Idealism/ Materialism

[Ederico]

I would like to acquire greater knowledge regarding the Philosophical aspect of Idealism. What constitutes Idealism and what are the main tenets of Idealism?

Anyone with a Philosophical knowledge of Idealism please contribute. Preferably post your own ideas here and perhaps provide some links. Are you in favour or in opposition to Idealism?

[Ederico]

I would like to acquire greater knowledge regarding the Philosophical aspect of Materialism. What constitutes Materialism and what are the main tenets of Materialism?

Anyone with a Philosophical knowledge of Materialism please contribute. Preferably post your own ideas here and perhaps provide some links. Are you in favour or in opposition to Materialism?

[Jack]

DAMNIT. Now you mentioned it in the Staff forum I am driven to help educate your poor mind out of shame for myself lol, kidding.

Idealism is the belief that the material depends on an ideal reality that is not knowable through the five senses (touch, taste, sight, hearing, smell). The Bhagavad Gita suggests humans have another sense, which is the mind. This is the base of idealism - that true reality is knowable through thought.

Plato's Idealism

Plato's theory of the Forms is a perfect example of idealism - in Platonic thought, something can only be identified if it holds true to the Form of that thing. I have read somewhere that a Greek argued with Plato once about the Forms - "I see horses, but I do not see the Form (horseness)". The Forms can be understood in two ways - one is that the Forms are actual things existing outside of reality, and that an object is a thing only when it emulates that Form. Another is that the Form is a set of qualities, for instance, the Form of the horse is the ideal of all the perfect qualities which together would make a horse. Ok, I'm not too good at explaining Platonic idealism lol. An important point to remember is that Plato's forms exist beyond time, are perfect, and do not change.

Hegel's Idealism

I'm going to deal with Hegel's Idealism now, because this is another major stream of Idealist thought. Hegel's Idealism is that there is a Spirit (National Spirit - Hegelianism is the intellectual foundation for blind patriotism), which is effected by various types of thought. Ok, that sucks. Er... You have Object A. Object A is challenged by Object B, the two come together and are united at a higher level, overriding the contradictions, becoming a synthesis we would know as Object C.

These Objects are Ideals. The thing being contested over by the Objects mentioned above is the National Spirit. This process I've mentioned above (Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis) is known as the Dialectic. It runs in Marxist thought too, which is Materialist (I'll deal with that in the Materialism thread) - Marx and Hegel are effectively opposites. In Hegelianism, the Objects I've mentioned above are styles of Government, that is, ways in which the Spirit of the Nation are expressed. Object A is Oriental Despotism, Object B is Roman Republicanism/Aristocracy, and the synthesis, Object C, is the Absolute State, which Hegel claimed would be the end of the Dialectic, the perfect expression of the Spirit of the Nation. Prussia, of course, embodied the Absolute State and thus was the example of perfect Government for Europe to emulate.

An important and often unnoticed fact is Hegel said the Dialectical process only operates in white nations. lol. Marx didn't change this. So the Marxist dialectic is essentially Eurocentric but the Marxists never paid attention.

Most of my learning about Hegelian Idealism comes from Karl Popper's work The Open Society and Its Enemies - Karl Popper was against Plato, Aristotle, Heraclites, Marx and Hegel - in short, everyone in favour of a total state. Popper instead advocated democratic-capitalist-liberal-internationalist-multicultural-individualist society. The opposite of this is pure National Bolshevism.

Oswald Spengler and Francis Parker Yockey's Idealism

Spenglerian thought also holds true to its own Idealism, which is similar to Hegelian Idealism in that it is not static, but evolutionary - there is a Spirit of the Age (e.g. the "objects" mentioned above). However, Spenglerian (though not Neo-Spenglerian philosophy, e.g. Yockey) philosophy is cyclical - there is a beginning, a rise, a height, decline and then fall of each Culture. A Culture is defined by its Spirit - the Spirit of the middle eastern Culture is heavily religious in nature and known as the Magian, the Spirit of Europe is the drive for limitless space and power, and is known as Faustian, the Spirit of Russian Culture is the embracing of Mother Earth, the Spirit of the Plain.

