God* use

SPEAKING OF GOD

SIGN USE AFTER THE 60'S -- the story of how post-modernism has tried to find a soul it could believe in ('knows').

PART I. Completion of Textualism
-critique of the language of science: positivism
-"Is God Is Dead?" -- Time Magazine cover '65.'66 .
Sensationalized presentation of Thomas J.J. Alltizer's theological work having these roots:

A. Nietzsche's "God is Dead" /
over-man thesis (early 1900's German instinctual nativism -- the existential apex of 'atheism': '2nd wave' of "Man is the Measure" Enlightenment (modernism). )

B. Theology and history: "Alltizer's religious proclamation viewed God's death (really a self-extinction) as a process that began at the world's creation and came to an end through Jesus Christ—whose crucifixion in reality poured out God's full spirit into this world."

C. Philosophy

1. Existentialism: Sartre's critique of pre-defining text as false consciousness.

Sartre originated a personally situated approach to what had become more an academic classical pursuit, rather than pursuing systematic world-view, to which earlier philosophy had aspired.

."One is never free of one's "situation," Sartre tells us, though one is always free to deny ("negate") that situation and try to change it. To be human, to be conscious, is to be free to imagine, free to choose, and responsible for one's lot in life.

"As a student, Sartre was fascinated by Edmund Husserl's new philosophical method, phenomenology. His first essays were direct responses to Husserl and applications of the phenomenological method. His essay on The Imagination in 1936 established the groundwork for much of what was to follow: the celebration of our remarkable freedom to imagine the world other than it is and (following Kant) the way that this ability informs all of our experience. In Transcendence of the Ego (1937) he reconsidered Husserl's central idea of a "phenomenological reduction" (the idea of examining the essential structures of consciousness as such) and argued (following Heidegger) that one cannot examine consciousness without at the same time recognizing the reality of actual objects in the world. In other words, there can be no such "reduction." In his novel Nausea (1938), Sartre made this point in a protracted example: his bored and often nauseated narrator confronts a gnarled chestnut tree in the park and recognizes with a visceral shock that its presence is simply given and utterly irreducible. In The Transcendence of the Ego Sartre also reconsiders the notion of the self, which Husserl (and so many earlier philosophers) had identified with consciousness. But the self, Sartre argues, is not "in" consciousness, much less identical to it. The self is out there "in the world, like the self of another." In other words, the self is an ongoing project in the world with other people; it is not simply self-awareness or self-consciousness as such ("I think, therefore I am").
At bottom is a metaphysics of consciousness:
This separation of self and consciousness and the rejection of the self as simply self-consciousness provide the framework for Sartre's greatest philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943). Its structure is unabashedly Cartesian, consciousness ("being-for-itself") on the one side, the existence of mere things ('being-in-itself") on the other. (The phraseology comes from Hegel). But Sartre does not fall into the Cartesian trap of designating these two types of being as separate "substances." Instead, Sartre describes consciousness as "nothing"--"not a thing" but an activity, "a wind blowing from nowhere toward the world." Sartre often resorts to visceral metaphors when developing this theme (e.g., "a worm coiled in the heart of being"), but much of what he is arguing is familiar to philosophical readers in the more metaphor-free work of Kant, who also warned against the follies ("paralogisms") of understanding consciousness as itself a (possible) object of consciousness rather than as the activity of constituting the objects of consciousness. (As the lens of the camera can never see itself--and in a mirror only sees a reflection of itself--consciousness can never view itself as a consciousness and is only aware of itself--"for itself"--through its experience of objects.

The politics of psychosemiotic freedom can be rooted in this metaphysics. It points to the general distinction between consciousness and thought as distinct brain energies).

2. Logical Positivism: The syntactical critique of discourse stripped the content of everything textual commmunicated by the Bible term "God" of everything except verifiable statements of fact, many of which turn out to be dubious, if not wild confabulations. In the history of mankind's march toward knowledge, and mastery of nature by science, The Bible's God, as content of Hebrew consciousness, may have played an important role, but only as propadeutic approximation, already assigned functional (transcendental), not transcendent, status by Kant.


3. T.J.J. Althizer: "God is Dead" <= a meta-language construct (for: "God" has ceased to communicate anything; whose who continue to use it are passing ancient hallowed wind (<- L.W.'s metaphor for logically unreconstructed harangue was "gassing off").... stated in object-language grammar, that is to say, as if asserting a fact. But the positivist critique of true-false discourse required inferential link to verifiable empirical propositions, which A. J. Ayer had showed "God", as a putative name, lacked (Language Truth and Logic). Yet "god", the generalized token including names from ancient pantheons, was the philosophical capstone, or culmination of many early systems, the most important and conprehensive being Aristotle's, equating Deus with "thought thinking thought" ("nous nousing"; the mind thinking itself). The positivist critique left science intact, but eliminated talk of "God", however pretentious in tone, as metaphysical -- a kind of literal nonsense. While Althizer's conception was more strictly a theological interpretation, it served as a perfect metaphysical metaphor for what positivist philosophy did to the "idea".

