University Anti-Defamation Post

Please disregard all previous statements about the soullessness of my University.  I found its soul; it was just very well hidden.

Thoughts on God

1. God wasn’t ever human. The idea that God became human is so persistent because it offers a solution to the problem of bridging the gap between what humans can know and relate to, and what we can’t. We want God to have become human, because it makes us seem sure of the possibility for empathy from and for God, and because it lets us think highly of our own capacities or forms as analogous to what we most value, thus giving us a role model. God-become-human is a wish-fulfillment metaphor, that also can be used as a heuristic device for abstract concepts like the “mediating third.”

2. A God that “existed” would be a phenomenon. That means God would be bound by the rules governing other phenomena — subject to space, time, causation, &c. Such an entity wouldn’t deserve the designation “God.” It would just be another phenomenon, like a tree, or the laws of physics, or Husserl. [Ed: The biggest benefit I'd want from having a god who exists within time, &c. isn't even possible. I'd want a God who understood me perfectly. But God couldn't know what it was like to be me, because I have limited consciousness, and God doesn't. If I'm worrying about whether Joey likes me or not, God knows whether or not Joey likes me at the same time as knowing that I'm worrying about it, so the experience God gets of my worrying wouldn't be the same as the one I get. Geez, God, you just don't understand.]

3. What’s worth considering “God” would not “be” / “exist” like a phenomenon. God would do the God-thing outside of all that. As per Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Doctrine of the Power of Judgment Chapter 3, God = a noumenon. A thing in itself, apart from how it’s cognized by any thinker. We don’t know any of those. Except God’s even more unknowable than the others, because unlike a pancake-in-itself, God isn’t even part of what there is. Anyway, by definition, we are incapable of experiencing a God that [...] outside of what there is. If we were capable of experiencing God, it wouldn’t be God anymore, but a phenomenon. Then we’d just be experiencing a phenomenon and calling it “God.” But it wouldn’t taste like God, because God doesn’t taste like anything.

4. If you want to speculate, you can say that God did so-and-so, but you’ll just be speculating. Nobody has ever known, nobody does know, and nobody ever will know anything about God, both because there are no criteria for knowing, and because anything worth deeming “God” isn’t a possible object of thought.

5. It’s possible to have an experience that you’d want to call a mystical experience. But it’s not actually God you’re experiencing. You’re experiencing your mind/body’s attempt to make a representation or metaphor about what God might be like. God isn’t representable though. It’s okay though. This is an interesting biological, psychological activity. But if you think you’ve transcended the limits of consciousness, you’re wrong. You might have thought or represented or felt something you personally hadn’t before, though. It might be very important. It might be good poetry even. You might have accessed a part of yourself you didn’t know about, so much so that it seems like it’s not you. It’s not God though. If you think it is, this is probably because you are very curious about things that are difficult to understand, or you long to be perfectly loved, or perfectly known, or else you are very arrogant. It could be that something outside of being loves and knows you perfectly, but I don’t know how, and in fact can’t know how, and none of us could ever know either how that could happen, or that it did. [Ed: If you insist that it's God you're experiencing though, that's idolatry. It's a representation. This is not a pipe. It's probably not a very good representation either. You don't know how to imagine that kind of thing, especially since it isn't anything that exists.]

6. There is no way to know — nobody has ever known, or ever could — whether or not there is (or, more appropriately “isn’t”) a God like that. There is actually no information, or meditative activity, or test, or apparent-revelation, that could ever bestow this knowledge. Anybody who says they know is either genuinely mistaken or conning you.

7. Human beings aren’t gods. We’re just human beings. We have a lot of fascinating faculties and properties. We also have a lot of blind-spots though. For example, I can’t feel what it’s like for a dolphin to use sonar. You can say that your unconscious is a god, if you really want to, since it knows a lot of stuff you don’t, but there are probably also a lot of people out there who know more than your unconscious. It’s probably good enough to just say that your unconscious is your unconscious. The only real reason to say that your unconscious is a god is to feel like you’ve transcended something extremely important when you seem to be accessing parts of yourself you’re not used to. But it’s just more you, not a god. “Nice to meet me.” If you say that’s God, that’s also idolatry. Also, in case you hadn’t noticed, you’re talking to yourself. That part’s okay though. The idolatry, on the other hand, is a bad idea, since it tends to lead to superstition. Why do you want to think of yourself as a god anyway? Maybe you don’t want to think about all the embarrassing things that happened to you in elementary school. Well, they still happened, even when you were lugging around that unconscious. You’re not a god. Just get over it.

