtle flaw. He writes, “It is the promise of Christian faith that, eschatologically, the music of all creation will be restored not as a totality in which all the discords of evil necessarily participated, but as an accomplished harmony from which all such discords, along with their false profundities, have been exorcised by way of innumerable ‘tonal’ (or pneumatological) reconciliations” (281). Certainly, the Bible does not teach that evil is a metaphysical necessity. However, if we say that evil was not necessary in the sense that God planned for it to occur, then how could the death of Christ for our sins have been “foreknown before the foundation of the world” (1 Peter 1:18-20), or why did the apostles acknowledge that “Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel” did “whatever Your hand and Your purpose predestined to occur” (Acts 4:27-28)?

Hart positively detests Calvin’s picture of God as “the omnipotent despot … who not only ordains the destiny of souls, but in fact predestines the first sin and so brings the whole drama of creation and redemption to pass (including the eternal perdition of the vast majority of humanity) as a display of his own dread sovereignty”(134). It would appear that Hart needs to expand his appreciation for God’s beauty to include God’s wrath, His justice, and His predestination of all things that come to pass.

Part 3—Rhetoric without Reserve: Persuasion, the Tyranny of Twilight, and the Language of Peace

Given that post-modernism views all attempts at persuasion as a kind of verbal violence, how can we defend evangelism as an activity of peace? As Hart has been at pains to show, the Triune God contains within Himself a rhetoric of peace. The Father’s eternal self-expression, and the Word’s eternal response to the Speaker are the original beauty, peace, and love, from which all created beauty, peace, and love have their being. Furthermore, God sent His Word into the world “as the very form of peace, the infinite gesture of a love that simply exceeds the gesture of every violence brought against it.… Christ offers, in himself, a peace that enters history always as rhetoric, as a persuasion, as a gift that can be received only as a gift” (413).

Christians cannot escape their responsibility to proclaim the gospel to an often hostile world. But “in the moment that this rhetoric is addressed to another, and encounters in consequence the intractability of another persuasion, it finds itself engaged in a kind of war, a struggle of voices each to suppress or displace the other; and in this moment, how does Christian rhetoric distinguish itself as a peaceful gesture that suffers this war, without merely abjuring from persuasion as such” (414).

How might a Christian respond when a post-modern critic says, “Don’t you try to evangelize me. Your attempt at persuasion is an unwarranted aggression against me and an attempt to limit my freedom for your own ends.” First, according to Hart, we need to point out that labeling all persuasion as a kind of violence is itself a kind of violence. Post-modernism’s rejection of all ultimate explanations is itself an ultimate explanation. It lays claim to one absolute truth: that there are no absolute truths. Post-modernism is the ultimate rhetoric of violence for it denies to others the right even to speak God’s message of peace.

Second, the exercise of power does not necessarily depend on a metaphysical warrant to give it legitimacy (as, for example, Hitler did when he used the myth of Aryan superiority to murder Jews). When individuals or groups attempt to make the raw use of power into its own metanarrative, the only effective response is another metanarrative, another vision of the good. Thus, metanarratives have often provided the moral resources to oppose violence to human beings. For example, the belief that all people are equal before their Creator provided a powerful metaphysical foundation for the elimination of slavery. Thus, it is simply false to view all metanarratives as selfish attempts to dominate others.

Third, the post-modern version of tolerance insists that people must leave their distinctive beliefs behind in order to engage in public discourse. But since “persons are in some sense the creatures of their traditions” a refusal to admit traditions into the public square is de facto a violent reduction of personhood. Christianity, on the other hand, desires the conversion of the individual from the city of this world to the city of God, but it does not demand that the person leave his identity behind in order to engage in a conversation.

Finally, our proclamation of the gospel must never become an attempt verbally to trounce unbelievers and force them to adopt our point of view. Rather we must imitate the pattern we see in our Lord. As the Word of God suffered rejection and endured death, so we must be prepared for our words and ourselves to experience the same end. “Theology must, because of what its particular story is, have the form of martyrdom, witness, a peaceful offer that has already suffered rejection and must be prepared for rejection as a consequence” (441). Jesus Christ came “to cast fire on the earth: would that it were already burning (Luke 12:49). Only by assuming the form of a ceaseless practice of peace, however—even in enduring the wounds always borne by the body of Christ—can Christian rhetoric demonstrate and persuade that this is, at the last, the fire of an infinite love” (443).

Concluding Remarks

Who might profit most from this book?

Ø Philosophers who are already acquainted with the major forebears and exponents of post-modernism, including (in alphabetical order) Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Hegel, Heidegger, Kant, Lyotard, and Nietzsche.

Ø Those who would like to enrich their already firm grasp of western Christendom’s theology, with a strong sampling of Eastern Orthodoxy’s best insights.

Ø Christian scholars in secular academic settings who face constant challenges from post-modernism’s rhetoric of violence.

Ø Well-educated Christians who hunger both for intellectual stimulation and for a clearer glimpse of the beauty of God.
*
http://www.godisbeautiful.com/Hart.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Beauty-Infinite-Aesthetics-Christian-Truth/dp/080282921X
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bentley_Hart

On Butterflies and Being

D. B. Hart ja Red Admiral
*
[...]'And I had just flipped to that haunting passage in the former where John Shade is about to cross the road to his death and a “Red Admirable” (Nabokov preferred the older form of its common name) emerges suddenly from the junipers and shrubs and whirls around the poet “like a colored flame” flashing and vanishing amid the sunbeams, then briefly settles on his sleeve, and then hastily disappears into the shadows of the trees, when a Red Admiral came coasting towards me, performed three elegantly gliding circumvolations of my head, briefly came to rest on the arm of my chair, and then flew off again and quickly disappeared in the shadows of a Chinese Tulip tree.

The coincidence alone would have been enough to astonish me, but the event was rendered considerably more uncanny by the particular significance of that butterfly in the text.' [...]

[Hart'in kertomuksen pointti käy täysin selväksi vasta, kun lukee kaksi aikaisempaa ja kaksi myöhempää kappaletta]

I
1
Jälleen kerran lähes lumoava teksti D. B. Hart'ilta.

Tiedän kyllä, että minulla on edessäni syvällisen pohdinnan paikka, mitä tulee Hartin teologiaan - koskien esim. Tuomaan analogia entis-periaatetta, mitä arvostamani, joskin melko huonosti tuntemani, luonnollisen teologian vihaaja Karl Barth piti anti-kristuksen keksintönä [tosin Hartin tulkinta ei ole sama kuin Tuomaalla vaan hän luo hyvin omanlaisensa näkemyksen; siitä myöhemmässä päreessä].

Mutta jälleen kerran - tämänkin esseen luettuani voin kysyä itseltäni saman kuin eräässä aiemmassa päreessäni: miksi minä - augustinolais-luterilaisen monergismin kannattaja kammoksun luterilaista mutta rakastan ortodoksista kirkkoa ja arvostan sen ekklesiologiaa, vaikken olekaan mikään yhteisöllisesti osallistuva persoona?

