Return of the Gods: the Other's Intention

https://www.jamesreeves.co/return-of-the-gods/

Do you believe in god or any spiritual dimension to the universe?

“I guess the real question is: Does God believe in Himself? I prefer a God who isn’t really sure if He exists or not. In all the best religious experiences, nobody’s certain about what’s going on, including and especially God.”

“When God showed up in a whirlwind and upbraided Job about how he wasn’t there at the foundation of the Universe, God starts talking about those weird and heady creatio ex nihilo times all cool like were you there when Deep calls to Deep? and this sounds badass, but then God gets lost in rambling about Behemoth and Leviathan and stuff that nobody’s sure why He made or what exactly they even are—but God wanted to seem like He was in more control than He actually was.”

“God reveals His unconscious in this diatribe when He disavows His part in the evil that Job is suffering. Jung interpreted God’s “shadow self” as His repudiation of His relation to His son Satan—which is to deny that if you are the author of everything, then you are also the instigator of evil.”

“For me, God’s shadow is ambiguity, which is His inability to determine all there is of the Universe. In other words, God has an unconscious just like the rest of us. He can’t be omnibenevolent because of His part in the evils of the world. But this lack of at-oneness, this lack of control, allows for whatever cool but incomprehensible stuff might follow from this impotence.”

“My favorite Talmudic passage depicts rabbis arguing about the Oven of Akhani, which was a dispute about the purity of said oven for kosher cooking. God shows up to settle the controversy because it’s His law after all. But Rabbi Joshua tells God that He doesn’t have a say in the matter since the Torah is in their hands now.”

“The gift of ambiguity is better than clarity because it is always open to
further interpretation, and the joy of humanity is the community of interlocutors that indeterminacy gifts to us. Belief as a test of faith was a huge mistake. Religion took a wrong turn when it started to lift up psychosis as its preferred position. Psychosis is fine and has its place, but neurotic doubt is an undeniable salve for too much belief.”

“I’m whatever religion they were at Gobekli Tepe. Religious practice should be a celebration of irreducible ambiguity. I was so excited when they uncovered Gobekli Tepe in Southern Turkey and Klaus Schmidt was like, “What the hell was going on here?” and decided it was a prehistoric zoo. Here was a city almost twelve thousand years old, built not for sedentary and hierarchical people but for the sacred practices of hunter-gathers who came together uncoerced to celebrate holy mysteries with ambiguous trickster gods in liminal spaces designed for music, dancing, stories, feasting, and shit-tons of carved animals doing stuff, like a vulture presenting an orb to a man without a head but with a prominent phallus, and the sublime wonderment of a submerged room with benches along the walls and loads of giant stone penises in the middle for some reason.”

“Schmidt and countless others have speculated on what these people thought that they were doing there. I for one, perhaps naively, hope they didn’t precisely know what they were doing there. Hegel famously pondered the “mysteries of the Ancient Egyptian religions,” to which Žižek postulated that “the mysteries of the Ancient Egyptians were mysterious to the Ancient Egyptians too.””

“Amen.”