8. There are a lot of other gods you may have heard of, from polytheistic traditions. People made them up. A lot of them are abstractions of communities, kind of like Lady Liberty, but people believe(d) they had volition and stuff. Some of them are personified philosophical or interpersonal concepts. Like Jesus Christ, a lot of these also make interesting heuristic devices and metaphors. For example, I sometimes find it useful to think about the difference between the sort of knowledge one uses to get things done in the world (Athena) and philosophical knowledge (Apollo). You might be tempted to say that these gods exist because people thought of them or believe in them. That’s a pretty thought, but more of that sneaky wish-fulfillment. You can think of a unicorn all you want, but that unicorn doesn’t have its own subjective experience, volition, or any of the other active properties something needs for an autonomous existence. The ideas of gods exist though, you may object. But that’s not the same thing, now, is it? The memory of John F. Kennedy will live on, but he didn’t get to finish his term as president. Alas, he wasn’t the same kind of guy after he was just a memory. Anyway, the same problems in 1-7 apply, no matter how many gods you’re talking about. It’s worse with polytheism though, because the problems of unknowability start to look like a conspiracy.

9. Assuming “Yes on God” outside of the categories of existence that we know, there has never been any direct revelation of God to anybody, nor any message from God, that could ever be identified as such. Anything we can identify in the first place is something we’re capable of comprehending, and the only criteria we have for something being from God (as opposed to being explainable in some other way) is that we’re not capable of comprehending it because it transcends our capacities. Oh well. This means that no kind of scripture, mediumship, bizarre flight of doves, uncanny/coincidental occurrence, &c. could count as evidence for or against God, nor could we ever verify that it came from God as opposed to human invention, interpretation, imagination, somnambulation, or pissed-off birds.

10. I personally think that, given the epistemological situation, it would be pretty perverse if God were strongly invested in people’s belief or worship, especially since the people most likely to offer it are the people most inclined toward some kind of idolatry, because they think they have some grounds for belief, when in fact, there couldn’t be any. The rest are trying with all their might to escape consciousness in order to properly attend to God, which of course, we can’t do, although there are some meditative practices that stand in for it metaphorically and claim the possibility of such an achievement in their <s>discourse</s> advertising.
Such meditative practices are themselves metaphors (oops, a representation!) for something that can’t be done. Very convincing metaphor, because it is so aesthetically tidy, almost geometrical. (Again, the Trinity comes to mind.) Meditation does a lot of other stuff, but can’t get your mind linked up with the mind of God, because you have a human brain. Thank you, Mario, but your princess isn’t in another castle.

11. Atheism is just as epistemologically difficult to establish as theism, again because there’s no way of knowing. However, acting as if there isn’t any sort of God to reckon with seems like an okay decision, since: if God, no way to reckon with God. You might be mistaken though. By the same token, faith is just as okay a decision. However, you might end up making up a lot of things by accident, since there isn’t any way of verifying a single step of the process of belief. So either way you might be mistaken. I think the most direct route to not being mistaken is to admit a lack of resources and leave it at that. That said, if you have a personal investment in the stakes and want to make a calculated benefits-losses wager in either direction, gamble away. In any case, if you use either a professed atheism or theism to justify treating people poorly, then you’re a big jerk, because either way, you have no evidence.