Neo-Spenglerian philosophy (Neo Spenglerian refers exlusively to Yockey, as I know of no other post-Spengler philosophers that follow his line of thought) believes a Culture-Bearin Stratum is essential to the evolution of a Culture. This Culture is divided into two parts - the Creators and the Preservers. The Culture-bearing stratum is also known as the "cultured" people. The Creator group - men like Spengler, Nietzsche, St Augustine, Goethe, Hegel, etc. - develops works of art, literature and music and gives form to the Spirit of the Age, while the Preserver group acts as a pipeline between this Creator group and the masses beneath. This Preserver group is important because it provides the essential unification of a Culture on an intellectual level.

A Culture goes through several stages - first, the barbarian/heroic Age, which provides the myths and basis for the religious unity of a Culture. The barbarian/heroic Age comes to an end, and the age of contending States emerges, and one wins over the others through force of arms, the Culture is unified into an Imperium, it reaches its intellectual height, and then collapses following the final expression of its Spirit. Spengler suggests that once a Culture is gone it does not come back. Yockey points out that since the power of Money has interfered with the cycle, cannot other things, such as Caeserism (i.e. military virtue over money power)? Yockey also believes that Cultures are founded Aryan blood (he points to the Vedic, Egyptian, Apollonian (i.e. Hellenic/Roman), Chinese and the Mayan/Aztec Cultures), and as long as the Blood is protected, a Cultures can rise and fall continuously, but there will still be a thread of continuation between them - in short, Cyclical history of Cultures on top of Linear history of Blood. Blood, however, is only half of Yockey's conception of Race. He uses Race in a similar term to Adolf Hitler (Hitler believed in a "Germanic Race" - we know this to be essentially biological rubbish), that is, a race is a biological-spiritual community. That, in his definition, is the historical-objective conception of Race.

The second, subjective definition, of Race in Yockey's philosophy is that a man does not belong to a race - he either has it, or he does not. This is similar to the statement people say occasionally, "that man has class", meaning that man has a cultivated mode of behaviour. Race, in a similar sense, is the drive to freedom, will to power, heroism, idealistic militance - in short, what I would term the iron guard mentality. These people are the vanguard of the Culture on the front lines of warfare. In their own way, they define the essence of the Culture-Race. We find, in the old armies of the Spartans, men of Race. We find in the Waffen SS, men of Race.

Without men of Race, the Culture cannot exist - it would be spiritually annihilated by decadence. Witness Buddhism.


Conclusion

Idealism is a vital nessecity for a European Nationalist culture (I refuse to use the term "movement" becuase I do not believe it is to be centrally coordinated). The mark of the White Eurasian (Eurasian in a geographical sense, not in a biological sense. This term corresponds historically with Aryan but Aryan takes on a Cultural term in my view, and I would like to refer to Europe as a Gothic Culture (the will to power of the Gothic tribes) rather than Aryan - the connection in my opinion has long been severed) is that he cannot be driven to kill by material factors. He dies for Ideals. He dies for God, for King and Country, Reich, Imperium Romanum, but he does not annihilate for food or blood. Therefore it is of nessecity, given that we must preserve the White Eurasian blood, that our Idealism must match with our Materialism (see my other response coming soon in the Materialism thread for that one). The Material must arise from the Ideal, and not vice versa, otherwise the Ideal is in flux, which itself is a refutation of Idealism (that is, all things depend on the Ideal).

[Jack]

Eh this is sickening... now, for the second round (first being Iovv's Idealism thread)...

"I can't take it anymore!" kidding. here goes...

Materialism

Materialism, also known as Physicalism, is the belief that all of reality is material existance, that Ideals are reflections, and nothing more, of the Material.

Chaos Theory and Materialism

Alright, here's my best stab at explaining some fun materialism. Say you've got a section of defined space, say, 25 cubic centimeters. Nothing can go into that space other than what is already within it, and nothing can escape it. You freeze time and count 10 atoms - no more, no less. Having frozen time, you collect the data explaining the direction and speed of the atoms, their mass, their densities, size, and all information about them. You use a computer and build a 3D model of that section of defined space, input the data, and you let time continue on the computer. You notice the atoms flying around, crashing into each other, bouncing off the boundaries, etc. Watch the details of the movements of the atoms. Stop the computer. Look at the real section of defined space. Unfreeze time. According to Chaos Theory, the movements you see in the real section of defined space will be exactly the same as the movements you saw on the computer. Because Chaos Theory says if you know everything about everything at a certain point in time, you can predict how they will interact with each other, and if you've got a good enough computer, you can tell the future four hundred thousand years ahead in time. Using the data, you can also look at it in reverse and check history backwards.

