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

The Aesthetics of Christian Truth
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[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.
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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
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[...]'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]

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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.

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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].

3
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].

4
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
*
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/

Believe it or not

 

David B. Hart [vasen alakulma] was born in 1965 in Maryland, and matriculated at the University of Maryland, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Virginia. He has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of St Thomas in Minnesota, and Duke University; he has also served as The Robert Randall Distinguished Chair and as a visiting professor at Providence College in Rhode Island. His areas of specialization are philosophical theology, religious studies, Asian religions, patristics, and aesthetics. He is also a writer on cultural issues, with an emphasis upon aesthetics.

[Kielimafian tarkistuksia ja lisäyksiä - viimeksi klo: 10.30]
1
Siirrän First Things sivustolta löytyvän David Bentley Hart'in viime huhtikuussa julkaistun artikkelin Believe it or not [arvostelu eräitten 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists-kirjan kirjoittajien argumenteista] omaan blogiini, koska se on loistava näyte siitä, miten poleeminen tyyli, ideahistoriallinen tietämys ja partaveitsenterävä looginen äly yhdistyessään aikaansaavat sellaista jälkeä, että siinä ovat ymmällään niin kritiikin kohteet kuin 'oman puolueen' tai viiteryhmän edustajatkin.

Minua nimittäin jotenkin huvitti ja hieman ehkä säälittikin [sillä myös (ja itse asiassa paradigmaattisesti) kristillinen teologia on ideologinen taistelukenttä, joka ilmentää kulttuuris-, poliittis-, antropologisia perustoja sekä 'suhdanteita'], kun huomasin, että eräs USA:han muuttanut englantilainen teologian [assistant-]professori luokitteli [positiivisesta yleisnäkemyksestään huolimatta] Hart'in kirjan Ateismin harhat blogissaan nimikkeellä Not Recommended [ks. linkki]. Joku kalvinisti ilmeisesti oli miehiään tämä mm. Plantingan erääksi kiinnostuksen kohteekseen nimennyt skolaari, joka ehdottomasti vaati Hartia historiallisen evidenssin lisäksi myös esittämään, että kristinusko on hyvä aate, koska se on tosi.

Surely it’s not enough to say that Christianity has been good for the world; we also want to say that Christianity has been good for the world because it’s true. Yet one looks in vain for any clear indication that Hart believes the claims of Christianity to be factual claims. If he does, he nowhere shares the reasons for his beliefs. And in the final sentences of the book, Hart speaks of Christians in the third person—an odd grammatical choice for one who dons the mantle of a Christian apologist.

[Minun (skeptikon) mielestäni totuudella argumentointi on jotakuinkin kehämäistä ja mahdotonta, koska esim. Plantingankin warrant-ratkaisu päätyy pelastamaan totaalin kaaoksen ns. kumoamattomalla kumoajalla eli Jumalalla (luonnontiede sen sijaan ajautuu väistämättä arvo-nihilismiin ja sitä kautta oman perustansa hajoamiseen), jota ei voi todistaa kuin uskon kautta (mutta Jumala-todistukset voivat vain osoittaa ongelman, eivät ratkaista sitä). - Plantingan päättely ei siis tuo mitään olennaisesti uutta vanhoihin ratkaisuyrityksiin - onpahan vain hyvä päivitys. Sitäpaitsi se implikoi teologisen fundamentalismin, johon Hart ei ymmärtääkseni poleemisesta 'take-no-prisoners'- kritiikistään huolimatta ajaudu. - Hart ei siis ajattele, että pelkkä looginen todistus sinällään legitimoisi/takaisi uskon eetoksen luotettavuuden tai jopa pätevyyden ilman historiallista, esteettistä ja eettistä kontekstia sekä kokemusta]  

Assistant-professorin viimeinen virke antaa jo vihjauksen siitä, mitä tuleman pitää. Mainitun 'puutteeellisuuden' ohella hän löysi teoksesta teologista huomautettavaa - esimerkiksi mainintoja vain inkarnaatiosta muttei lainkaan sovituksesta ja uskosta - liikaa puhetta kirkkoisistä, outoja käsityksiä gnostilaisuudesta jne. - No - tämähän jo riittääkin - ei reformoitu evankelinen teologi voi ymmärtää kristinuskoa ilman sovitusta, uskoa ja episteemistä todistusta [joka on pelagiolaisuuden filosofinen muoto]; - siten kaikki theosikseen päin kallellaan olevat yläkristologi-ortodoksit hyllytetään armotta. Not Recommended.