4. L.W. Wittgenstein, again, arrived in his later work at the master metaphor of "language game" for discourse in general; each sign* carrying rules for its use with it; each content communicated by strings of signs actualizes a "move" within a posited 'game' set-up.

Note: The metaphor does not import 'a motive' for moves, but sophistication in pursuit of rigorous (so that a computer could do it) rules for deductive argument, spanning millenia as core consistent intellectual thread) argues irreftably for one motive as collectively dominant in that psychosemiotic thread:


Part II. After the Purge -- "post Modernism"

What happens to the Token of completing totality
after its Text is refuted?

alt.: how can the psychic unity of mythopoeic discourse be restored after its text has been critically reduced to phenomenal content? originally organized by unconscious group-fantasy (shared fetal origins of experience).

That is the question classical philosophy left thought to ponder.

It's answer lies in reversing "below" for "above" in the old meme: "as above, so below". We were "born that way" -- that is, as children of mother's womb, internally connected by fetal origins of experience. The earliest rhythms of relationship are between fetus and placenta; an entire drama (=>'narrative history') is lived through, and left imprinted under trauma of birth. This is the bond Squared by creation myths. Ritual observance of creation in yearly renewal began in Sumer, under Marduk, hero of human children he released from Mother Tiamat's belly by killing her champion Kingsor.


Speaking psychic containers
-from the sky: astrology
-from statues: idolatry
-from books: "inspired scripture"
-in barrels: ZyklonB

**** 7.31.'11
PUBLIC GOD-use

And the Rule of Distrust: Never trust anyone you don't know who says "God"
(maybe its just the Protestant in me)

Comment on the pro- and con- of Julie Lewis' use of Christian prayer to open Broome County Legislature session

http://www.pressconnects.com/article/20110731/VIEWPOINTS02/107310310/Religion-government-should-not-mix?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|Viewpoints|s


There must be a point of inner unity -- "what we are all doing here, together" -- in order for a common bond of what each 'brings to the table', from having won election -- and to re-focus collective attention from campaigning to Legislating. Some carry-over unity from one mode of public discourse to another is required to maintain a larger group identity; but some break from rhetoric designed to win votes, to the grammar of discourse for participating in meetings and discussions about policy and action, is historical protocol and ( hold) appropriate. The notion of prayer, as in calling upon a higher power each may or not relate to in their own way, but some are commited to as part of pledge of their inner pledge of service, to guide the process toward good governance, bridges these two layers of public discourse.

Such, in general, is the psychosemiotic function of "swearing in" ceremonies for judges; pledges, as to the flag; vows, as in marriage; promises to pay, as in securing loans; + (here) prayer before conducting (some) official public business, as chaplains opening sessions of Congress. The religious moment, if invited rather than imposed (couldn't the Legislature vote not to have a prayer?), takes the edge off strict rule-following, by infusing a spirit. If that spirit is consonant with that of America's founding fathers, it won't -- can't -- exclude participation by alternate (to Christian) religion, nor by those professing no religion whatever, since it might not have come up or figured into the campaign.

And, it can be argued, a new bond comes into play, at a higher (more inclusive) level of discourse -- supervenient "we"-ness --in addressing the containing group. However, if there is to be unity up and down the line, each one's 'constituent we' must fold into the shared grammar with other's, so 'calling ON a higher power' would have the effect of 'calling FOR empowerment of a larger group spirit', which would be entirely appropriate.

The problem -- and it is a big one -- with this public act of sign-use lies not with "God", the token (of 'higher power', or 'completing totality'), but "God" the text -- as if the word referred to something private to the individual user. So, if the "God"-token is used
symbolically to evoke a felt, but undefined, container of the rules of discourse, the tendency will be for it to become personalized by private textual associations, thus converting its helpful role as softening legal edges, into a deeper, necessarily EXclusive,
bond. The harbinger of an agenda for those aligned with its user. No non-believer could be called upon to participate in that agenda which they did not frame and may absolutely oppose as reversal of reality itself. However, many are polite and won't bring it up. "Positions" harden at a meta-level, e.g., "Is this a Christian nation, or what?" Each one claiming right to use of the word "God" both: 1. pubically, as a token; but 2. reserving a private meaning, however profoundly wise and committed they are to its highest authoritative text ...can only invite, first, spiritual anarchy; then warfare.

That is the point brought into focus by Ms. Lewis' act. If she means "God" in the same sense of G.W. Bush, or Joe Liebermann pronouncing "God's choice" was Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, free speech reserves the right to challenge her use as abominable in its own terms -- anti-God, imposing the reverse of what the term means in Christianity, for political purposes. It's not just that atheists are justified in declining to participate -- with open gesture; turning backs. for instance. It's that real "God"-fearing people -- if the term means anything at all, when text is added to token in actual use, as in prayer -- may feel privately compelled, as did Norway psychotic Anders Breivic, to act out some Almighty




Rule of distrust: never trust anyone you don't know who says "God"..