Dialectical Materialism

Ah this hideous inverted Hegelian Marxist rubbish. Take Hegel's idealism, replace the Spirit of the Nation with economic conditions, a class analysis of society and you have Marxist dialectical materialism.

Marxism says you can determine a man's mode of behaviour by his class, that is, position in relation to the ownership of the means of production. Marxism says the very character of society is determined by its mode of production (that is, economic style). You have two classes - those who own the means of production, and those who are owned by it. The man who owns it must live his life in such a way as to keep control of it - it is his means to his own existance. The man who is owned by it must work and try to live his life as best he can by whatever means he has at his disposal. That probably doesn't make sense, so I'll try simplify it with an expression from Karl Popper's Open Society and Its Enemies - Man is driven by economic nessecity. The people who need to work and do not own those means are exploited by the people who do own the means of production. Their consciousness is determined by the fact they are the underclass. The people on top have to work to suppress those underneath because if they don't they lose their means of existance. Marxism often claims that it works for human freedom, and the Capitalists say Capitalism is the only system that prevents man from being exploited by force.

Marxist freedom is different. It is not freedom from force - it is freedom from economic nessecity. History in Marxist thought is the evolution from the society of nessecity to the society of free expression, where men put their character into their work and do not live life as if they are mere cogs in a machine, sources of labour power, commodities to be bought and sold by the hour.

In Marxism, culture is defined by class - those on top build religion, the State, everything in order to keep those underneath deluded enough to keep the system going. "Religion", Marx says, "is the opiate of the masses". The State is an instrument ordered and engineered by the ruling class to keep those underneath in line.

Society is recognised as two distinct elements - the base and the superstructure. The base is the system of economic relations, the superstructure is its expression - the style and mode of the State, organised religion, instruments and institutions of force to keep the underclass in line. In Marxist theory, contradictions in the base are resolved through the Dialectic (hence Dialectical Materialism, as the marxist view of history is known), which become expressed through the superstructure.

Society starts off as a tribe, a primative commune. One man, desiring power, organises a bunch of man from his tribe, goes to war with the one next door and makes them slaves, and his own people hail him as Emporer. His own people, however, are not paid enough, from their point of view, little more than the slaves themselves get. So the officers rise up and make the Emporer compromise, which alters the economic base - this becomes known as Feudalism - the institution of Emporer/King remains, but much of the power is transferred to the officers, who become knights/samurai/warrior elite. Contradictions in economic relations result in a changed superstructure.

They are backed up by organised religion, but build a "social contract" method of keeping the peasents in line (they are no longer slaves, since they helped the officers win) - that is, the warrior elite protect the peasents and the peasents give them food and they live nice lives. Some peasents get smart and tell the warrior elite they don't need protection, and they start dealing in goods, build up their wealth and become merchant princes. They believe themselves to be restricted by Feudalism, and under the name of life, freedom from force and property, they overthrow the elite and establish a parliamentary democracy.

The new ruling class we know in Marxist theory as the bourgeoisie. Through advancements in technology, agrarian feudalism is rendered pointless, and the working masses are drawn to the cities to seek means of existance, and take up cheap jobs at the factories. The bourgeoisie benefit from having an "industrial reserve army" (i.e. unemployed), because if the cheap industrial labour (known in Marxist theory as the proletariat) goes on strike, the bourgeoisie can give the unemployed the jobs and the strike is impotent. Technology advances, work becomes easier, exploitation becomes heightened, and it reaches breaking point when the proletariat reaches class consciousness (in Marx's words, ceases being a class in itself (economic term) and becomes a class in itself (political term).

The contradictions in the economic base reach their height - the proletariat rises up in the ultimate episode of class warfare and sieze control of the means of production. They organise themselves into soviets (that's Russian for Worker's Council), assemble worker's militias, organise the soviet's together through trade unions and assemble the proletarian state. The State, as you recall, is the expression of the economic base, and is a means of class domination. The proletarian state exists only to annihilate the political power of the bourgeoisie, and because the proletariat is defined by its lack of property, once it has siezed the property it has abolished itself - it was defined as the industrial underclass. The proletarian state, once the bourgeoisie is suppressed, withers away, and communism sets in - that is, distribution "from each according to his ability to each according to his needs". At this point, using Karl Popper's analogy, the people step out of the Kingdom of Nessecity and into the Kingdom of Freedom.

Marxist Dialectical Materialism is a theory of history based on economic progress. Its various stages can be thus illustrated:

Primative Commune -> Slavery -> Feudalism -> Capitalism -> Socialism -> Communism.