Mainittakoon, että Hart ei hyväksy teologisesti esim. tiettyjä kalvinistisen theodikean 'todistuksia', joiden mukaan Jumala ei olisi välttämättä vastuussa kaikesta pahasta, mitä maailmassa tapahtuu. Samaan todistustyyppiin kuuluu myös  Hartin 'antipodin' Richard Swinburnen [ortodoksi vuodesta 1996; bad enough, myös Hart on ortodoksi] probabilistinen saivartelu siitä, ettei Jumalalla ollut moraalista pakkoa/velvoitetta puuttua holocaustiin.

Hartin lähtökohta pahan ongelmaan on hyvin toisenlainen kuin edellä mainittu episteemis-looginen argumentointi, jota itsekin pidän karkeana väärinkäsityksenä teologisen itseymmärryksen yhteydessä. Hartin mukaan Jumala ei intentoi eikä myöskään salli pahaa, joka on monesti joko ihmisen omaa aikaansaannosta tai maailmassa vaikuttavien 'voimien' ennalta määräämättömyyttä, jota Jumalan kaikkivaltius ja hyvyys ei täten ikäänkuin juridisesti salli, joten [ja ylipäätään] Jumalaan on jotakuinkin mieletöntä soveltaa tiettyä ihmisjärjen konstruoimaa vastuuvelvollisuutta [tähän asiaan palaan vielä].
*
Hart on artikkelissaan [johon on tullut 1167 kommenttia - sama määrä kuin Nietzschen Tahto valtaan-kokoelmassa on aforismeja (!?)]  kieltämättä aika ajoin varsin ilkeällä päällä, mutta hän tietää, mitä tahtoo ja sanoo. Esim. Richard Dawkins'in ontologinen ymmärrys kyseenalaistetaan mielestäni asiallisella argumentaatiolla [sanoipa Anthony Kenny mitä tahansa], joka summautuu seuraavasti:

Numerous attempts have been made, by the way, to apprise Dawkins of what the traditional definition of divine simplicity implies, and of how it logically follows from the very idea of transcendence, and to explain to him what it means to speak of God as the transcendent fullness of actuality, and how this differs in kind from talk of quantitative degrees of composite complexity. But all the evidence suggests that Dawkins has never understood the point being made [...].

Kannattaa lukea, miten Hart tähän  lopputulemaan päätyy [Dawkins ja uusateistit ovat esim. väärinkäsittäneet regressio-argumentin loogiset implikaatiot ja seuraukset], koska samalla hän pystyy myös osoittamaan, että Dennettin ja Dawkinsin mutta myös Hartin itsensä arvostama modernin [käsite-]empristisen skeptisismin isä ateisti David Hume ei sortunut modernien evolutionisti-ateistien kategorisiin virhepäätelmiin ja kehämäisyyksiin [Hume ymmärsi että tietyt premissit/taustaoletukset on aina pakko edellyttää annetuiksi muttei suinkaan todistetuiksi, mikäli ylipäätään aikoo väittää yhtään mitään].
*
Christopher Hitchens saa käsittelyn, joka ei jättäne kylmäksi ketään, sillä lähimmäisenrakkauden uskontoa preferoiva joskin armottoman satiirinen teologimme jotakuinkin skalpeeraa hedonisti-Hitchensin elävältä. Hart nimittäin luettelee liudan karkeita hístoriatietouden virheitä Hitchensiltä ja konstruoi muutaman farssimaisen tai pikemminkin absurditeettia hipovan tyyppi-esimerkin hänen tavastaan argumentoida. 

Mikäli Hart kritisoisi Hitchensin ranskalaista sukulaissielua Michel Onfray'ta, tulos olisi varmasti hiukan samantyyppinen kuin Hitchensin kohdalla. Hart ei kuitenkaan pidä tätä filosofoivaa kokkia käsittelyn arvoisena lainkaan vaan pohtii nihilismiä yleensä.