Toisin sanoen - saatan toistaiseksi suhtautua varauksin ja epäillen Hart'in teologiseen dogmatiikkaan, mutta arvostan hänen argumenttejaan uusateisteja vastaan sekä hänen tapaansa suhtautua todellisuuteen esteettisesti.

Olen vaikuttunut ja vakuuttunutkin Hartin kulttuurifilosofisesta tietämyksestä, asenteista ja mielipiteistä sekä ajoittain jopa haltioitunut hänen lahjakkuudestaan englanninkielisen asiaproosan virtuoosimaisena taitajana, jonkaveroista toista tuskin löytää näinä typerien fundamentalistien ja viihde-blogihöpöttäjien [;\] aikoina - olivatpa he sitten uusateisteja tai Intelligent Designer-teorian kannattajia joko kalvinistien epistemologisesta [Plantinga] tai [uusateisteihin rinnastettavasta] kirjaimellisimpien kreationistien leiristä.

Hart on kuitenkin toista maata ellei peräti toisesta maailmasta. Oheisen tekstin luettuani voisin jopa väittää, että hän on perhosten valtakunnasta koko mies. Luonto, luominen, kauneus ja Jumala ovat hänelle yhtä ja samaa olemassaolon ihmeen - sekä todistusta että kokemusta sen kaikessa laajuudessa, syvyydessä ja yllättävyydessä.

Myös tämä viehättävä tarina yhteensattumuksineen, kirjallisuus- ja kulttuurikommentteineen sekä filosofisen teologian tiiviine linjanvetoineen osaltaan tekee D.B. Hartista näkijän, jota voinee pitää yhtenä USA:n kristillisen konservatismin teologisesti luovimmista että esteettisessä ajattelussaan ja retorisesti suvereenissa poleemisuudessaan ehkä jopa anarkistisimman edustajan - vaikka kyseessä onkin kaikkea muuta kuin sotaisa nietzscheläinen klassisisti [joka tosin arvostaa Nietzscheä suuresti] tai zizekiläinen vasemmisto-vallankumouksen provokaattori (mikäli Zizekin trad. kommunismin ylipäätään voi ottaa vakavasti; - minä en ota].

Hart ei myöskään kiellä viehtymystään eristäytyä ikäänkuin omaan erämaaluostariinsa keskellä nihilistisen ajan kaiken banalisoivaa, latteuttavaa ja julmaa pakanallisuutta - huonon maun ja typerän kulutusnautinnon tunkiessa tyrkyttävässä omahyväisyydessään ja itsetyytyväisyydessään joka paikkaan häiritsemään ellei suorastaan kiusaamaan niitä ihmisiä [demokraattisessa liberalismissa huonolla maulla voi laillisesti tyrannisoida muita ihmisiä], joilla on oma ja yleensä huomattavasti korkeampi käsitys kulttuurista sekä sivistyksestä kuin populismiin ja ala-arvoiseen viihteeseen addiktoituneilla positiivisen ego-ajattelun [öykkärimäisyyden, latteuden, rikollisuuden ja piilopornoilun] sekä itsetarkoituksellisen teknologia-hypetyksen uusbarbaareilla.

2
Hart'in taipumus tiettyyn älylliseen ja teologiseen isolationismiin koskettaa omaa elämänasennettani muullakin tavalla: elänhän itse käytännännöllisesti katsoen lähes erakkomaiseen tapaan [sikäli kuin se ylipäätään on mahdollista kaupunki-yhteisössä], enkä missään tapauksessa haluaisi osallistua julkisuuteen yhtään sen enempää kuin olen tämän blogin kautta siihen syntiin suostunut lankeamaan.

Nokian Connecting people-uskonto tai internetin Facebook-hypetys ovat minulle pelkkää kapitalistisen pintaliito-kulttuurin pakonomaista rahanteko-bisnestä - ei mitään sivistystä lisäävää kommunikaatiota. Sitäpaitsi mikään todella syvällinen filosofia ei koskaan synny pelkkänä tiimityönä toisin kuin sellaiset innovaatiot, joissa tiedon kasautuminen on ensiarvoisen tärkeää uusien sovellutusten löytämiseksi.

Filosofia ei ole uuden löytämistä vaan ikivanhojen ongelmien näkemistä uudella tavalla. Ja se vaatii viime kädessä - seminaarien ja keskustelujen jälkeen - täydellistä yksinäisyyttä, jossa omistaudutaan vain sille asialle, jonka itse kokee kaikkein tärkeimmäksi.

Heidegger ymmärsi tämän asiaintilan ja kärjisti sen osuvasti toteamukseen, jonka mukaan jokainen todellinen filosofi ajattelee elämänsä aikana vain yhtä ainoaa ajatusta. Heideggerille tuo ajatus oli oleminen ja aika. Hart'ille se lienee ehkä jumalallinen ikuisuus kauneutena.

II
On Butterflies and Being

David B. Hart
Aug 31, 2009

We are living this year in a cottage in the forest, halfway up the slope and under the slightly furrowed brow of a green mountain whose ridge forms our western horizon, and over which the brief twilight rises in the evening as a pale gold thinly fringed with dark amethyst. The days are filled with the incessant clamor of stridulating and timbalating insects, to which at night—undiminished—is added the mighty song of the Upland Chorus Frog (Pseudacris feriarum, for those with a taste for taxonomic Latin) and the sweet belling of the Cope’s Gray Treefrog (Hyla chrysoscelis). Earlier in the summer, the woods were full of fireflies, but they are gone now. The only regularly invited visitors to our rustic retreat are Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds—who come for the red nectar in the two feeders hanging on either side of the house—and a large assortment of butterflies—whom we entice to our porch with sprays of purple hyssop. The deer come unbidden, usually in the dawn.

The most numerous of the butterflies—or, at any rate, the most conspicuous—are the common Swallowtails or Papilioninae, of which I have seen two varieties here. There is the splendid Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes), whose sable wings are adorned with markings of yellow and iridescent blue; the female is especially lovely, with her lavish train of shimmering sapphire; and on each of the hindwings of either sex there is a single russet ocellation with a black “pupil”. Then there is the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus), of which the male is always a bright jonquil yellow striped and bordered with black, but of which the female is either yellow or (more alluringly) black with glittering azure hindwings. There are few sights more purely enchanting up here than that of a yellow male and a black female sailing and fluttering about one another in the erratic choreography of their courtship pas de deux, before finally achieving the fragile stillness of consummation on some leaf or blossom or bending frond. All of us less graceful beasts, it is hard not to think, should be envious of the sheer ethereal delicacy of that lepidopterogamy.

All right, well, I suspect that with that last word I’ve gone a bit too far; so perhaps I should leave off painting the scene and simply get to the story I want to tell—which does indeed involve a butterfly, but not a Swallowtail, of any hue. The lepidopteron in question was, rather, a Red Admiral or—a few last flourishes of Linnaean jargon—a Vanessa atalanta, a butterfly that does not really belong to the Admiral sub-family (Limenitidinae) of the Brushfoots (Nymphalidae) at all, but belongs instead to the True Brushfoot sub-family (the Nymphalinae). It is a gorgeous creature: black with lashings of white on the upper forewings, faintly tinged with ashen blue at its outer and inner tips, and strikingly marked with broad bands of ember red across the centers of its forewings and along the skirts of its hindwings. I have seen it only once since arriving here. What made that lone sighting remarkable to me, though, was neither the butterfly’s beauty nor its comparative rarity in these woods, but the eerily perfect timing of its appearance.