12. Incidentally, pantheism doesn’t work out either, as far as epistemologically verifying it goes. If you want to say that there’s a God that pervades everything, as opposed to there just being everything, the term “God” has to add something to the mix, and my guess is that you’ll want it to be something like thought or will. It wouldn’t say a hell of a lot for God if God’s thought were only the sum of all individual thinkers without some kind of unifying, overarching thought process, since even we’re capable of that degree of mental synthesis. By definition, God’s synthesizing mind would be beyond our capacity to recognize or understand, so we have no way of getting at the one thing that would be evidence that there’s a God pervading the world, and not just the world. People have suggested things like the “collective unconscious” and cited evidence. But if you knew about any datum in the unconscious, that piece of evidence would not actually be unconscious. And how would you ever know it was collective? You could just as plausibly be simply communicating, individual to individual, on a level you’re not aware of, as drawing from a unified mind.

Hail Terminus.

His death was unalarming; nature in a decent mood. He was not accomplished, sociable, or wise. He used to sit at the head of the table for hours as if absent, til at a moment he appeared among us smirking with immigrant wit.

My Great Uncle Morty was a stubborn man who waited to die until he was good and ready. There was still a Tzar in Russia when he was born; that’s how old he was. Today he’s dead, and I won’t trouble with euphemisms. When you’ve managed to live that long, there’s no shame in just plain dying. Other people I’ve known to die, they stole out of their rightful minds or were struck by a spasm of nerves in youth, but Morty just waited, squinting at his hand of bridge, intentionally misplacing his cane, clearing the history from his throat, until it was time to go.

I think here shadows of my full-bodied thought. (I invert here word order.)

I can’t help but feel self-consciously laughable beginning a reflection on my disillusionment with academia while listening to Schönberg’s “The Book of the Hanging Gardens,” even as on my right languishes a newly-purchased just-begun yet already-beloved edition of Heinrich von Kleists Sämtliche Werke und Briefe (and not a word of my native English sullies the thick-stock formidable pages, &c.).  It has been a sarcastic-voiced heartbreak, as if I had spent my life’s proper allotment of emotionally dramatic articulations between the ages of 12 and 22, and thus feared (were I to frame it as I’ve felt it) incurring aesthetic debt.

For all I have criticized my (nominal) field of study on theoretical or political grounds, my decision to leave this world after my M.A. ist eigentlich nicht (is really not) a cool objection to its lack of intellectual flexibility, but rather an almost-injured recoiling from its austerity of feeling and lack of poetic sensibility.

I started out looking for a refuge from selling out.  I worried that graduate school might be too difficult, that I wouldn’t be as smart as the others.  Instead, I am good enough, but the work is somehow soulless, far from beauty and love, from the incantation and the dignity of pondering slowly.

The Good Wrongs

At some point, Americans of every political leaning talk as if the country’s laws ought to reflect the correct moral maxims. The country should prohibit actions that are morally wrong and allow actions that are morally right, so we argue. I wonder: do Americans, even secular, liberal Americans, long for the state to be somewhat churchlike?

I consider my own ambivalence. I believe that abortion should be legal. I believe that abortion is wrong. I believe that sometimes extreme life circumstances force people to choose the lesser of two evils — people who have been attacked, people who are in physical danger, people who are starving. I have no reason to believe that a judge or jury would be more capable of verifying such a situation, or of making the necessary moral decision, than the woman, her family, her friends, her doctors. I don’t trust the American judicial system to convict rapists or determine whether or not someone is on the brink of death. People in such situations need mercy, not bureaucracy. Yet that’s very different from celebrating a woman’s right to choose. I don’t think the possibility of legal, safe abortion should be cause for celebration. I don’t think it should make anyone feel more powerful, more independent, more in control. Even the possibility of killing what might be your own child is morally horrifying. I think that having an abortion might mean killing someone — I’m not sure, but it might. Nobody knows for sure. I don’t know the criteria for knowing. People can invent criteria, but they do so according to the stance they want to justify. We don’t know when a person becomes a person; we pretend that we know, but we don’t know and can’t know. I also have met too many wonderful people who have led difficult lives to believe that it’s better never-to-have-been-born than to be born into hardship. Yet, I’ve never been destitute and pregnant; it’s not, ultimately, my role to decide, but hers. So, I believe that abortion is wrong — but that the law should allow it.