[Onfray on mannermais-ranskalaisista nihilisteistä varmaankin poleemisin mutta samalla intellektuaalisesti yksi kehnoimmista. Gastronomia, filosofin koulutus ja (kohteensa vulgaaris-naivisti introjisoinut) Nietzschen imitointi tuottavat hänessä tulokseksi fundamentalistisen ateisti-anarkisti-hedonistin, jonka ajattelusta ei ole pitkä matka rasismiin (etenkin antisemitismiin)]. 
*
Filosofi A. C. Craylingiä Hart on arvostanut hiukan enemmän kuin edellä mainittuja ateisteja. Hän sanoo kuitenkin pettyneensä odottaessaan Craylingiltä historiallisesti relevantimpaa ja samalla syvällisempää näkemystä.

Hartin mukaan Crayling osuu kyllä kiinnostavaan teemaan, kun hän vertailee kristinuskon ja klassisen renessanssi-taiteen eroja toisiinsa. Nyt vain on niin, että Crayling'iltä, hänen löytäessään paljon enemmän 'life-enchanting'-vaikutusta Afroditen syntymä-teoksesta kuin 'morbidista' Kristuksen ristiltä ottamisesta, ilmeisesti puuttuu traagisuuden tajua suhteessa niin taiteeseen kuin elämään eikä hän ymmärrä, minkälaisessa historiallis-sosiaalisessa tilanteessa kristillisyyden alkuperäinen sanoma syntyi; toisin sanoen, mitä Kristuksen kuolema ja ylösnousemus  todella merkitsi kristityille pakanamaailman keskellä - sekä kirjaimellisen arkipäiväisesti että teologisena narratiivina. 

Hart päättää artikkelinsa vaikuttavaan ja vakuuttavaan vastaukseen/vastineeseen Craylingille:

Ignoring that leaden and almost perfectly ductile phrase “life-enhancing,” I, too—red of blood and rude of health—would have to say I generally prefer the sight of nubile beauty to that of a murdered man’s shattered corpse. The question of whether Grayling might be accused of a certain deficiency of tragic sense can be deferred here. But perhaps he would have done well, in choosing this comparison, to have reflected on the sheer strangeness, and the significance, of the historical and cultural changes that made it possible in the first place for the death of a common man at the hands of a duly appointed legal authority to become the captivating center of an entire civilization’s moral and aesthetic contemplations—and for the deaths of all common men and women perhaps to be invested thereby with a gravity that the ancient order would never have accorded them.

Here, displayed with an altogether elegant incomprehensibility in Grayling’s casual juxtaposition of the sea-born goddess and the crucified God (who is a crucified man), one catches a glimpse of the enigma of the Christian event, which Nietzsche understood and Grayling does not: the lightning bolt that broke from the cloudless sky of pagan antiquity, the long revolution that overturned the hierarchies of heaven and earth alike. One does not have to believe any of it, of course—the Christian story, its moral claims, its metaphysical systems, and so forth. But anyone who chooses to lament that event should also be willing, first, to see this image of the God-man, broken at the foot of the cross, for what it is, in the full mystery of its historical contingency, spiritual pathos, and moral novelty: that tender agony of the soul that finds the glory of God in the most abject and defeated of human forms. Only if one has succeeded in doing this can it be of any significance if one still, then, elects to turn away.

2
Believe it or not

I think I am very close to concluding that this whole “New Atheism” movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County. This is not because I necessarily think the current “marketplace of ideas” particularly good at sorting out wise arguments from foolish. But the latest trend in à la mode godlessness, it seems to me, has by now proved itself to be so intellectually and morally trivial that it has to be classified as just a form of light entertainment, and popular culture always tires of its diversions sooner or later and moves on to other, equally ephemeral toys.

Take, for instance, the recently published 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists. Simple probability, surely, would seem to dictate that a collection of essays by fifty fairly intelligent and zealous atheists would contain at least one logically compelling, deeply informed, morally profound, or conceptually arresting argument for not believing in God. Certainly that was my hope in picking it up. Instead, I came away from the whole drab assemblage of preachments and preenings feeling rather as if I had just left a large banquet at which I had been made to dine entirely on crushed ice and water vapor.