I was sitting on my porch with two volumes I had recently acquired, both by Vladimir Nabokov: a first edition of Pale Fire in good condition, which is not very hard to find, and that Holy Grail of Nabokoviana, a first printing of the 1970 volume Poems and Problems in absolutely immaculate condition, bearing not so much as a single scuff mark on its jacket. And I had just flipped to that haunting passage in the former where John Shade is about to cross the road to his death and a “Red Admirable” (Nabokov preferred the older form of its common name) emerges suddenly from the junipers and shrubs and whirls around the poet “like a colored flame” flashing and vanishing amid the sunbeams, then briefly settles on his sleeve, and then hastily disappears into the shadows of the trees, when a Red Admiral came coasting towards me, performed three elegantly gliding circumvolations of my head, briefly came to rest on the arm of my chair, and then flew off again and quickly disappeared in the shadows of a Chinese Tulip tree.

The coincidence alone would have been enough to astonish me, but the event was rendered considerably more uncanny by the particular significance of that butterfly in the text. Red Admirals constitute a recurring motif throughout Pale Fire, and many attentive readers have concluded (rightly, I believe) that the one who appears at that point in the novel is a kind of revenant of John Shade’s dead daughter Hazel, either attempting to warn him of the danger across the way or to welcome him over the threshold of the next life. Nabokov, as is well known, was a fairly firm believer in the immortality of the soul, as well as a believer in fate, and he tended to think that the patterns of our lives are in large part shaped and guided by the spiritual community of those who have gone before us. In the strange, often tragic, but also often beautiful symmetries of his own life he thought he could discern the clear workings of these benign presences, close about us at all times, hiding and yet revealing themselves in the exquisite intricacies of nature and art. He certainly would have been pleased by the potently exact synchrony of my experience on my porch and would surely have refused to ascribe it to chance; and I have to admit that, for a brief tremulous moment, I wondered if his spirit had not been teasing me, in a way simultaneously obvious and impenetrable.

There are any number of fascinating aspects to the curious interaction and equally curious demarcation that existed between Nabokov the lepidopterist and Nabokov the artist. As a scientist, he affected to be completely indifferent to the aesthetic splendor of the creatures he studied; and, as a novelist, he affected to despise facile symbolisms. But it is clear from his writings that his love of Lepidoptera was in part fired by the mysterious grandeur of a holometabolous species whose life cycle seems to encompass a magical passage from death to greater life—from the earthbound groping of the larva (in Latin, after all, a word for ghost or funerary mask), through the golden entombment of the chrysalis, to the winged liberty and polychromatic glory of the fully formed imago (the true “image”). An Atlas Moth breaking from its cocoon at the end of his early story “Christmas,” for instance, clearly figures as an intimation of life beyond death.

A more interesting feature of Nabokov’s interest in butterflies for me, however, and of his entire career as a naturalist, was his intuition—at once metaphysical and aesthetic—that between nature and art there is no ultimate formal difference. Though not in any conventional sense a religious man—his only answer in an interview to the question of whether there is a God was to hint that he knew far more than he could say—he was certain that the natural world exhibited innumerable signs of conscious and even somewhat whimsical artistry: morphological games, almost, patterns of mimicry and delightful complexity that exceeded any purely evolutionary warrant, and that spoke of a sort of creativity whose rationale was ultimately aesthetic. Nature, no less than art, and no less (for that matter) than the mysteriously guided lives of individual men and women, seemed to him a work of supreme intelligence, conjuring enchantments purely for the sake of enchantment.

One has to be careful to make the proper distinctions here. There was nothing in Nabokov’s vision of reality that would have brought his thinking into the vicinity of the current Intelligent Design movement, with its logically and epistemologically unverifiable arguments regarding irreducible complexity and its crude mechanistic deism and its all-too-immanent god of the gaps. For Nabokov, nature’s design was something he thought he perceived in the sheer surfeit of the beautiful over the needful, and in the specular play of formal likenesses and variations among species. It was an aesthetic judgment on the whole of the natural order, not an empirical claim about certain portions of its machinery.

It is hard to know what to make of the more spiritualist elements of Nabokov’s beliefs. Perhaps they might be dismissed as the quaint residue of a certain Silver Age Russian hermeticism, or perhaps as just too idiosyncratic to provide a philosophy for any but the very particular sensibility that harbored them. Whatever the case, his beliefs certainly endowed him with a limitless capacity for happiness, one that never failed him even the darkest period of his life, when his family’s vast estates had been seized by the Bolsheviks and he was forced to live the life of an impoverished émigré for decades on end. According to him, he was always able to find life to be a delightful “surprise” and for this reason he was always able to see something more shining through the veils of the ordinary.

And it is this quality of surprise that lends depth and poignancy (and delight) to all of Nabokov’s art. Whatever else one makes of his peculiar metaphysics, it is clearly an expression of that most original of human intuitions regarding existence, known to every reflective child, and forgotten only by adults who have coarsened their intellects through moral indifference or “realist” dogmatism: the awareness that the very familiarity of the world of beings is saturated by the infinite strangeness of the fact of being as such. His was nothing other than the ancient Platonic and Aristotelian sense of thaumazein—of original rational wonder at existence—transcribed into a new key. As Wittgenstein said (a pronouncement the implications of which even some of his most avid admirers seem not to notice), it is not how things are, but that they are, that constitutes “the mystical.” Where the Intelligent Design theorist wants us to ponder the (actually incalculable and therefore imponderable) probabilities in how the world is ordered, a simpler and yet immeasurably richer perspective enjoins us to feel awe before the sheer there-ness—the sheer inexplicable that-it-is-of intelligibility and complexity and grandeur.

This is a consciousness of things more aesthetic than empirical and more spiritual than aesthetic, but at every level it is an experience of beauty—which is to say, an experience of the utter non-necessity, the absolute fortuity, of being. Heidegger, in an infuriatingly terse paragraph in the “epilogue” of his “The Origin of the Work of Art,” correctly rejects as inadequate those static understandings of beauty that say it resides simply in form and order and a certain splendor (quod visum placet), and insists on the ontological dimension of the beautiful. No object, however striking, is beautiful as a sheer sensuous effect (that is nothing but a neurological agitation), nor even as an object of intellectual comprehension; it is beautiful because, in addition to these things, there is the mysterious surprisingness of its existence, by which it discloses to us being in its advent, or being as event. The experience of the delightful needlessness of the beautiful awakens us to the needlessness of the existence of things, to their ontological contingency, to the failure of their essences (conceived statically) to account for their existence. In this moment, we are aware—not always reflectively or speculatively, admittedly—of the difference between being and beings; and so long as we dwell in that apprehension, we cannot fall prey to that excruciating confusion that makes someone like, say, Richard Dawkins incapable of grasping the difference between the mystery of existence and the question of origins. The philistine hath said in his heart . . .

