Nietzsche on being "lost in space"

[Occam's Banana]

Bearded eco-Jesus with boobs? Boy, did Nietzsche call it ...

https://twitter.com/oldbooksguy/status/1725531346142146663
{Jash Dholani @oldbooksguy | 17 November 2023}

[emphasis in original - OB]

One of Nietzsche's insane insights: Ideas are like stars in space. Many people get stuck in the orbit of an ideology forever, circling it till they die. This only sounds bad till you realize the alternative is much worse—falling through empty space forever.

God's death was like the death of the greatest star in the mental universe, and we've been falling through empty space ever since.

People need some thing or some one or some idea to revolve around.

Fanaticism is an external manifestation of deep intellectual desperation. People latch onto gender madness, geopolitical folly, elections and movie fan clubs to have some orientation in life. To have no mantra to repeat, no stone to bow down to, no [star] to revolve around, produces a terrifying "lost-ness".

The human animal is over-developed, and cannot survive until he projects onto the universe a religious significance. If the Old Gods are dead then New Ones will be born, if we are to live at all.

 

[Occam's Banana]

Gramsci was writing in the interwar years. Christianity was an already weakened foe: The Enlightenment divorced God from both the individual and reason. Nietzsche announced the death of God in the latter part of the nineteenth century. World War One was the crushing blow, leaving Christian Europe reeling. Gramsci spotted a wounded enemy, and he knew that this is where the fatal blow to the West must be struck.

[...]

Friedrich Nietzsche would write, in Twilight of the Idols: “If you give up Christian faith, you pull the right to Christian morality out from under your feet.”

What is Christian morality, if not, at minimum, the non-aggression principle? Antonio Gramsci understood this more than eighty years ago. It is his political strategy that is at the root of what we see happening today in universities, government, and society more broadly speaking.

I am not a Christian, nor am I "religious" in the colloquial sense of offering obeisance to a deified "creator" entity.

But "creation" exists (whether any creator-agent does or not), as does sentient consciousness - and the latter requires to comprehend the former in terms of some narrative framework in which (metaphorical) "meaningfulness" is of far greater significance and importance than (empirical) "literalness". Empirical facts will always be trumped by non-empirical (and often metaphorical) truths [1], which is why reason alone, applied solely to mere empirical observations, is not (and never will be) sufficient to provide such a narrative [2].

The so-called "Enlightenment" may have had its virtues, but its exaltation of "reason alone, applied solely to facts" has been catastrophic.

Nietzsche's proclamation that "God is dead" was a warning, not a celebration.

God's death was like the death of the greatest star in the mental universe, and we've been falling through empty space ever since.

[1] This is because those "truths" (as distinct from "facts") include the presuppositions by and through which we (1) judge something to be empirically "factual" in the first place, and (2) interpret and weigh the relevance of any such "fact" (relative to other "facts" and "truths").

[2] Indeed, it is not even sufficient to provide a coherent narrative for the physical sciences themselves (which are the most empirically empirical of all empiricisms), let alone for anything else. For just one example, consider that science depends completely, utterly, and absolutely upon the prior acceptance and application of the "truth" that (physical) existence is consistent and non-contradictory. This is not a proposition that can be defended empirically, because any empirical observations, tests, or experiments intended to confirm (or even disconfirm) the proposition would necessarily have to presuppose its truth in order for the results of those observations, tests, or experiments to be regarded as acceptable in the first place.

 

[cjm]

it's Friday evening. are there just a few memes I can go through to get the gist of this? I promise to read and digest fully next week.

 

[Occam's Banana]

[...] we've been falling through empty space ever since.

https://twitter.com/tsarnick/status/1752154682619998421
[source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roHeUk7ApUo]

Someone should inform him that the whole point of the "blank slate" concept/metaphor is to denote the total absence of any "belief and value system".