The distinction between Marxist Socialism and Communism is an important one. Marx's Communist Manifesto was termed such because there were many other variaties of "socialisms" (the most suitable, all-encompassing definition of socialism is "a system in which the individual is posited in a social existance") in the intellectual arena of Europe - the term Communism was one of distinction. Marxism was not termed that during the life of Karl Marx, and arose during the Second Internationale, which collapsed after World War 1, which was dominated by Karl Kautsky, a German-born Jew who fought the radical, revolutionist tendencies of Marxism, and pioneered social democracy, which became the major stream of Marxist thought at that time (Lenin viciously attacks "Economism" (that is, Karl Kautsky's social democracy) as pointless and dangerous compromising of labour with the bourgeoisie). After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin's faction, known as the Bolsheviks, once again adopted the term Communist to distinguish themselves from the Social Democrats of western Europe. Thus the modern street definition of Communism is linked to the Russian Revolution.

I shall make another post on Marxism and its various streams tomorrow I think.

Sociobiology and White Nationalism as Materialism

This will probably be one of the most controversial statements I have to make about White Nationalism - that it is, at base, crude materialism. Sociobiology - literally, society viewed from a biological standpoint - holds to the modern, neo-Darwinist view of the "Selfish Gene" - that individuals are constructs of genetic code built for the self perpetuation of their genes. This is perfectly compatible with Chaos Theory as I have explained above. Altruism can be viewed from the selfish gene perspective, as individuals help those who are similar to themselves in order to increase their chances of passing on genes they have in common - example: I might be 25 years old and pretty rich, I could give $25,000 to a white college student girl. The non-neo-Darwinist would view this as a "kind act" (unless he's anti-white of course) and nothing more. The Neo-Darwinist would see this as me aiding the college student in order to help her increase her chances at passing on genes we both having in common - e.g., blonde hair, blue eyes, keltic-nordic subrace, etc.

White Nationalism is solely built on genetic materialism. Multicultists ask why WN's want to preserve the European blood-race and the WN's respond with the typical neo-Darwinist answer: "GENETIC SIMILARITY THEORY!" - that is, we want our race to survive because we share common genes. They say from the understandable viewpoint that culture is built on blood, preserve the blood and no matter what happens to the culture things will be ok. This is interesting because from the point of view of the geneticist, the white race blurs at the edges and something is needed to define what is white and what isn't, and materialism does not, and cannot provide this required arbitrary boundary. So white nationalism is a paradox - operating on neo-Darwinist grounds, it ignores culture in favour of a totally biological centered ideology, which does not provide borders at all unless it includes culture. White Nationalism is a sick, diseased crossbreed between National Socialism (which, despite its intellectual bankruptcy, at least acknowledges culture - Hitler in Mein Kampf says teaching the Slavs German won't Germanize them so it must be the blood, he ignores culture, and yet the SS take in thousand of perfectly Aryan Czeck children for "Germanization" - that is, NS actually acknowledges culture built on the foundations of common blood is the nation!) and "selfish gene" Neo-Darwinism. It cannot exist.

Conlusion

An entire race-Culture cannot be mobilized by appeals to genetic selfishness. To ask that this occur of any White Eurasian (see the Idealism thread for my explanation of that term) Culture is sick. It does not happen. The hallmark of our race is that it does not fight or die or kill for material - whether food, economic factors, or blood. Chaos Theory provides no justification for anything - as we cannot know all the factors involved, anything that happens can be consigned to historical nessecity - entire pointless for a European Nationalist culture. The very existance of Marx is enough refutation of his own ideology - how did a man born into a bourgeois family develop a proletarian ideology? Engels was an Industrialist! 90+% of all Marxist leaders and revolutionaries as well as ideologists and intellectuals are bourgeois by social class. Why does Marx view the Communist society as the most moral one, free of exploitation? Why is exploitation bad? According to Marxism it is economic-historical nessecity. There is no justification. Why, then, is Marx on the side of the proletarians, if man's consciousness is not determined by his class (as the very existance of Marx is refutation of)? Marx might claim that his morality is the morality of the future - yet he has already conceded that because man's consciousness is self-determining, that history does not make the man, but that man must make history. "Our morality", Marx would say, "is the morality of the future!" - and we could easily respond - "Perhaps, but man is not impelled by history, as you are evidence against, but man makes history" - and his response would be - "Our morality is the morality of the future because we will make it so".