To be fair, the shallowness is not evenly distributed. Some of the writers exhibit a measure of wholesome tentativeness in making their cases, and as a rule the quality of the essays is inversely proportionate to the air of authority their authors affect. For this reason, the philosophers—who are no better than their fellow contributors at reasoning, but who have better training in giving even specious arguments some appearance of systematic form—tend to come off as the most insufferable contributors. Nicholas Everitt and Stephen Law recycle the old (and incorrigibly impressionistic) argument that claims of God’s omnipotence seem incompatible with claims of his goodness. Michael Tooley does not like the picture of Jesus that emerges from the gospels, at least as he reads them. Christine Overall notes that her prayers as a child were never answered; ergo, there is no God. A.C. Grayling flings a few of his favorite papier-mâché caricatures around. Laura Purdy mistakes hysterical fear of the religious right for a rational argument. Graham Oppy simply provides a précis of his personal creed, which I assume is supposed to be compelling because its paragraphs are numbered. J.J.C. Smart finds miracles scientifically implausible (gosh, who could have seen that coming?). And so on. Adèle Mercier comes closest to making an interesting argument—that believers do not really believe what they think they believe—but it soon collapses under the weight of its own baseless presuppositions.

The scientists fare almost as poorly. Among these, Victor Stenger is the most recklessly self-confident, but his inability to differentiate the physical distinction between something and nothing (in the sense of “not anything as such”) from the logical distinction between existence and nonexistence renders his argument empty. The contributors drawn from other fields offer nothing better. The Amazing Randi, being a magician, knows that there is quite a lot of credulity out there. The historian of science Michael Shermer notes that there are many, many different and even contradictory systems of belief. The journalist Emma Tom had a psychotic scripture teacher when she was a girl. Et, as they say, cetera. The whole project probably reaches its reductio ad absurdum when the science-fiction writer Sean Williams explains that he learned to reject supernaturalism in large part from having grown up watching Doctor Who.

So it goes. In the end the book as a whole adds up to absolutely nothing—as, frankly, do all the books in this new genre—and I have to say I find this all somewhat depressing. For one thing, it seems obvious to me that the peculiar vapidity of New Atheist literature is simply a reflection of the more general vapidity of all public religious discourse these days, believing and unbelieving alike. In part, of course, this is because the modern media encourage only fragmentary, sloganeering, and emotive debates, but it is also because centuries of the incremental secularization of society have left us with a shared grammar that is perhaps no longer adequate to the kinds of claims that either reflective faith or reflective faithlessness makes.

The principal source of my melancholy, however, is my firm conviction that today’s most obstreperous infidels lack the courage, moral intelligence, and thoughtfulness of their forefathers in faithlessness. What I find chiefly offensive about them is not that they are skeptics or atheists; rather, it is that they are not skeptics at all and have purchased their atheism cheaply, with the sort of boorish arrogance that might make a man believe himself a great strategist because his tanks overwhelmed a town of unarmed peasants, or a great lover because he can afford the price of admission to a brothel. So long as one can choose one’s conquests in advance, taking always the paths of least resistance, one can always imagine oneself a Napoleon or a Casanova (and even better: the one without a Waterloo, the other without the clap).

But how long can any soul delight in victories of that sort? And how long should we waste our time with the sheer banality of the New Atheists—with, that is, their childishly Manichean view of history, their lack of any tragic sense, their indifference to the cultural contingency of moral “truths,” their wanton incuriosity, their vague babblings about “religion” in the abstract, and their absurd optimism regarding the future they long for?

I am not—honestly, I am not—simply being dismissive here. The utter inconsequentiality of contemporary atheism is a social and spiritual catastrophe. Something splendid and irreplaceable has taken leave of our culture—some great moral and intellectual capacity that once inspired the more heroic expressions of belief and unbelief alike. Skepticism and atheism are, at least in their highest manifestations, noble, precious, and even necessary traditions, and even the most fervent of believers should acknowledge that both are often inspired by a profound moral alarm at evil and suffering, at the corruption of religious institutions, at psychological terrorism, at injustices either prompted or abetted by religious doctrines, at arid dogmatisms and inane fideisms, and at worldly power wielded in the name of otherworldly goods. In the best kinds of unbelief, there is something of the moral grandeur of the prophets—a deep and admirable abhorrence of those vicious idolatries that enslave minds and justify our worst cruelties.

But a true skeptic is also someone who understands that an attitude of critical suspicion is quite different from the glib abandonment of one vision of absolute truth for another—say, fundamentalist Christianity for fundamentalist materialism or something vaguely and inaccurately called “humanism.” Hume, for instance, never traded one dogmatism for another, or one facile certitude for another. He understood how radical were the implications of the skepticism he recommended, and how they struck at the foundations not only of unthinking faith, but of proud rationality as well.