At any rate, this is what I take to be the profoundest truth in Nabokov’s belief in nature’s secret artistry: that sheer sense of surprise at the beautiful that—when we seek it, but more often when we do not—reminds us of a deeper surprise that inhabits our consciousness at all times, but of which we are usually oblivious, distracted as we are from being by beings. The surfeit of the beautiful over the necessary is a revelation of the surfeit of being over beings. It is an enigma written as plainly upon the surface of a twig or a brick as upon the wing of a butterfly; but only the greatest artist or saint has the ability to see it with equal ease in all circumstances.

Even if my encounter with that Vanessa atalanta was nothing more than a wildly amusing coincidence, or even if it was one of those exquisitely unanticipated patterns that Nabokov’s kindly ghosts weave into the fabric of quotidian existence, the most significant lesson to be learned from it is that—as we all know—every butterfly is a Papilio mysteriosus, an emblem and an emissary of being in its familiarity and infinite strangeness, and all things properly contemplated remind us that, of themselves, they cannot be. And yet they are.

*
David B. Hart’s most recent book is Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies.
*
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2009/08/on-butterflies-and-being/david-b-hart
*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bentley_Hart
http://actuspurunen.blogspot.com/2010/11/miksi-augustinolais-luterilainen.html
http://www.ortodoksi.net/index.php/Ekklesiologia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being#St._Thomas.27_analogy_of_being
http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/2006/11/analogia-entis-makes-comeback-david.html
http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Nabokov
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Nabokov
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_admiral
http://www.michaelramseyprize.org.uk/titles.php#dbh
http://www.michaelramseyprize.org.uk/titles.php
http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiraali_(perhonen)
http://authorshive.com/2011/01/03/red-admiral-butterflies/

A Math Atheist

Onko matematiikka pikemminkin uskonto kuin tiede - tai ainakin tieteellinen uskonto [muista Pyhagoras]?
*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGe9rcDfAt0
Mathematics and Religion: - Roundtable discussion with Dominic Balestra, Loren Graham, Edward Nelson, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, and Max Tegmark
*
http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras
http://cc.oulu.fi/~ljalonen/Kurssit/MaLuKu/Tieteen%20alkuvaiheita.pdf
http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matematiikan_historia
http://www.tieteessatapahtuu.fi/005/pekonen.htm
http://christophersisk.com/tag/calvin-and-hobbes/

Otetaanko vähän kuppia? [monikon partitiivi kup/sta]

Mä olen Kaaleppi. Mikä sun nimesi on? - Suvi? Ai Satu? Sepäs sattu. Mä tunsin kerran jos kaksikin yhden Sadun. - Mutta ei siitä sen enempää - ainakaan vielä.

No - voinhan mä päivittää sulle sitä juttua illan mittaan, niin ei ehkä tarvi tänään mennä toisten blogeihin oksentamaan ja tilaamaan itselleen morkkista viikonlopuksi.

Wait a moment while I go to toilet.

[...]

Nonniin - I'm back again. - - Katos kaikki alko siitä, kun mä huomasin 17-vuotiaana lukiolaisena, että tolla yhdellä typykällähän on ihmeellisen pyöreä takapuoli. Ja vähän muutakin pyöreetä. Sen huulet oli punaset ja paksut - tukka pitkä, tumma ja kiharainen - nenä nypykkä ja silmät kuin kaksi pientä lähdettä keskellä kumpuilevaa savannia.

Tämän kokemuksen jälkeen mä en enää palannu entiselleni vaan jäin himoni orjaksi - kutemaan kiimani katiskaan ninku kalamiehet sanois.

Meidän suhde alko tehokkaasti. Mä tuijotin sitä Satua VII B:n metsästysmaja-bileissä kolme tuntia suoraan silmiin ja puhuin taukoamatta, mikä ei ollu mulle lainkaan tyypillistä vielä siihen aikaan. Lopulta me oltiin kahden millin päässä toisistamme, mutta mä vaan puhuin, vaikka huulet vähän väliä hipaisi toisiaan.

- - Mä voin kyllä näyttää neidille, miten se tapahtu, niin ei jää pelkän kielikuvan tasolle tämä dokumentointi - - -

Hei mihin neiti nyt menee! Tässä olis valkoviiniä ja tryffeleitä. Oikein sian keräämiä. Ei minun. Entä se ulkofilee? Tanakaksi kuumennettu. - - Voi härre gud että on nopeajalkainen likka.
......
Hmm. Ehkä se typy oli unohtanut tehneensä treffit just tässä kohtaa mun dramaturgista visiotani . - Siitähän tulis näyttelijä - oikea taimauksen kuningatar...
*
[päivitysvarauksella - to be continued].
*
http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/una-anu/reviews/

Begging the question ja circular reasoning - salakavalimman argumentaatioviruksen melkein identtiset kaksoset

Huomaa, että Begging the question on täysin eri asia kuin Raise the question [ks. I /2].



[K-mafian lisäys kohtaan I/3 - viimeksi klo: 10.10]
I
1
Begging the question (or petitio principii, "assuming the initial point") is a type of logical fallacy in which the proposition to be proven is assumed implicitly or explicitly in the premise. The first known definition in the West is by the Greek philosopher Aristotle around 350 BC, in his book Prior Analytics, where he classified it as a material fallacy. Begging the question is related to the circular argument, circulus in probando (Latin, "circle in proving") or circular reasoning [ks. linkki].

2
What is Begging the Question?

Begging the question is a form of logical fallacy in which a statement or claim is assumed to be true without evidence other than the statement or claim itself. When one begs the question, the initial assumption of a statement is treated as already proven without any logic to show why the statement is true in the first place.

A simple example would be I think he is unattractive because he is ugly. The adjective ugly does not explain why the subject is unattractive - - they virtually amount to the same subjective meaning, and the proof is merely a restatement of the premise. The sentence has begged the question.

What is it Not?

To beg the question does not mean to 'raise the question.' [e.g. It begs the question, why is he so dumb?] This is a common error of usage made by those who mistake the word 'question' in the phrase to refer to a literal question. Sadly, the error has grown more and more common with time, such that even journalists, advertisers, and major mass media entities have fallen prey to "BTQ Abuse."

While descriptivists and other such laissez-faire linguists are content to allow the misconception to fall into the vernacular, it cannot be denied that logic and philosophy stand to lose an important conceptual label should the meaning of BTQ become diluted to the point that we must constantly distinguish between the traditional usage and the erroneous "modern" usage. This is why we fight.

3
Petitio principii
*
[Esimerkit tässä(kin) ovat muodollisesti päteviä mutta jopa harhaanjohtavan yksinkertaisia, sillä petitio principii/begging the question kuten kehäpäätelmät yleensä on joskus todella hankala ellei jopa mahdoton hahmottaa monimutkaisista teoreettisista perusteluista. - Mahdottomuudesta seuraa, että 'perimmäinen' tietomme olisi aina kehäistä ja usein juuri BQ-muodossa. - Tämä merkitsee, että emme voi välttää skeptisismiä ja että ainoa tieto, mitä meillä on, määräytyy viime kädessä todennäköisyyden (tilastollinen kausaliteetti, relatiiviset oletukset hyödystä ja seuraamuksista] ja auktoriteetin (instituutiot) perusteella eikä episteemisesti oikeutettuna/rr]
*
Petitio principii: johtopäätöksen olettaminen lähtökohtaisesti todeksi premisseissä, jotka esitetään johtopäätöksen perusteluina. Termi on käännös Aristoteleen ilmaisusta "(to en) archei aiteisthai" eli 'olettaa aluksi'.