Marxism has no ethical justification. It is not rational in any way, shape, or form. The very origins of the ideology is refutation of its intellectual claims.

And so, I believe that Materialism in an intellectual form is nothing but a disease for European Nationalism and the survival of White Eurasian man. It does not place him in a cultural context, which is imperetive to understanding his identity, and because materialism is inherently determinist, we can win or fail and point the finger at historical neccesity - materialism provides no motivating factors for our survival. I believe Idealism would. A New Idealism.

[Taras Bulba]

http://www.geocities.com/integral_tr...terialism.html

Materialism Destroys the Eternal Spirit
Excerpted from the writings of Nicholas Berdyaev, The Bourgeois Mind, Freedom and Spirit and The Meaning of History.

Civilization is by its nature "bourgeois" in the deepest spiritual sense of the word. "Bourgeois" is synonymous precisely with the civilized kingdom of this world and the civilized will to organized power and enjoyment of life. The spirit of civilization is that of the middle classes, it is attached and clings to corrupt and transitory things, and it fears eternity. To be a bourgeois is therefore to be a slave of matter and an enemy of eternity. The perfected European and American civilizations gave rise to the industrial-capitalist system, which represents not only a mighty economic development but the spiritual phenomenon of the annihilation of spirituality. The industrial Capitalism of civilization proved to be the destroyer of the eternal spirit and the sacred traditions. Modern capitalist civilization is essentially atheistic and hostile to the idea of God. The crime of killing God must be laid at its door rather than at that of revolutionary Socialism, which merely adapted itself to the civilized "bourgeois" spirit and accepted its negative heritage.

Industrial-capitalist civilization, it is true, did not altogether repudiate religion: it was prepared to admit its pragmatical utility and necessity. Thus religion, which had found a symbolic expression in culture, became pragmatical in civilization. It could, indeed, prove useful and practical in the organization and fostering of life. Civilization is by its nature pragmatical. The popularity of pragmatism in America, the classical land of civilization, need cause no surprise. Socialism, on the other hand, repudiated pragmatical religion; but it pragmatically defends atheism as being more useful for the development of life forces and the worldly satisfaction of the larger masses of mankind. But the pragmatical and utilitarian approach of Capitalism had been the real source of atheism and spiritual bankruptcy. The useful and practically effective god of Capitalism cannot be the true God. He can be easily unmasked. Socialism is negatively right. The God of religious revelations and symbolic culture had long vanished from capitalist civilization, just as it had receded from Him.

The capitalist system is sowing the seeds of its own destruction by sapping the spiritual foundation of man's economic life. Labour loses all spiritual purpose and justification and, as a result, brings an indictment against the whole system.

Civilization is powerless to realize its dream of everlasting aggrandizement. The tower of Babylon will remain unfinished.

The Technological Society

The triumphant advent of the machine opened a new era in which life loses its organic character and natural rhythm; man is separated from nature by an artificial environment of machines, by the very instruments of his intended domination of nature. As a reaction against his mediaeval ascetic ideal, man puts aside both resignation and contemplation, and attempts to dominate nature, organize life and increase its productive forces. This, however, does not help to bring him into closer communion with the inner life and soul of nature. On the contrary, by mastering it technically and organizing its forces man becomes further removed from it. Organization proves to be the death of the organism. Life becomes increasingly a matter of technique. The machine sets its stamp upon the human spirit and all its manifestations. Thus civilization has neither a natural nor a spiritual, but a mechanical foundation. It represents par excellence the triumph of technique over both the spirit and organism.

The machine and technique are the product of the mental development and discoveries of culture; but they sap its organic foundations and kill its spirit. Culture, having lost its soul, becomes civilization. Spiritual matters are discounted; quantity displaces quality. The assertion of the will to "life," power, organization and earthly happiness, brings about mankind's spiritual decline; for the higher spiritual life is based upon asceticism and resignation. Such are the tragedy and fate of historical destinies.

Civilization as opposed to culture, which is given up to the contemplation of eternity, tends to be futurist. Machinery and technique are chiefly responsible for the speeding up of life and its exclusive aspiration towards the future. Organic life is slower, less impetuous, and more concerned with essentials, while civilized life is superficial and accidental; for it puts the means and instruments of life before the ends whose significance is lost. The consciousness of civilized men is concentrated exclusively upon the means and technique of life considered as the only reality, while its aims are regarded as illusory.