A truly profound atheist is someone who has taken the trouble to understand, in its most sophisticated forms, the belief he or she rejects, and to understand the consequences of that rejection. Among the New Atheists, there is no one of whom this can be said, and the movement as a whole has yet to produce a single book or essay that is anything more than an insipidly doctrinaire and appallingly ignorant diatribe.If that seems a harsh judgment, I can only say that I have arrived at it honestly. In the course of writing a book published just this last year, I dutifully acquainted myself not only with all the recent New Atheist bestsellers, but also with a whole constellation of other texts in the same line, and I did so, I believe, without prejudice. No matter how patiently I read, though, and no matter how Herculean the efforts I made at sympathy, I simply could not find many intellectually serious arguments in their pages, and I came finally to believe that their authors were not much concerned to make any.

What I did take away from the experience was a fairly good sense of the real scope and ambition of the New Atheist project. I came to realize that the whole enterprise, when purged of its hugely preponderant alloy of sanctimonious bombast, is reducible to only a handful of arguments, most of which consist in simple category mistakes or the kind of historical oversimplifications that are either demonstrably false or irrelevantly true. And arguments of that sort are easily dismissed, if one is hardy enough to go on pointing out the obvious with sufficient indefatigability.

The only points at which the New Atheists seem to invite any serious intellectual engagement are those at which they try to demonstrate that all the traditional metaphysical arguments for the reality of God fail. At least, this should be their most powerful line of critique, and no doubt would be if any of them could demonstrate a respectable understanding of those traditional metaphysical arguments, as well as an ability to refute them. Curiously enough, however, not even the trained philosophers among them seem able to do this. And this is, as far as I can tell, as much a result of indolence as of philosophical ineptitude. The insouciance with which, for instance, Daniel Dennett tends to approach such matters is so torpid as to verge on the reptilian. He scarcely bothers even to get the traditional “theistic” arguments right, and the few ripostes he ventures are often the ones most easily discredited.

As a rule, the New Atheists’ concept of God is simply that of some very immense and powerful being among other beings, who serves as the first cause of all other things only in the sense that he is prior to and larger than all other causes. That is, the New Atheists are concerned with the sort of God believed in by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Deists. Dawkins, for instance, even cites with approval the old village atheist’s cavil that omniscience and omnipotence are incompatible because a God who infallibly foresaw the future would be impotent to change it—as though Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and so forth understood God simply as some temporal being of interminable duration who knows things as we do, as external objects of cognition, mediated to him under the conditions of space and time.

Thus, the New Atheists’ favorite argument turns out to be just a version of the old argument from infinite regress: If you try to explain the existence of the universe by asserting God created it, you have solved nothing because then you are obliged to say where God came from, and so on ad infinitum, one turtle after another, all the way down. This is a line of attack with a long pedigree, admittedly. John Stuart Mill learned it at his father’s knee. Bertrand Russell thought it more than sufficient to put paid to the whole God issue once and for all. Dennett thinks it as unanswerable today as when Hume first advanced it—although, as a professed admirer of Hume, he might have noticed that Hume quite explicitly treats it as a formidable objection only to the God of Deism, not to the God of “traditional metaphysics.” In truth, though, there could hardly be a weaker argument. To use a feeble analogy, it is rather like asserting that it is inadequate to say that light is the cause of illumination because one is then obliged to say what it is that illuminates the light, and so on ad infinitum.

The most venerable metaphysical claims about God do not simply shift priority from one kind of thing (say, a teacup or the universe) to another thing that just happens to be much bigger and come much earlier (some discrete, very large gentleman who preexists teacups and universes alike). These claims start, rather, from the fairly elementary observation that nothing contingent, composite, finite, temporal, complex, and mutable can account for its own existence, and that even an infinite series of such things can never be the source or ground of its own being, but must depend on some source of actuality beyond itself. Thus, abstracting from the universal conditions of contingency, one very well may (and perhaps must) conclude that all things are sustained in being by an absolute plenitude of actuality, whose very essence is being as such: not a “supreme being,” not another thing within or alongside the universe, but the infinite act of being itself, the one eternal and transcendent source of all existence and knowledge, in which all finite being participates.