Kehäpäätelmä [tai sen eräs muoto - ks. II 1]. X on totta, koska X on totta. Kummituksia on olemassa, sillä meediot kommunikoivat kummitusten kanssa. Kulkee englanninkielisessä keskustelussa nimellä 'begging the question eli 'kysymyksen (=kyseessä olevan asian) olettaminen [ilman todisteita]' - ks. kuitenkin II 1.
*
Nykyisin englanninkielisessä keskustelussa käytetään ilmaisua 'begging the question' myös merkityksissä 'kysymyksen välttely' ja 'kysymyksen herättäminen'. Merkityksen myöhempi laajentuminen johtuu siitä, että yleensäkin "begging" tarkoittaa nykyisin vain harvoin 'olettamista' ja useammin 'välttelyä' ja 'pyytämistä' tai 'kerjäämistä'.

Sana "question" eli 'kysymys' tarkoittaa tässä yhteydessä alun perin nimenomaan 'kyseessä olevaa asiaa', mutta sanan "question" yleisen merkityksen vuoksi nyttemmin tässäkin fraasissa tarkoitetaan usein kirjaimellisesti jotain kysymystä. Monet puristit pitävät näitä myöhempiä merkityksiä väärinä ja rahvaanomaisina, joten latinankielinen termi on kiistattomampi ja selkeämpi.

II
1
Circular reasoning is a formal logical fallacy in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises. For example:

'Only an untrustworthy person would run for office. The fact that politicians are untrustworthy is proof of this.'

Such an argument is fallacious, because it relies upon its own proposition - "politicians are untrustworthy" - in order to support its central premise. Essentially, the argument assumes that its central point is already proven, and uses this in support of itself.

[Obs!] Circular reasoning is different from the informal logical fallacy "begging the question", as it is fallacious due to a flawed logical structure and not the individual falsity of an unstated hidden co-premise as begging the question is.

2
Kehäpäätelmä on virheellinen päätelmä, jonka pätevyys perustuu oletukseen johtopäätöksen totuudesta. Toisin sanoen kehäpäätelmä on hyväksyttävä vain siinä tapauksessa, että johtopäätös sattuu olemaan tosi. Kehäpäättely ei osoita mitään syitä, miksi kyseistä väitettä olisi pidettävä totena.

Yksinkertaisimmillaan kehäpäätelmä kuuluu: Koska asia on näin, asia on näin. Kehäpäätelmän yleinen kaava on seuraava:

1. A on B:n premissi

2. Todisteeksi B:lle esitetään A

3. Alkuehdoksi (premissiksi) A:lle esitetään B

Tavallisesti kehäpäätelmät piiloutuvat monimutkaisen esitystavan taakse eikä kehäpäätelmästä ole siksi helppoa antaa selkeää esimerkkiä. Kehäpäätelmässä voi olla myös useampia termejä kuin vain kaksi. Esimerkiksi seuraava päättely on kehämäistä :

- Jos suurin osa ihmisistä pitää jotakin väitettä totena, niin se on tosi.

- Koska suurin osa ihmisistä pitää edellistä väitettä totena, on sen oltava tosi.

- Siis: Jos suurin osa ihmisistä pitää jotakin väitettä totena, niin se on tosi.
*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
http://begthequestion.info/
http://hommaforum.org/index.php?topic=2649.10;wap2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reasoning
http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keh%C3%A4p%C3%A4%C3%A4telm%C3%A4
http://hommaforum.org/index.php?topic=2649.10;wap2

http://www.libertypages.com/cgw/2009/02/02/erudite-ferrets/

Hiljaisuuden ääni [objekti a] subjektin tietoisuutena itsestään

Näkyvä hiljaisuus, jonka voi kuulla

[Kielimafian lisäys - klo: 18.15]

Asia, ääni ja aika on vuonna 1998 Suomessa vierailleen ranskalaisen filosofin pieni suuri kirja toisen tunnistamisesta ja todellisuuden konstituutiosta.

'Kaikki on siis jo alkanut Toisesta. Niin äänikin, tuo puhdas ääni jota ei voi sanoa, mutta jota ilman ei voisi sanoa mitään. Sillä kaikki sanominen, kaikki puhe on ajallistumista, joka taas on mahdollista ainoastaan äänen inkorporaation kautta. Aika ei ole mitään muuta kuin tuo puhdas ääni, ääni objekti a:na. Ajallehan me vastaamme, kun vastaamme tuolle äänettömälle äänelle joka antaa meille käskyn puhua. Vaikkemme tiedä siitä mitään, vastaamme sille joka kerta kun avaamme suumme puhuaksemme. Niinpä äänemme, merkitsevä, ilmiötason äänemme suojelee meitä katoamasta äänen puhtaaseen kajeeseen ja ajan kammottavaan hiljaisuuteen.'
*
Päreen osa II sisältää sitaatteja filosofin ja lacanilaisen psykoanalyytikon Bernard Baasin pitämästä pikku kirjaseksi nidotusta puheesta Asia, ääni ja aika hänen käydessään Suomessa 10.10 1998 Helsingin Lacan-piirin 10-vuotisjuhlaseminaarissa.

I
1
Tämä teksti/puhe selvensi minulle toistaiseksi parhaiten, mitä Lacan tarkoittaa tärkeimmäksi nimeämällään käsitteellisellä innovaatiollaan eli objekti a:lla. Valitettavasti valikoimani kohdat eivät voi edustaa tekstin yksityiskohtaista kokonaisuutta katkaisematta Baasin tiivistä analyysia ja ajatuksenjuoksua. Mutta jonkinlaisen yleiskäsityksen niistä voinee saada. - Hannu Siveniuksen Baasin esittely: 'Johdannoksi' on myös aihetta selkiyttävää luettavaa.

Jos joku nyt kysyy, mitä tämä teksti oikein on, mitä se tarkoittaa ja mistä se puhuu, niin annan vastaukseksi yksinkertaisen: tässä puhutaan siitä, miten subjekti syntyy tyhjyyden ympärille - tapahtuma, joka ei ole kerrottavissa tai rekonstruoiotavissa uudestaan empiiristen havaintojen, kokemusten tai kokeitten avulla tai redusoitavissa niihin - ikäänkuin olisi olemassa jokin empiirinen tai fenomenologinen fakta nimeltään Subjekti.

On olemassa subjekti objekti a:na [itsereflektio heijasteena tyhjyydestä] ja vuorovaikutuksellinen subjekti [kommunikatiivinen vuorovaikutus kielenä/ssä], mutta ei mitään subjektia alkuperänä tai alkuperää subjektina.