https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,

Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Humanism is beginning to human sense of religiosity, symbolic behaviors, game drawings, burial practices, ornamentation, vegetation. They often get gripped in with culture or art. You know, there might be ways of dressing them as a mark, some sort of religious category of person. Very difficult to separate out what's a religious impulse versus what's a purely artistic impulse versus what's a purely sociological or cultural impulse. Some kind of a way, symbolize things that are in the natural environment, atmosphere, things like the weather, stars at night, and the sun, and the water, oceans, rivers, mountains, the moons, forests and rivers, valleys, and renaming all these geographic, environmental, atmospheric features that are picked out as objects of some kind of veneration for wonderful. Not just because of their practical relation to survival and reproduction, but also because of a basic spiritual or religious impulse that is just a kind of art of the world full of intentions or purposes that are unknown and maybe even unknowable. So looking at these things and perhaps even wondering what are they all for. In the history of philosophy, this is kind of like considered the encounter with the other, the inscrutable other, the fathomless other. There is this void of information that has to be filled in with imagination. So we are the inheritors of those nerves, we are the inheritors of that generalized anxiety and that over-hyper reactivity that is now undoing the linings of our stomachs and keeping us swimming in stress hormones in a society where we might not need to be quite so etheric. Modern scientific humanity does not see nature as anything but blind forces. And so there has been a meaning crisis declared this callback to when there was supposedly a more uh enchanted world full of purposes, full of meaning, full of intentionality, uh, that is lost by the material reduction of modern science. Why is there this sense of loss, this sense of craving for a larger meaning and purpose in the world that used to be provided by such things as religion? Or it might be a kind of paranoia of seeing patterns where there aren't any. So the enchanted world versus the disenchanted world, and the disenchanted world is this scientific rational world that we supposedly live in now. Something else that was served by seeing the world as full of independent intentionality that had to be imagined because they couldn't be directly known. Some yearning, some desire. These animist gods are transformed into the gods of pantheon. So that the sun Helios is this, you know, guy in a chariot who makes the sun a little less inscrutable by personifying the sun as a guy in a chariot who wants to drive himself across the sky every day in order for there to be there. And then you get personifications and many cultures of all kinds of things like sickness, death, agriculture, war. And in general, these pantheons are associated with sedentary rather than nomadic peoples, peoples who are to some degree urbanized because they can stay in one place because of the greater and greater possibilities with agriculture. And so pantheons in general reflect a greater need also for hierarchy and organization, and there to be a stratified society, and the gods in their little boxes and in their little zones, and you know, they all reflect that stratification, but they also reflect a greater personification or a greater humanization, become more and more anthropomorphic, which you can see in the shift from the uh Titans to the Olympians in Mycenaean Greece. The Olympians are certainly more human-like and also more involved in human affairs in general, oftentimes in detrimental ways, but also as helpers, as uh Athena is obviously a great help to Odysseus. But there is still a lot of otherness about these more humanized gods. They are capricious, they are unpredictable, and in general they are not great for uncertainty reduction. So you need a specialized class who can figure out the unscrutable otherness of these gods. They can figure out how to correctly propitiate them so that you get the correct outcome. And they can explain to you why when things are going super shitty, it's because uh some god is against you and you need to sacrifice in the correct way to that god to uh fix things up. But thankfully that priest knows just how to do it. They are specially trained and have been specially chosen by that god to perform the correct ritual for uh the proper price. And so you can see just the continual stratification and specialization of society to get a specialized priestly class, often hereditary, but then you get this uh educated class that gradually rises up to challenge their authority. In particular in Athens, you get the development of philosophy beginning with the so-called pre-Socratics, and then Socrates himself, and of course, Plato writing down his doings, perhaps fictionalizing them a bit, and then his student Aristotle, who in many ways is the precursor to modern science. But famously, these philosophers, particularly Plato, rejected the mythology, the ritual practice, the authority of the priests as well as of the poets and their Arctic presentations of these pantheons in favor of rational thought. But first through polytheism to monotheism. Famously, the god of the philosophers is not really a personification of human intention. In Plato you get the concept of the one where the eternal forms reside as if in the mind of God, pristine and perfect, unlike this fallen world. Uh, whereas everything else is a contingent being. And then these developments in Athens get joined together with monotheistic developments in the ancient Near East. Sometimes we say Jerusalem in the metonymic sense of Jerusalem representing the idea of what had been a pantheistic god. So, for example, Yahweh having been a regional storm god to a particular group of Canaanites, through a very long process becoming the only god, the one god, which seemed to demote all the other gods either to complete non-existence or to the realm of demons. In the Hellenization of the ancient Near East, you get the joining of Jerusalem and Athens, and so you get the intermixing of Greek ideas about the one, mixing with Yahweh to become the one God. So that you get somebody like Baruk Spinoza equating God or the One with the material or the physical universe. There is no personal intention, there is no subjective intention from which being or from which whatever there is comes. There is only the blind intention of physical causality. Which was what Einstein meant when he said that his God was Baruch Spinoza's God. In other words, his God is the natural world. And then you get somebody like Ludwig Feierbach, who looks at the god of monotheism and sees it as a projection of human value. God is like the maximal or the ultimate human in some kind of a way, or ultimate personification of what human beings take to be valuable or ultimate or absolute. So that you get the personification of both natural forces and just like what's perceived to be outside of the human intention. The pantheons of polytheism are used to explain all kinds of personal intentions behind the world and its happenings. Which both reduces uncertainty but also increases it because oftentimes these personalities are quite capricious, quite fickle, hard to propitiate, and hard to control in general. So, in a sense, the otherness of the external or the outside of the self or the outside of the intention is reduced, which means that it's more coherent in a sense, or more readable in a sense, or more knowable in the sense, the specific sense that it seems more human. But it retains this completely irrational, inhuman, unpredictability, this resistance to systemization, this uh otherness that Jacques Khan calls the real. So there is plenty of room for imagination still because there's all of this unknowability plus all of this imagined intention uh behind uh the utterness uh of the exterior world. And then all of this polytheistic uh uncertainty, all of these many purposes of polytheism, many intentions uh of the many gods gets projected into the one intention of the ultimate uh exterior other, the ultimate big other, which is the god of monotheism. And then whatever appears to happen outside of that one intention is just because of the inscrutability of that one god and the mystery of his uh intentions. The many intentions is the rational dialogue, the rational thinking, the rational inquiry of philosophy, which eventually results in the total rejection of intention in the rational and empirical sciences. But nowadays you are seeing a sort of realization of the problem with reducing all intentions to physical causality, and any perception that there are any degrees of freedom like choice or a conscious decision or a conscious intention or any degrees contained within an imaginal projection are illusions, illusions that are physically necessary. But this has left many cold and longing for the return of purpose, the return of the gods.