It is immaterial whether one is wholly convinced by such reasoning. Even its most ardent proponents would have to acknowledge that it is an almost entirely negative deduction, obedient only to something like Sherlock Holmes’ maxim that “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” It certainly says nearly nothing about who or what God is.

But such reasoning is also certainly not subject to the objection from infinite regress. It is not logically requisite for anyone, on observing that contingent reality must depend on absolute reality, to say then what the absolute depends on or, on asserting the participation of finite beings in infinite being, further to explain what it is that makes being to be. Other arguments are called for, as Hume knew. And only a complete failure to grasp the most basic philosophical terms of the conversation could prompt this strange inversion of logic, by which the argument from infinite regress—traditionally and correctly regarded as the most powerful objection to pure materialism—is now treated as an irrefutable argument against belief in God.

But something worse than mere misunderstanding lies at the base of Dawkins’ own special version of the argument from infinite regress—a version in which he takes a pride of almost maternal fierceness. Any “being,” he asserts, capable of exercising total control over the universe would have to be an extremely complex being, and because we know that complex beings must evolve from simpler beings and that the probability of a being as complex as that evolving is vanishingly minute, it is almost certain that no God exists. Q.E.D. But, of course, this scarcely rises to the level of nonsense. We can all happily concede that no complex, ubiquitous, omniscient, and omnipotent superbeing, inhabiting the physical cosmos and subject to the rules of evolution, exists. But who has ever suggested the contrary?

Numerous attempts have been made, by the way, to apprise Dawkins of what the traditional definition of divine simplicity implies, and of how it logically follows from the very idea of transcendence, and to explain to him what it means to speak of God as the transcendent fullness of actuality, and how this differs in kind from talk of quantitative degrees of composite complexity. But all the evidence suggests that Dawkins has never understood the point being made, and it is his unfortunate habit contemptuously to dismiss as meaningless concepts whose meanings elude him. Frankly, going solely on the record of his published work, it would be rash to assume that Dawkins has ever learned how to reason his way to the end of a simple syllogism.

To appreciate the true spirit of the New Atheism, however, and to take proper measure of its intellectual depth, one really has to turn to Christopher Hitchens. Admittedly, he is the most egregiously slapdash of the New Atheists, as well as (not coincidentally) the most entertaining, but I take this as proof that he is also the least self-deluding. His God Is Not Great shows no sign whatsoever that he ever intended anything other than a rollicking burlesque, without so much as a pretense of logical order or scholarly rigor. His sporadic forays into philosophical argument suggest not only that he has sailed into unfamiliar waters, but also that he is simply not very interested in any of it. His occasional observations on Hume and Kant make it obvious that he has not really read either very closely. He apparently believes that Nietzsche, in announcing the death of God, literally meant to suggest that the supreme being named God had somehow met his demise. The title of one of the chapters in God Is Not Great is “The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False,” but nowhere in that chapter does Hitchens actually say what those claims or their flaws are.

On matters of simple historical and textual fact, moreover, Hitchens’ book is so extraordinarily crowded with errors that one soon gives up counting them. Just to skim a few off the surface: He speaks of the ethos of Dietrich Bonhoeffer as “an admirable but nebulous humanism,” which is roughly on a par with saying that Gandhi was an apostle of the ruthless conquest and spoliation of weaker peoples. He conflates the histories of the first and fourth crusades. He repeats as fact the long discredited myth that Christians destroyed the works of Aristotle and Lucretius, or systematically burned the books of pagan antiquity, which is the very opposite of what did happen. He speaks of the traditional hostility of “religion” (whatever that may be) to medicine, despite the monastic origins of the modern hospital and the involvement of Christian missions in medical research and medical care from the fourth century to the present. He tells us that countless lives were lost in the early centuries of the Church over disputes regarding which gospels were legitimate (the actual number of lives lost is zero). He asserts that Myles Coverdale and John Wycliffe were burned alive at the stake, although both men died of natural causes. He knows that the last twelve verses of Mark 16 are a late addition to the text, but he imagines this means that the entire account of the Resurrection is as well. He informs us that it is well known that Augustine was fond of the myth of the Wandering Jew, though Augustine died eight centuries before the legend was invented. And so on and so on (and so on).