Toki subjekti yksilönä on olemassa, mutta se[kin] syntyy inkorporaation kautta [pienen lapsen sisäistäessä toisen äänen ja katseen]. Inkorporaatiossa ei kuitenkaan ole kyse suorasta kokemuksellisesta introjektiosta eli identifikaatiosta johonkin reaalis-empiiriseen hahmoon vaan fantasiasta, jolla subjekti-yksilöksi kehittyvä vauva omaksuu itsensä toisessa ja toisen kautta eräänlaisena itsen [ideaali-]peilikuvana, jona toimivat aluksi pääosin äiti ja isä [tai isäksi mielletty mikä lie äidin kaveri näin sateenkaari-aikana]. - Myöhemmin tämä samastuminen on myös sosiaalistumisen psyykkinen malli.

Me emme siis voi löytää mitään havaittavaa, kokemuksellista ja tilastollisesti laskettavaa subjektia tai edes psyykkisen rakenteen subjektiivista kykyä etsiessämme minuuden perimmäistä alkua. Subjektin lähtökohtana on se sama halun perimmäinen puute eli tyhjyys, jolla äiti vastaa pienen vauvan refleksinomaiseen huutoon, jolla ei ole mitään valmista kohdetta ja joka ei ilmennä mitään muuta merkitystä ja tarkoitusta kuin biologisen ihmiselämän alkuhetkien puhtaan ja paljaan puutteenalaisuuden [halun} kauhua ja hätää, joka uhkaa jatkuvasti vajota takaisin siihen puutteen tyhjyyteen, josta on alunperin ilmestynytkin [kunnes kuolemassa sinne lopullisesti vajoaakin].

Äiti antaa kyllä varauksettoman huolenpitonsa mutta ei ikäänkuin geneettistä vastetta ja vastausta vauvan itseyden perimmäiseen tyhjyyteen, koska hänen oma subjektiutensakin on puutteen/tyhjyyden ympärille konstituoitunut 'saviruukku'.

Pystymme hahmottamaan subjektin kehitystä vain strukturaalisesti, mikä teorisointi ei kuitenkaan [fiktiona] sorru Lacanin kritisoimaan myyttiin ja etenkin kleinilaiseen myyttiin subjektin kokemuksellis-apriorisesta alkuperästä.

Koska subjekti on alkuperäisen puutteen ympärille konstituoitunut fantasia-rakennelma, sitä ei voida myöskään rekonstruoida uudestaan jonain ajallisena kokemuksena - olkoonkin, että subjekti myös Lacanin mukaaan 'kehkeytyy' ajassa.
Oleellista on, ettei tuo kehkeytyminen ilmennä mitään absoluuttisen, empiiris-geneettisen ytimen teleologisesti määrättyä evoluutiota [Aristoteleen potentiaalista muotoa] vaan on hahmotettavissa vain käsitteellisesti kielessä strukturoituvana imaginaarisena prossessina, jonka redusointi alkuperäänsä on illusorista fiktiota, jolloin heidän reduktionsa jää väistämättä kesken ilmentäen huonosti peiteltyä ja etenkin huonosti tajuttua idealismia.. Tähän illuusioon monet empiirikot kuitenkin retkahtavat.
*
[Edelliseen liittyen: evolutionistit olettavat mm. tilastomatematiikkaan vedoten, että toiston pakon (sukupuolivietti, lisääntyminen) ja funktion (adaptaatio, sopetuminen olosuhteisiin) välillä vallitsee positiivinen korrelaatio (hyvin sopeutuvat lisääntyvät eniten), mutta loogisesti toiston ja funktion välillä on täydellinen katkos, sillä toisto on adaptaation kannalta pelkkä automaatti, kun taas adaptaatio/mukautuminen 'valikoi' ne yksilöt, joiden geenit jatkavat olemassaoloa. Informaation siirtyminen eteenpäin (toisto) on itsessään 'tyhjä prosessi', jolle adaptaatio antaa 'merkityksen']. 
*
Koska on loogisesti mahdotonta ilman kategorista virhettä ja väärinkäsitystä löytää ja osoittaa tietoisuus kokeellisessa havainnossa, pidän [ainakin satiirisessa mielessä] älyllisesti rehellisempää jopa kytkeä subjekti [olemassaolo tietoisuutena] heti suoraan 'jumalalliseen' alkuperään.

Olemassaolo [tietoisuus] ei voi loogisesti, ilman katkosta syy-seuraus-ketjun ennalta määräytyneisyydessä, seurata evoluutiosta vaan on itsessään jotain, joka toimii edellytyksenä kaiken materiaalisen tajuamiselle.

Ja vaikka vedottaisiin biologiseen mutaatioon [joka sekin on laskettavissa oleva tilastollis-kausaalinen poikkeama], ei päästä mihinkään siitä käsitteellisestä dilemmasta, että olemassaolo ei ole materiaalisen olion ominaisuus vaan jotain, jonka on jäätävä ikäänkuin 'yli' [objekti a, tietoisuus] materiasta, jotta mitään voitaisiin ajatella olemassaolevana.

2
Objekti a on Lacanilla alkuperäisen tyhjyyden eli reaaliseen 'sisältyvän' Asian [halu puutteena; ei-representoitavissa oleva vietti] läsnäoloa puhtaana Äänenä [analogisesti myös katseena joskin ajallisesti myöhemmin], joka kutsuu subjektin olemassaoloon triviaalista itseydestään ainutlaatuisena minuutena.

[Alkuperäinen tyhjyys [ei-mikään] on tietysti aina jo lopullinen tyhjyys, sillä tuskin voidaan mielekkäästi ajatella tyhjyydellä olevan evoluutiota. Tai ehkä sittenkin - ehkä Kari Enqvist pystyy sellaiseen temppuun laskemalla tyhjyydelle ensin koordinaatiston mukaisen massakeskipisteen ja tämän jälkeen muiden tuohon tyhjyyteen suhteessa olevien ja suhteeseen tulevien massakeskipisteitten vaikutuksen siihen ;/]

Objekti a on subjektiksi tulemisen struktuurin välttämätön ei-empiirinen nimitys. Se ei kuitenkaan ole identtinen [vaikkakin analoginen] Kantin transsendentaalinen apriorin kanssa vaan subjektiivisuuden ja tietoisuuden mahdollisuuden aktualisoiva 'ei-koettu ylimäärä', joka ylittää empiirisen kausaalisuuden toimien sen ehtona: vrt. Jumala, olemassaolo, tietoisuus, Kantin apriorit, Derridan jälki ja differance.

Sama uudelleen hieman toisin sanoen: subjektiksi tuleminen ja subjektina oleminen on kuvattavissa mielekkäästi vain kokemus-tietoisuuden rakenteen ontologisesta halkeamasta [yhdistävä katkos olion olemassaolon ja sen ominaisuuksien välillä] kumpuavana ylimääränä, jota objekti a on. - Objekti a ei siis ole representaatio [jostain perustavammasta, joka voidaan osoittaa] vaan pikemminkin derridalainen jälki/differance, joka kuitenkin differanceen verrattuna sisältää energeettisen latauksen [ollen sillä tavoin ajallinen 'jokin' suhteessa tilaan, mikä merkitsee tangeerausta fenomenlogiaan].