Technique, organization and the productive processes are a reality while spiritual culture is unreal, a mere instrument of technique. The relation between end and means is reversed and perverted.

This loss of any sense of purpose is the death of a culture. The only real way to culture lies through religious transformation.

The Meaning of History

It is not an exaggeration to say that for many people the doctrine of progress was a religion, that the religion of progress in the nineteenth century was professed by many who had fallen away from Christianity. An analysis of this idea of progress, with special reference to its religious pretensions, will reveal the fundamental contradiction that it involved.

The doctrine of progress is first and foremost an entirely illegitimate deification of the future at the expense of past and present, in a way that has not the slightest scientific, philosophical or moral justification. The doctrine of progress is bound to be a religious faith, since there can be no positive science of progress.

The nineteenth-century positivist doctrines of progress deliberately stifled and suppressed the religious element in this belief and hope. The theoreticians of progress opposed their faith and expectations to the religious type of these dispositions. But what is left of the idea of progress, once it has been emptied of its religious content? How can such a mutilated idea be inwardly accepted?

In the light of the positivist doctrine of progress every human generation, every individual, every epoch of history, are but the means and instrument to an ultimate goal of perfection, this ultimate humanity perfect in that power and happiness which are denied to the present generation. Both from the religious and ethical points of view this positivist conception of progress is inadmissible, because by its very nature it excludes a solution to the tragic torments, conflicts and contradictions of life valid for all mankind, for all those generations who have lived and suffered. For it deliberately asserts that nothing but death and the grave awaits the vast majority of mankind and the endless succession of human generations throughout the ages, because they have lived in a tortured and imperfect state torn asunder by contradictions. But somewhere on the peaks of historical destiny, on the ruins of preceding generations, there shall appear the fortunate race of men reserved for the bliss and perfection of integral life. All the generations that have gone before are but the means to this blessed life, to this blissful generation of the elect as yet unborn. Thus the religion of progress regards all the generations and epochs that have been as devoid of intrinsic value, purpose or significance, as the mere means and instruments to the ultimate goal.

It is this fundamental moral contradiction that invalidates the doctrine of progress, turning it into a religion of death instead of resurrection and eternal life. There is no valid ground for degrading those generations whose lot has been cast among pain and imperfection beneath that whose pre-eminence has been ordained in blessedness and joy. No future perfection can expiate the sufferings of past generations. Such a sacrifice of all human destinies to the messianic consummation of the favoured race can only revolt man's moral and religious conscience. A religion of progress based on this apotheosis of a future fortunate generation is without compassion for either present or past; it addresses itself with infinite optimism to the future, with infinite pessimism to the past. It is profoundly hostile to the Christian expectation of resurrection for all mankind, for all the dead, fathers and forefathers. This Christian idea rests on the hope of an end to historical tragedy and contradiction valid for all human generations, and of resurrection in eternal life for all who have ever lived.

One of the most obvious objections to the theory of progress is the discovery of a great culture like that of Babylon, which flourished three thousand years before Christ and attained a pitch of perfection in many respects superior to anything of which the twentieth century is capable. Yet it died and vanished almost without leaving a trace.

Our habit of breaking up time into the past, present and future does not entitle us to endow the last with more reality than the first. From the standpoint of the present, the future is no richer in reality than the past, and our efforts should be with reference, not to the future, but to that eternal present of which both future and past are one.

In a sense it may even be argued that the past is more real than the future, that those who have departed from us are more real than those who have not yet been born.

History is in truth the path to another world. It is in this sense that its content is religious. But the perfect state is impossible within history itself; it can only be realized outside its framework. This is the fundamental conclusion of the metaphysics of history and the secret of the historical process itself. In its perpetual transition from one epoch to another, mankind struggles in vain to resolve its destiny within history. Disappointed in its expectations, feeling itself imprisoned within the circle of history, it realizes that its problem cannot be solved within the process of history itself, but only on a transcendental plane. The problem of history is determined by the nature of time. To solve it requires an inversion of the entire historical perspective, a transfer of attention of extra-historical considerations, to the urge of history towards super-history. We must admit within the hermitic circle of history the super-historical energy, the irruption within the relations of terrestrial phenomena of the celestial noumenon--the future Coming of Christ.

