A baby after his Dead Goggles were installed, and before they became invisible
Thus I wrote in 2002, and in other pieces around the millennium. Back then, I was writing from the assumptions of science generally, and biological in particular - and was (and for another half decade or so) metaphysically an atheist-materialist.
In other words, I assumed reality was the world described by "science"; and, more importantly, by bureaucracy, the mass media, law and all the other mandatory-enforced social institutions.
And also the same world is assumed by religion, including Christianity in its churches, in all its public and regarded-as-essential manifestations.
Yes! The Christian churches, Christian people, all assume the same abstract models of reality as do science and government; because they believe that most of the world is dead (or rather unalive) and ultimate reality is divided-into and consists of abstractions such as time and infinity.
They assume that physics (and mathematics) describes ultimate reality, to which life, consciousness, humanity are added-on sometime later.
Indeed; it has long been the contention of sophisticated Christians theologians that God is dead; in effect! Dead either because God can only be described "negatively", by what God is not - or because God is only knowable in terms of attributes described in terms of philosophical abstractions.
To circle back to my metaphor that "humans see the world through social spectacles" - it is evident that my social interpretation of reality was then being regarded as due to a focusing and filtering scheme that was interposed between a dead reality and the livingness of human beings.
Now I have an opposite metaphysics: I assume that creation (and God) consists of beings in relationships - Reality is Anthropomorphic.
The Social Spectacles were not so much installed into us by natural selection, nor helpfully provided even by God; as being our innate and primordial knowledge of the nature of reality.
Not "spectacles" at all - but a proper apprehension of truth.
And it is life-filtering Dead Goggles that get installed onto us in childhood; Dead Goggles that interpose an un-natural, abstract, mediated and modelled, conceptualization of reality.
It is Dead Goggles that generate modernity and Modern men; obscuring our innate, spontaneous, and natural apprehension of the living beings and purposive nature of this divine creation we inhabit.
Once properly installed, Dead Goggles can be difficult to remove
2 comments:
I totally agree that from my point of view, which is subjective, that relationships are primary. For instance I notice in my dreams repeated minor tweaking of (how I conceive) relationships from the past: with family and close friends, most of whom are no longer around much. I don't dream about atoms, money or even language. The relationships were constitutive not only of my early mind but apparently remain as the core of what was built later on (i.e. my mind as it is now).
We live in a hostile culture which encourages people to discount their own subjectivity and focus on material things like atoms and fields and money and system propaganda. And many of us obey, putting on our 'dead goggles' despite the fact that we don't live in the physical world, only our bodies do. We are virtual creatures.
Yet I still think the objective perspective is valid!
It's a different perspective on the same underlying reality. It can only be appreciated and understood subjectively, from our own personal experience, but it is real. Physics is its base layer. Without objectivity the activity of science wouldn't have been possible.
However physics won't be useful in explaining what matter does for very much longer. This because the physical world will be increasingly dominated by life and consciousness. As you have said, every thing is part of someone's body. Or part of someone's feudal domain as Catacomb Resident would say. This will become more and more visibly obvious, assuming we survive. It will provide further motivation for culturally rehabilitating the subjective-relationships-between-beings outlook.
@Ron - I think we must choose between these world views, since both cannot be fundamental reality - no matter which "model" we may choose to use for present purposes.
In more ancient times, it didn't much matter what people said or wrote or put into laws; because the animistic perspective was always there, unconsciously.
Hence, many Christians have been sitting on the fence since the time of Jesus - claiming one thing then another, as was convenient or useful. In the Genesis fable, God apparently did cosmology, physics and chemistry first; then biology; last thing was human psychology - but at the time I am sure that everything was unconsciously assumed to be alive.
But now things have come to a point and we must choose. Either nothing is really alive, and everything is "a thing", as our culture assumes; or else everything is alive, conscious, purposive etc: i.e. Beings.
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