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RR:n obligatorinen jeremiadi eli lähes jokaiseen päreeseeni kuuluva pakollinen valitus

Tahdon ja valinnan irrationaali vapaus ja halu irrottautua kaikista mahdollisista [niin uskonnollis-metafyysisistä kuin rationaalis-normatiivisista] rajoituksista on pahin katastrofi, mihin ihminen voi riippumattomuutta tavoitellessaan päätyä. Se on paluu eläimelliseen olotilaan - nyt vain ilman vaistoja, jotka ohjaavat eläimen käytöstä.

Täysin vapaan ihmisen vapaus on paradoksaalisesti mielihalujen ja oikkujen orjuutta - eräänlaista itse aiheutettua riippuvuutta impulsseista ja affekteista, joita kapitalismi [pääoma] systeeminä hyödyntää - ruokkien ja kasvattaen 'vapaasta' massakuluttajasta nautinto-fantasioilla stimuloiden optimaalisen talous-subjektin ikäänkuin kyseessä olisi geneettisesti juuri tietynlaiseksi hybridiksi jalostettava teuraseläin [niinkuin itse asiassa onkin].

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18.1.2011 - Edelliseen [alunperin hyvin strukturalistis-pitoiseen vuodatukseen] olen reilut puoli vuotta sen kirjoittamisen jälkeen tehnyt huomattavia tarkennuksia ja lisäyksiä, jotka ovat nyt enemmän fenomenologiaan päin kallellaan [esim. empiirisen tutkimuksen lähökohdaksi (ei välttämättä täysin parodisesti) suosittamani oletus tietoisuuden 'jumalallisesta' alkuperästä].

Joten - huolimatta siitä, että joudumme puhumaan subjektista aina käsitteellisen konstituution puitteissa, minuus on silti jotain, joka ilmenee itsereflektiivisesti vain yhdelle subjektille eli minulle [muut minuudet ovat havainto-päättelyä - eivät kokemusta] eikä mikään struktuuri voi ilmentää tätä kokemusta kuin abstraktiona, jolla on vain häviävä [joskin välttämättömän] välineellinen arvo silloin, kun sanomme: minä olen.

Voidaan hyvällä syyllä sanoa, että fenomenologinen hermeneutiikka ei ole strukturalismin aivot, mutta sydän se aivan varmasti on [revi siitä Michel F.].

II
[...] Objekti a on erikoislaatuinen objekti, jossa on kyse vietistä sellaisena kuin se solmuttuu puhuvalle subjektille ominaisessa symbolifunktiossa. Se ei ole mikään empiirinen halun objekti, vaan ikäänkuin objektivoimaton objekti, jonka ansiosta subjektille muodostuu fantasma, jossa sen halu jäsentyy.

Juuri objekti a - kaavani hieman uskalias, mutta pyrkimykseni on sanoa asia mahdollisimman selvästi - juuri objekti a on se, mikä ruumiista ei ole symbolisoitavissa. Toisin sanoen - ja nyt otan vielä suuremman riskin! - objekti a on se, mikä ruumiista ei ole symbolifunktion sulattamaa, eikä voikaan olla.

Subjekti ei siis ylläpidä objektisuhdetta objekti a:n avulla, vaikka kyseinen objekti ensi näkemältä näyttääkin kuuluvan kokemuksen piiriin, kokemuksiin, joita tarjoavat rinta, ulosteet, katse ja ääni.

Kokemus ei tarjoa meille objekti a:ta, vaan sitä on haettava ja jäljitettävä kaikkien kokemusten takaa ja tuolta puolen; se nimittäin on se, joka jatkuvasti kummittelee niissä tiedostetuissa ja tiedostamattomissa mielteissä ja mielikuvissa, joiden ansiosta subjekteilla on maailma.

Lacanin edeltäjät, ennen muuta Melanie Klein, mutta jo Freudkin, tunsivat toki viettiobjektin tehtävän psykoanalyysissa. He rajoittuivat kuitenkin kahteen ensisijaiseen objektiin: rintaan ja ulosteisiin, mikä johtui siitä, että että he ajattelivat objektin tehtävää subjektin synnyssä, ja se puolestaan johti heidät puhumaan oraalisesta ja anaalisesta vaiheesta.

Lacan taas halusi irrottautua geneettisestä orientaatiosta ja tarkastella sen sijaan strukturaalisesti viettiobjektin suhdetta symbolifunktioon, joka on ominainen ihmiselle puhuvana olentona. Näin tehdessään hän päätyi erottamaan vielä kaksi muuta viettiobjektia: äänen ja katseen. [...]; s. 18-20

[Baasin analyysin yksityiskohtaisempi siteeraaminen vie tässä yhteydessä liikaa tilaa ja on hankalasti ositettavissa, joten ylitän tässä 20:n sivun verran tekstiä, mikä jättää tietysti asioita auki ja epäselviksi/rr]
*
Palaan nyt inkorporaation käsitteeseen ja kertaan vielä Lacanin siitä esittämät kaksi muotoilua: '...meidän on inkorporoitava ääni sen toiseutena, joka sanotaan'; ja 'Ääni ei assimiloidu, vaan inkorporoituu, ja juuri siksi se voikin muokata tyhjyyttämme.'

Inkorporaation käsitettä on tarkasteltava Karl Abrahamin ja Melanie Kleinin pohdintojen avaamasta näkökulmasta. Abraham ja Klein tutkivat introjektiota ruumiillisena modaliteettina ja siis identifikaatio-prosessin prototyyppinä tai alkuperänä.

Sellaiset tavallisesti havaitut piirteet kuin mielihyvän saaminen, objektin tuhoutuminen ja objektin osien sulauttaminen itseen eivät kuitenkaan ole inkorporaatio-prosessissa itsestään selviä, sillä inkorporoitu objekti, josta mainitut Freudin seuraajat puhuvat, ajatellaan halun emiiriseksi objektiksi [joskin inkorporaation identifikaatio-puoli jo viittaa siihen, että kyseessä on jotakin enemmän kuin pelkkä halun tarkoitusperä].

Sitävastoin ääni, josta Lacan sanoo, että se inkorporoituu, ei millään muotoa ole kokemuksessa objektivoitunut ääni vaan objektaalinen ääni, eli ääni objektivoitumattomana objektina, objekti a:na. On siis pyrittävä rekonstruoimaan se, mitä tuo objektin alkuperäinen inkorporaatio on voinut olla lapsen kannalta.

On kuitenkin syytä pitää mielessään, että Lacan pysytteli tiukasti erossa kaikista yrityksistä kehitellä subjektin ja halun syntyä lähtien ajatuksesta, että on olemassa jokin pikkulapsen (rintalapsen tai jopa sikiön) oletetusti saama alkuperäinen tyydytyskokemus, jonka lapsi sitten pyrkii löytämään uudelleen sen kerran menetettyään. Kaikki tämäntapainen kehittely on nimittäin välttämättä teoreettista fiktiota, sillä se, mitä nimitetään alkuperäiseksi ei ole muuta kuin seurausta struktuurista, josta käsin se on alkuperäksi rakennettu.