Of Celestial History: God and Man

Before developing our metaphysics of history any further, we must pause to consider the primal drama and mystery taking place in the inmost depths of being. What is the nature of this drama? It is that of the mutual relations between God and man. But in what form are we to conceive it? I believe that this primal drama and mystery of Christianity consist in the genesis of God in man and of man in God. This mystery, is, indeed, implicit in the foundations of Christianity. Historical destiny reveals more particularly the genesis of God in man. This constitutes the central fact of human and world destiny. But there exists a no less profound mystery, that of the genesis of man in God, accomplished in the inmost depths of the divine life. For if there is such a thing as a human longing for God and a response to it, then there also must be a divine longing for man the genesis of God in man; a longing for the love and the freely-loving and, in response to it, the genesis of man in God. A divine movement which brings about the genesis of God implies the reciprocal movement of man towards God, by which he is generated and revealed. This constitutes the primal mystery both of the spirit and of being, and at the same time of Christianity, which in its central fact, in the Person of Christ, the Son of God, unites two mysteries. In the Image of Christ is brought about the genesis of God in man and of man in God, and the perfection of both is manifest. Thus, for the first time, in response to God's movement and longing, a perfect man is revealed to Him. This mysterious process occurs in the interior depths of the divine reality itself; it is a sort of divine history which is reflected in the whole of the outer history of mankind. History is, indeed, not only the revelation of God, but also the reciprocal revelation of man in God.

The whole complexity of the historical process can be explained by the inner interdependence of these two revelations. For history is not only the plan of the Divine revelation, it is also the reciprocal revelation of man himself; and that makes history such a terrible and complex tragedy. History would not be tragic if it were only the revelation of God and its gradual apprehension. Its drama and tragedy are not only determined in the divine life itself, but also by the fact that they are based upon the mystery of freedom, which is not only a divine, but also a human revelation--that longed for by God in the depths of the divine life. The origin of the world springs from the freedom willed by God in the beginning. Without His will or longing for freedom no world process would be possible. In its place there would be a static and pre-eminently perfect Kingdom of God as an essential and predetermined harmony. The world process, on the other hand, implies a terrible tragedy, and history a succession of calamitous events in the centre of which stands the Crucifixion, the Cross on which the Son of God Himself was crucified, because God had desired freedom and because the primal drama and mystery of the world are those of the relations between God and His other self, which He loves and by which He desires to be loved. And only freedom endows this love with any significance.

This freedom, which is absolutely irrational and inapprehensible to reason, offers a solution of the tragedy of world history. It fulfills not only God's revelation in man, but also man's in God; for it is the source and origin of movement, of process, of inner conflict and of inwardly experienced contradictions. An indissoluble tie exists therefore between freedom and the metaphysics of history. The concept of freedom elucidates both the divine life as a tragic destiny and the life of mankind and the world as the history of a tragic destiny. There would be no history without freedom. It is the metaphysical basis of history. The revelation of history can be apprehended only through Christ as perfect man and God, as their perfect union, as the genesis of God in man and of man in God, and, finally, as God's revelation in man and the reciprocal revelation of man in God. Christ, the Absolute Man, the Son of both God and man, stands in the centre of both celestial and terrestrial history. He is the inner spiritual tie between these two destinies. Without His help the tie between the world and God, between the plural and the unique, between the human and the absolute reality, could not exist. In fact, history owes its existence entirely to the presence of Christ at its very heart. He represents the deepest mystical and metaphysical foundation and source of history and of its tragic destiny. Both the divine and the human energy flow towards and away from Him.

All historical tendencies which have striven to create harmony, to overcome the dark premise, to subdue the turbulence of freedom and supersede it by compelled and necesary good, are concerned only with the secondary signs of the unique and primal mystery of divine freedom. These tendencies have a wide currency, but they should be unmasked in the light of Christian consciousness as a temptation always besetting human destiny. One of the greatest of Christian mysteries, that of Grace, which lies at the foundation of the Church, symbolizes the transcendent reconciliation and resolution of the fatal conflict between freedom and necessity. It achieves a victory over the fatality of both freedom and necessity, though the word "fatal" here is but an imperfect symbol. It is the act of Grace which realizes the communion between God and man and offers a solution of the problem posed by the divine drama. We must, therefore, note that the principle of Divine Grace is active in the history and destiny of both world and man together with that of natural necessity. And without it neither this destiny nor mystery would be fulfilled.

[Hellenic Eagle]

Matter.

What exactly is matter?

It is the things that are visible to our eyes. What exists according to our visual perception. Nature. The material Universe, planets included of course.

Matter takes many forms. The most simplistic ones are the well known forms: earth, water, fire, air.