In the end, though, all of this might be tolerated if Hitchens’ book exhibited some rough semblance of a rational argument. After all, there really is a great deal to despise in the history of religion, even if Hitchens gets almost all the particular details extravagantly wrong. To be perfectly honest, however, I cannot tell what Hitchens’ central argument is. It is not even clear what he understands religion to be. For instance, he denounces female circumcision, commendably enough, but what—pray tell—has that got to do with religion? Clitoridectomy is a widespread cultural tradition of sub-Saharan Africa, but it belongs to no particular creed. Even more oddly, he takes indignant note of the plight of young Indian brides brutalized and occasionally murdered on account of insufficient dowries. We all, no doubt, share his horror, but what the hell is his point?

As best I can tell, Hitchens’ case against faith consists mostly in a series of anecdotal enthymemes—that is to say, syllogisms of which one premise has been suppressed. Unfortunately, in each case it turns out to be the major premise that is missing, so it is hard to guess what links the minor premise to the conclusion. One need only attempt to write out some of his arguments in traditional syllogistic style to see the difficulty:

Major Premise: [omitted]

Minor Premise: Evelyn Waugh was always something of a bastard, and his Catholic chauvinism often made him even worse.

Conclusion: “Religion” is evil.

Or:

Major Premise: [omitted]

Minor Premise: There are many bad men who are Buddhists.

Conclusion: All religious claims are false.

Or:

Major Premise: [omitted]

Minor Premise: Timothy Dwight opposed smallpox vaccinations.

Conclusion: There is no God.

One could, I imagine, counter with a series of contrary enthymemes. Perhaps:

Major Premise: [omitted]

Minor Premise: Early Christians built hospitals.

Conclusion: “Religion” is a good thing.

Or:

Major Premise: [omitted]

Minor Premise: Medieval scriptoria saved much of the literature of classical antiquity from total eclipse.

Conclusion: All religious claims are true.

Or:

Major Premise: [omitted]

Minor Premise: George Bernard Shaw opposed smallpox vaccinations.

Conclusion: There is a God.

But this appears to get us nowhere. And, in the end, I doubt it matters.

The only really effective antidote to the dreariness of reading the New Atheists, it seems to me, is rereading Nietzsche. How much more immediate and troubling the force of his protest against Christianity seems when compared to theirs, even more than a century after his death. Perhaps his intellectual courage—his willingness to confront the implications of his renunciation of the Christian story of truth and the transcendent good without evasions or retreats—is rather a lot to ask of any other thinker, but it does rather make the atheist chic of today look fairly craven by comparison.

Above all, Nietzsche understood how immense the consequences of the rise of Christianity had been, and how immense the consequences of its decline would be as well, and had the intelligence to know he could not fall back on polite moral certitudes to which he no longer had any right. Just as the Christian revolution created a new sensibility by inverting many of the highest values of the pagan past, so the decline of Christianity, Nietzsche knew, portends another, perhaps equally catastrophic shift in moral and cultural consciousness. His famous fable in The Gay Science of the madman who announces God’s death is anything but a hymn of atheist triumphalism. In fact, the madman despairs of the mere atheists—those who merely do not believe—to whom he addresses his terrible proclamation. In their moral contentment, their ease of conscience, he sees an essential oafishness; they do not dread the death of God because they do not grasp that humanity’s heroic and insane act of repudiation has sponged away the horizon, torn down the heavens, left us with only the uncertain resources of our will with which to combat the infinity of meaninglessness that the universe now threatens to become.

Because he understood the nature of what had happened when Christianity entered history with the annunciation of the death of God on the cross, and the elevation of a Jewish peasant above all gods, Nietzsche understood also that the passing of Christian faith permits no return to pagan naivete, and he knew that this monstrous inversion of values created within us a conscience that the older order could never have incubated. He understood also that the death of God beyond us is the death of the human as such within us. If we are, after all, nothing but the fortuitous effects of physical causes, then the will is bound to no rational measure but itself, and who can imagine what sort of world will spring up from so unprecedented and so vertiginously uncertain a vision of reality?

For Nietzsche, therefore, the future that lies before us must be decided, and decided between only two possible paths: a final nihilism, which aspires to nothing beyond the momentary consolations of material contentment, or some great feat of creative will, inspired by a new and truly worldly mythos powerful enough to replace the old and discredited mythos of the Christian revolution (for him, of course, this meant the myth of the Übermensch).