On tärkeää ymmärtää fiktio siksi, mitä se on, eikä luulla, että se on täsmällistä tietoa jostakin, mikä muka on ollut alkuperäistä todellisuutta. Muussa tapauksessa voi langeta siihen, mitä lacan kutsuu myytiksi [ja nimenomaan kleinilaiseksi myytiksi] ja jonka hän määrittelee 'pyrkimykseksi antaa eeppinen muoto sille, mikä toimii strukturaalisesti'.

Näin itseämme varoitettuamme voimmekin nyt ryhtyä rakentamaan fiktiota. [...]; s. 41-43
*
Meidän kokemuksessamme subjektin ääni on tietysti ilmiötason ääni, koska sillä on oma erityinen sävynsä, sointunsa, korkeutensa ja sävellajinsa. Kuitenkin tuo aistein havaittava kuuluva aines, jonka havaitsemínen voi jopa tuottaa nautintoa, on vain siinä äänettömästi ja salaa soivan puhtaan äänen peite. Juuri tämän vuoksi ääni voi kuuluvan aineksensa ansiosta 'muokata tyhjyyttämme'.

Lacanin sana muokata, modeler, on tässä ymmärrettävä 'muovaamiseksi' ja muodon antamiseksi [niin kuin ruukuntekijä muovaa savea kietoakseen sen sisään tyhjyyden, joka on ruukun olennainen sisältö].

Tyhjyyden muovaamista Lacan kuvaa usein sen ääriviivojen piirtämiseksi, sen ympäröimiseksi ja piirittämiseksi. Äänen ilmiötason resonanssi muodostaa siis Asian [reaalinen: vietti/halu puutteena; tätä on mahdotonta artikuloida subjekti-objekti-asetelmassa/rr] ääriviivat, puhtaan puutteen piirin, ja kuitenkaan ääni ei soi sen tyhjyyden sisällä,, jota se näin ympäröi.

Tuossa tyhjyydessä ei soi mikään aistein kuultava ominaissävel, siinä ei soi mikään kuin tuon tyhjyyden puhdas kaje. Toisin sanoen aistein kuultavan äänen ilmiötason resonanssi muovaa tyhjyyttä, jossa puhtaan kajeen asiaääni resonoi, ja tuo puhdas kaje on totuus äänestä ymmärrettynä objekti a:ksi.

Tyhjyys ei silti ole negatiivista ideaalisuutta. Päinvastoin, se on välttämätön puute, jota koko merkitsijöiden järjestelmä kiertää - ja tuo puute syntyy vasta, kun subjektikin syntyy merkitsevän vieraantumisen kautta ja sen sisällä. [...]; s. 45-47
*
[...] Lacan ei myöskään vastustanut ajatusta, että subjekti, kuten Husserl on osoittanut kehkeytyy itsekin ajassa. Lacan täsmensi, ettei subjekti ole koskaan ajassa kiinni itselleen läsnäolevana substanssina, mutta tämäkin varaus vastaa loppujen lopuksi Husserlin teesiä, jonka mukaan subjektia, vaikka se kehkeytyykin omien havaintojensa ja representaatioidensa virrassa, ei voida koskaan vangita jonkin nykyhetken hetkellisyyteen.

Francoise Dastur kiteyttää kirjoituksessaan Husserlin teoksesta 'Luentoja sisäisen aikatajunnan fenomenologiasta' seuraavasti: 'subjekti tulee jollakin tapaa aina esittää myöhässä, sitä edeltää aina jo ajan virta itse. Lacanilla ei ollut mitään tätä vastaan. Hän vain täsmensi, että subjektia edeltää aino jo ääni.

Lacanin fenomenologiasta saamalla innoituksella on kuitenkin rajansa. Ja tuo raja on nimenomaan objekti a:n käsite. Subjektin strukturoiminen objektivoitumattoman ja siis itse asiassa poissaolevan objektin ympärille ei johdu mistään tietoisuuden tai psyyken sisäisestä rakenteellisesta kyvystä. Se johtuu siitä, että subjekti itse on merkitsijän seuraus.

Subjekti on subjekti nimenomaan puhuvana, ja sellaisena se ei voi tukeutua mihinkään muuhun eikä 'saada ravintoaan' mistään muusta kuin piiloon jäävästä objektista, jota symbolinen järjestys strukturaalisista syistä edellyttää.

Tämä pätee objekti a:han yleensä ja erityisesti se pätee ääniobjektiin, joka kutsuu subjektia ainoastaan puhuvana subjektina. Tämän takia Lacan ei ole fenomenologi, vakka koko hänen ajattelunsa onkin ikäänkuin jatkuvaa kissanhännän vetoa fenomenologian kanssa. s. 55-57
*
Kaikki on siis jo alkanut Toisesta. Myös ääni, tuo puhdas ääni, jota ei voi sanoa, mutta jota ilman ei voisi sanoa, että mitään on alkanut Toisesta. Kaikki sanominen, kaikki puhe on ajallistumista, joka taas on mahdollista ainoastaan äänen inkorporaation kautta.

Aika ei ole muuta kuin puhdas ääni, ääni objekti a:na. Ajallehan me vastaamme, kun vastaamme äänettömälle äänelle, joka antaa meille käskyn puhua. Vaikkemme tiedä siitä mitään, vastaamme sille joka kerta kun avaamme suumme puhuaksemme. Äänemme, merkitsevä, ilmiötason äänemme suojelee meitä katoamasta äänen puhtaaseen kajeeseen ja ajan kammottavaan hiljaisuuteen.

Kerron tähän loppuun esimerkin. Se on Georg Bühnerin tunnetusta novellista, joka kertoo Lenzistä ja hänen käynnistään Elsassissa. Koko tarinan yllä leijuu alusta loppuun pelottava hiljaisuus, joka vetää runoilijaa vastustamattomasti puoleensa [eikä ole sattuma, että kyseessä on runoilija, sillä juuri runon puhe luultavasti aina liikkuu kaikkein tarkimmin sillä rajalla, joka erottaa toisistaan puheen ja ajan äänettömän äänen].

Kertomuksen alussa ilmiötason äänet ja merkitsevät äänet ovat edelleen sen verran kiehtovia, että Lenz pääsee ahdistuksestaan ja pystyy jatkamaan puhujien yhteisössä. Loppupuolella kaikki on kuitenkin toisin. Aika seisahtuu, kun kuulemme vaikuttavan loppurepliikin: 'Katsokaahan kirkkoherra, jos vain pääsisin kuulemasta sitä, olisin pelastettu'. Niin mitä, ystäväni' 'Ettekö kuule sitä? Ettekö kuule hirveää ääntä, joka huutaa pitkin taivaanrantaa ja jota tavallisesti kutsutaan hiljaisuudeksi?...'; s. 62-64
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http://www.lokikirjat.fi/baasasia.html
http://www.suomalainen.com/sk/servlets/ProductServlet?action=getAuthorProducts&authorid=402486
http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan
http://filosofia.fi/node/2427
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology
http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenomenologia
http://www.ppcolorado.com/printawards/2009.html
http://natalieshell.com/2008/01/24/the-sounds-of-silence/