Not surprisingly, that’s an unpopular line of argument. I doubt I could convince many pro-lifers to vote in favor of abortion rights by agreeing with them that abortion is wrong because it might be killing someone. I doubt many pro-choicers would want me along on the campaign trail. The moral card is trump. People want to feel like they’re fighting for what’s right. You can’t mobilize people to fight for the ability to choose between necessary evils. Instead, you have to convince them that it’s good. So we have the rhetoric of liberty, of empowerment, of pride — the good.

My stance, on the other hand, is also moral: mercy. (Mercy doesn’t mobilize people who want to feel proud. We want to feel good while we do good. While we know who we are, the ones who do good, spread our good. Not like those bad people who try to stop us.)

The Small, Quantifiable Self

In assessing whether or not you’re living properly, do you value measurable accomplishments more highly than un-listable virtues?

Imagine, for example, that someone has insulted you, and yet you’ve managed to refute his allegation with both intelligence and kindness. Would knowing that you behaved well in that sort of situation make you feel as satisfied with yourself as you would feel if you had produced a work of art, run a marathon, gotten a job, or joined an organization? Or does behavior feel somehow less substantial when it can’t be listed on a CV, resume, fellowship application, book jacket, CD pamphlet, “about the artist,” facebook, myspace, livejournal, OKCupid, JDate…

Our culture encourages us to equate the question “How do I live the good life?” with “How do I make the right list?” In our society, it’s easier to like yourself if you have a list than if you don’t have a list. Sometimes, having a list is a more urgent value than anything on the list. (You want to know who I am, in alphabetical order, in chronological order, in reverse chronological order. I have to know who I am, sequentially. As soon as I can add xyz to the list, we’ll all know.) If you try to think otherwise and act accordingly, I think you’ll see how entrenched this system of self-evaluation is. I am consciously, ideologically opposed to it, but I can’t climb out of it.

I’m not your five year plan.

Often, meeting new people feels like an impromptu job interview. Within an hour, they ask me what I plan to do with the rest of my life. Perhaps they mean, “Over the next half century, how do you intend to make money?” or perhaps, “Summarize your identity now so that I don’t have to think later.” When I tell them I don’t know, I try to let ‘em down easy — “I have abc option in the works…” — like a tactful apology. A nerve-wracking ritual. I fantasize that my intelligence, competence, and sense of reality are periodically scanned at strategic checkpoints for adequate citizen potential. Or I am the victim of undercover sociologists.

Last week, a Buddhist half-joked that my M.A. in History of Religions would not help me in business. We were in a sangha at the time, drinking tea after forty minutes of objectless meditation. I ask myself: what made him think of business?

“It’s a sin.”

What weighs the most?

“Nerds at Heart” advertized an evening of board games for queer singles. I wanted to play Scrabble. I didn’t think the bar was going to be very far away, but the bus kept going. The concrete walls between neon-signed restaurants seemed to grow broader, and I determined on this basis that I must be in danger. I had the right name and address, but somehow it was a tattoo parlor. The room offered no evidence of equipment that could have become the source of a free drink. Two hip men and a dowdy young woman had walked in with me, and the man in velvet now approached the friendly-looking employee, as if to say: I know how this tattoo parlor is a bar, I know about the board games. I walked back out into the night, searching for a taxi. Guys in hoodies. “Did you just get a tattoo there?” “No.” “Did your friend just get a tattoo there?” “…” “Man, I was just trying to talk to her!” I saw the spaces between people as miles to traverse. I made note of them as I passed, as if they were signposts, of civilization or, then again, of imminent violence. I walked half a block, crossed the street, flagged down the same bus driving in the opposite direction. I sat in the front across from a teenage couple. The bus was almost empty. A man in the back was singing at the top of his voice. “Girls kissing girls! Boys kissing boys! The girl fish and boy fish don’t do that. Only humans is that fucked up!” He sang from Montrose to Diversey. Back into the neon womb. “Keep it down,” said the driver. The man didn’t like that. “Do they do that in your neighborhood? I’ll come to your neighborhood and fuck them up. Fuck if I’ll keep it down.” I wondered if he could follow me home. “Do you want to ride or walk?” the driver threatened. “I’ll walk. I just got a hard-on.” He walked to the front of the bus. He gestured at me and asked the driver, “Do you want girls sucking on each other? Don’t talk to me like I’m crazy.” He left. He was gone, episode over. The teenage girl, smirking: “I miss the boys kissing boys song.” “It was beautiful,” I said in the same tone she had used, as if I felt sarcastic, which I might have. Like that, the strangers are as friends to me. Some guy: “And in the gayest neighborhood in Chicago!” “I know!” said the girl. “I know,” I said along with her, though I still don’t know for sure.