What i want to discuss, is:

Does matter according to your opinion, has any divine qualities? Is matter divine? Is there divinity in matter?

Or is just lifeless matter, and Divinity is something "other" from matter, or something "outside" material things?

Again there has been a wide variety of approaches towards this issue according to different civilisations around the world in the span of human history.

What is your opinion?

[Blood_Axis]

What do you consider to be "Divine"?

As far as I am concerned, matter is divine to the extent that Nature is divine!

What is more divine than "Nature" itself?

Ans what proof is there about a seperate entity that creates or "governs" the Laws of Nature?

Consider the following:

suppose that you are a cell of, let's say, the human liver. You live in a dark and moist environment and you have interactions with other cells of the same kind as you, perhaps you are aware of a few other kinds of cells that are neighbouring you and have similar function.

Could you ever be aware that you are actually a cell of the liver, and that there are other tissues outside the liver, other organs, an organism, and a whole wide world outside the organism?
Could you be aware as to what your overall role, function and contribution, your telos, actually is in relation to the whole organism and the world outside it?
Would you ever be able to perceive that?

No, because your level of analysis can reach as far as to that point.

That is the divine element for me.

It does not exist seperately from us in a different sphere, creating, observing and destroying, but we are part of it and we contribute to it.

And of course we have as much awareness of it as we can from the point of which we are standing.

Thus, every kind of matter has an inherent element Divinity

[Jack]

Njörd, this is the thread where you can preach dialectics and Hegelianism and try to convert me over to the contradictory side of the force And hopefully I shall defend myself adequately with Nietzsche... If not, I may convert.

*'It's on!' by Korn plays loudly in the background, as papers are shuffled, eyeglasses are adjusted and the tension builds in the room, as Njörd and Jack are face to face in the ring, readying to do battle with concepts and different varieties of logic*

[Liquid Len]

From the fact that the experience in some dreams and also in some drug induced trips feels exactly as "real" as the perception of what we call reality, it follows that everything I perceive in life, absolutely everything I ever feel and experience, all my feelings and impressions are nothing else than states of myself. All these impressions are not somewhere "out there", but they emerge in myself. When I'm watching a tree and thus get an impression of that tree, then my impression of the tree isn't the tree itself. And thus everything I perceive of my body is not my body but impressions of my body and nothing more than states of myself. When I'm thinking "I", this "I" is a thought of mine, but it isn't identical with myself, it isn't that what is thinking.
So everything I know is that I am something, a subject that has mental states. What exactly it is, remains utterly unknown to me. I don't know myself, nor the world I'm living in, directly.

Of course it's very plausible to assume that the world and the human beings I perceive do really exist, although I cannot be entirely sure about that. And further, we nowadays have to take note that neuroscience tells us that this something which has mental states is in every human being the brain. Thus my mental states would be identical with the states of the brain which I would be.

This explanation of the emergence of mind doesn't seem very satisfying.

But how could we actually imagine a satisfying explanation? Saying that only a nonphysical soul would be able to have mental states would be an unproven, unverifiable claim. To assume that mind and consciousness are just something distinct which doesn't belong to the world of physics would be no explanation at all. Everything we know are our own subjective mental states. What they would look like from an inter-subjective point of view, we cannot know. Nor can we directly know what the subject is that has them; this would be like a hand trying to grasp itself.

This all seems to suggest a materialistic point of view.

Now some could object that if all mental states were identical with brain states, then our subjective impressions wouldn't be necessary anymore. The brain could as well work completely without them, purely mechanically, and some say that this points to a general problem of materialism. Well, the idea that the brain could work without subjective impressions is true, but this could only be really reality if we presupposed that brain states don't comprise subjective feelings, and as it seems, this isn't the case in our world.

Some might object that brains and matter in general aren't smooth like the mind. Matter consists of molecules, atoms, atomic nuclei and electrons etc, so the question arises how a unified mind could be possible there. Probably the answer would go into the direction of regarding it as a functional unity comparable to the atoms in a PC which nonetheless can enable the playing of a unified computer game, and this isn't very unlike the stream of consciousness, by the way.

Perhaps some might point out that we shouldn't make the stupid mistake of confusing the inside of a brain with the subjective inside of a person only because of the same sound of the words. But I didn't suggest that the brain perceives its own states, but that the states themselves are conscious and the brain only has them. The subjective person isn't the brain, but the sum of the conscious states which together make up the inner life of the person.