Perhaps; perhaps not. Where Nietzsche was almost certainly correct, however, was in recognizing that mere formal atheism was not yet the same thing as true unbelief. As he writes in The Gay Science, “Once the Buddha was dead, people displayed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave, an immense and dreadful shadow. God is dead: —but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millennia yet where people will display his shadow. And we—we have yet to overcome his shadow!” It may appear that Nietzsche is here referring to “persons of faith”—those poor souls who continue to make their placid, bovine trek to church every week to worship a God who passed away long ago—but that is not his meaning.

He is referring principally to those who think they have eluded God simply by ceasing to believe in his existence. For Nietzsche, “scientism”—the belief that the modern scientific method is the only avenue of truth, one capable of providing moral truth or moral meaning—is the worst dogmatism yet, and the most pathetic of all metaphysical nostalgias. And it is, in his view, precisely men like the New Atheists, clinging as they do to those tenuous vestiges of Christian morality that they have absurdly denominated “humanism,” who shelter themselves in caves and venerate shadows. As they do not understand the past, or the nature of the spiritual revolution that has come and now gone for Western humanity, so they cannot begin to understand the peril of the future.

If I were to choose from among the New Atheists a single figure who to my mind epitomizes the spiritual chasm that separates Nietzsche’s unbelief from theirs, I think it would be the philosopher and essayist A.C. Grayling. For a short time I entertained the misguided hope that he might produce an atheist manifesto somewhat richer than the others currently on offer. Unfortunately, all his efforts in that direction suffer from the same defects as those of his fellows: the historical errors, the sententious moralism, the glib sophistry. Their great virtue, however, is that they are mercifully short. One essay of his in particular, called “Religion and Reason,” can be read in a matter of minutes and provides an almost perfect distillation of the whole New Atheist project.

The essay is even, at least momentarily, interesting. Couched at one juncture among its various arguments (all of which are pretty poor), there is something resembling a cogent point. Among the defenses of Christianity an apologist might adduce, says Grayling, would be a purely aesthetic cultural argument: But for Christianity, there would be no Renaissance art—no Annunciations or Madonnas—and would we not all be much the poorer if that were so? But, in fact, no, counters Grayling; we might rather profit from a far greater number of canvasses devoted to the lovely mythical themes of classical antiquity, and only a macabre sensibility could fail to see that “an Aphrodite emerging from the Paphian foam is an infinitely more life-enhancing image than a Deposition from the Cross.” Here Grayling almost achieves a Nietzschean moment of moral clarity.

Ignoring that leaden and almost perfectly ductile phrase “life-enhancing,” I, too—red of blood and rude of health—would have to say I generally prefer the sight of nubile beauty to that of a murdered man’s shattered corpse. The question of whether Grayling might be accused of a certain deficiency of tragic sense can be deferred here. But perhaps he would have done well, in choosing this comparison, to have reflected on the sheer strangeness, and the significance, of the historical and cultural changes that made it possible in the first place for the death of a common man at the hands of a duly appointed legal authority to become the captivating center of an entire civilization’s moral and aesthetic contemplations—and for the deaths of all common men and women perhaps to be invested thereby with a gravity that the ancient order would never have accorded them.

Here, displayed with an altogether elegant incomprehensibility in Grayling’s casual juxtaposition of the sea-born goddess and the crucified God (who is a crucified man), one catches a glimpse of the enigma of the Christian event, which Nietzsche understood and Grayling does not: the lightning bolt that broke from the cloudless sky of pagan antiquity, the long revolution that overturned the hierarchies of heaven and earth alike. One does not have to believe any of it, of course—the Christian story, its moral claims, its metaphysical systems, and so forth. But anyone who chooses to lament that event should also be willing, first, to see this image of the God-man, broken at the foot of the cross, for what it is, in the full mystery of its historical contingency, spiritual pathos, and moral novelty: that tender agony of the soul that finds the glory of God in the most abject and defeated of human forms. Only if one has succeeded in doing this can it be of any significance if one still, then, elects to turn away.
*
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/04/believe-it-or-not [Sivu takkuilee eli on hidas ilmeisesti jo senkin vuoksi, artikkelia on kommentoitu 1167 kertaa]
*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._C._Grayling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bentley_Hart  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Onfray
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/julian_would_not_appreciate_th.php
http://www.discerningreader.com/book-reviews/atheist-delusions
http://www.michaelramseyprize.org.uk/titles.php
http://www.123people.com/s/david+bentley+hart