 

[Occam's Banana]

Nietzsche was right.

https://twitter.com/oldbooksguy/status/1746244257701339397

//

 

[Occam's Banana]

[...] we've been falling through empty space ever since.

https://twitter.com/oldbooksguy/status/1759587464463757459
to: https://twitter.com/oldbooksguy/status/1759590663396512135
[archive @ Thread Reader: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1759587464463757459.html]
{Jash Dholani @oldbooksguy | 19 February 2024}

[images omitted - OB]

God is Dead: Modern philosophy's boldest (and the most misunderstood) statement

Atheists think it's a triumphant announcement, but for Nietzsche it was a great TRAGEDY...

A breakdown of what Nietzsche actually meant:

1/ In The Gay Science (1882), Nietzsche announced God's death for the first time. For Nietzsche, God was not a useless burden, a liability, or an irrational filter that distorted our view of reality. The metaphors Nietzsche uses for God proves this. Let's see:

2/ God as Sun. The sun holds the planets in their orbit; similarly God oriented us. Unchained from our sun, "are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions?" Our center of gravity is gone - we're hurtling through "an infinite nothing"

3/ God as horizon. Nietzsche asks: "Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?" The horizon keeps sailors on track when at sea. The horizon provides direction and holds the promise of ports to dock at. With the horizon wiped off, where do we look to in stormy seas?

4/ God as light. The madman who announces God's death in The Gay Science is carrying a lit lantern in broad daylight. He's mocked by the normies around him but they miss the point: Without God, we must now carry our own fragile flames. Illumination is no longer a given.

5/ Who killed God? We did. This task was " too great for us." Nietzsche asks: "What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?"

6/ Our cosmic father is dead, and we are now orphans in a hostile universe. Nietzsche wonders if we must now "become gods" simply to justify what we did...

7/ There are profound implications to God's death; these will unfold over centuries. Faith in God's existence underpinned a lot of what we take for granted - doesn't the idea of human rights and universal equality come from the notion of each created in God's image?

8/ Faith in God was the invisible foundation for much of civilization; it's all now on shaky ground. We will need new justifications, new fixed horizons, new sources of illumination, and new reliable centers of gravity. WHO is creative enough to build all of this from scratch?

9/ Bottom line. Nietzsche: "God is dead. God remains dead." Now who/what will do God's job? The tasks done by even the concept of God are too numerous for a simple conceptual replacement. God's death has left a void; to even begin to fill it requires great daring and creativity...

10/ Everyone should read the full passage where Nietzsche first announced the death of God, for it reveals the central spiritual crisis of modern man.

Here it is:

​

 

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/tsarnick/status/1752154682619998421
[source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roHeUk7ApUo]

Someone should inform him that the whole point of the "blank slate" concept/metaphor is to denote the total absence of any "belief and value system".

//

 

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/ComicDaveSmith/status/1767910594424770843
{Dave Smith @ComicDaveSmith | 13 March 2024}

When you don't have God, whatever your highest value is becomes your God.

If you are an atheist who doesn’t have kids, that God tends to be yourself or your conception of yourself. Your identity.

This is a particular problem for libertarians who are atheists, childless or unmarried.

Libertarianism often becomes their God, and their identity as a libertarian becomes their religion, when it was only ever supposed to be your legal theory. And because they are trying to make it something much bigger than what it was supposed to be, they end up getting the theory wrong.

This is why goofy woke libertarians will say things like “being trans doesn’t violate the nap, so why do you care” when libertarianism has nothing to say about caring. All libertarianism tells us is that I can’t beat a trans person over the head with a club or support the government doing it. It doesn’t tell me that I have to pretend a dude in a dress is a woman.

This is also why some libertarians recoil at hypotheticals, or real world situations where there aren’t perfect libertarian solutions currently available.

I guess my point is that you should be a libertarian and it’s fine if that’s a part of your identity, but there should be things you value way above it. God, family, friends, community, being a decent person, should all be more important to you than your legal theory.

 

[Occam's Banana]

THREAD: The Atheism Delusion

https://twitter.com/KonstantinKisin/status/1785409177000562859

YouTube version:

The Atheism Delusion - Konstantin Kisin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmCvw-TJyb0
{Triggernometry | 30 April 2024}

My youth was infused with example after example of stuffy religious Conservatives attempting to enforce their values on the rest of society ...


​