Subjectivity, from the Latin sub-iectus: thrown beneath. There’s a way to understand this as a joke, condemnation, redemption, no big deal, xyz, es hängt davon ab (it depends upon), what we’re thrown beneath.

Ethics of Relationships and Sexuality

Questions larger than I.

Three years ago, I might have said about sex: transgression, complicity in transgression, an attempt to enter into the presence of / communion with an infinite and unknowable Beyond, an act of recognition (of God, of Being, of Self…), a paradoxical act of becoming oneself by ceasing to be individual, a game about perspectives. Sex was, for me at that time, kinetic philosophy: a way to make my intellectual/spiritual conceptions tangible. It was a symbol, not only for me to read, but to touch while reading. (Prof. A.V. clarified for me this week the difference between a metaphor and a symbol. A metaphor establishes a relationship between two knowable or representable things, whereas a symbol shows you something you can see in order to point to something invisible.) Sex was a symbol to touch while reading. It was to feel the interpretive process. That was the level on which I was conscious of my motives.

I pulled those cards out of the rolodex, or they wore away and fell out. I learned about an unexpectedly stronger desire: the simple yet fervent hope for a lover’s reciprocal, mature friendship. Gentleness, loyalty, kind humor, patience, tact, respect. Possibly even: justice, prudence, fortitude, temperance, faith, hope, and love. A different axis of meaning.

Here’s my dish of scrambled ethics.

Culture: not helping.

“Hookups” are supposed to be fun, freeing, adventurous, and delightfully meaningless. I once supposed them to be profoundly unifying of humanity because of their relative anonymity. Upon further reflection, I’ve come to regard them negatively as something more significant than merely “shallow” — cowardly, avoidant (the fear of knowing or being known by someone you hold in your arms), or else genuine yearning condemned to “no big deal” status (often for one person and not the other), or a kind of metaphorical suicide. We take better care with our CDs. I wouldn’t say that hookups are always in their motives or effects cruel, but rather careless in a way that, collectively, makes the whole realm of dating seem to me like more of an invitation to feel insignificant or alienated. And polyamory, which is supposed to be so liberating and equitable? Marveling at three people’s terrible taste in other lovers while secretly hoping they all like me best? Unofficial jealousy, because one is not supposed to care…

Yet monogamy? I’ve come to imagine a prison of overt jealousy, power struggle, creepy cocktail parties, constantly catering to someone else’s ego / plans / uncles. I imagine some feminist’s hell, if I end up with a man, or if I end up with a woman, Feminist Hell itself: loving someone so “empowered” she doesn’t know the meaning of kindness.

I ask myself how I have so many wonderful friends, but when I consider dating, the world seems to be filled with monsters. I know that the question is not as small as one highly educated twenty-something. For reasons that I haven’t fully identified, much of the “liberal” segment of our generation seems to have adopted an ethic of sexual relations that considers a lack of rules/conventions/restrictions to be more important than mutual emotional support.

More than what I would have to leave behind on either side of the fence (here a little self-determination, there a little self-worth), I think of how well acquainted I would have to be with a lover in order for us to mediate these tensions in an intelligent and respectful manner. How does one get there? Through the hookups or the hellish cocktails?

———-

Postscript: A friend asked me what I mean by “metaphorical suicide,” and I think that’s worth exploring more. I mean that the random sexual encounter can be like drinking to the point that you no longer think and feel as yourself. Temporarily killing yourself. A sensory intoxication and a forgetting. Hooking up can be the dramatization of giving up.