The ideas presented here are largely inspired by Hegel. On the other hand, the ideas presented point beyond all philosophical and religious authority.
Theology is God. Theology is our protagonist. Theology seeks to know God. But theology discovers that it had the been the God it desired know all throughout its search for God. Indeed, theology created or enlarged itself in this pursuit of God, without realizing that it was constructing the very God that it enlarged itself to pursue or know more effectively. We might say that (in terms of this theory) God is nothing but his own knowledge of himself. So God is self-consciousness. But this is a result. Until this particular conceptual but passionate journey is untaken, such statements can only appear as absurdities. The undeveloped conception of God does recognize that it is indeed a conception. The journey of self-consciousness involves a recognition that the intelligible structure of reality is conceptual. Common sense, which deserves honor as a foundation for any "higher" kind of thinking, tends to be lazy in all thinking that is not practical. As a general rule, conceptions of God are vague and are perhaps better described as pictures than conceptions. We think of a person who is somehow an object that is really "there" and yet not at all material like a tree or a stone. On the other hand, this is how we think of our own "souls," which are attached to or within our bodies. We tend to vaguely think of God as a passionate disembodied mind. He is passionate because he loves. He is mind because, like us, he is self-conscious. This theory is likely to appeal only to those who value conceptual clarity for its own sake, as an "esthetic" value that has no justification outside itself.
Continuing, we can say that theology evolves its notion of itself as well as its notion of God as it progresses. This progression is complete when these notions finally coincide. If this sounds blasphemous, this is probably because the blasphemous "I" of theology is understood as an idiosyncratic being. But the idea here is that theology (or the individual) raises himself up to God.
Theology is evolving process. Its result is that it discovers itself to be God's own self-consciousness. But throughout the process (until this consummation), it understands God as an object of thought apart from the thinking of this object that it itself is. It does not yet understand God as a self-thinking thought that exists "above" or as the "negation" of "idols," or these limitations of God that are experienced as pieties. The individual thinker, "purified" of various identifications, discovers himself to be "God." But this "dis-identified" I is the universal I of first-person "Christ consciousness." This theory presents the "true" or "revealed" Christ to be exactly this first-person conceptually mediated experience. In the terms of this theory, the adoration of Christ as an "external" person or object is an unstable position within the journey of theology to its complete self-consciousness.
Ultimately this theology leads "behind" words or toward a radical freedom in the use of words. So theology-as-God is "also" an "atheistic" theory in the sense that the "God" involved is nothing like the God of the typically religious. This God is also the "I" as "absolute negativity" (Hegel) or "nothingness." Note that this "nothingness" is also the "infinite" or the comprehension of everything that is not God as a unity. Typically religion is understood as belief in supernatural objects, but the theory presented here is stubbornly committed to the realm of concepts. It understands human experience as thinking and feeling, where "feeling" includes both emotion and sensation. While it does repurpose the ideas and myths of traditional religion, it understands itself to be "rational." But this theory also examines the idea of the rational as one of the "masks" of God. This theory is a "negative theology."
This theory also understands itself as "poetry." It expresses itself as non-fiction, but it does not understand itself as science. It does not a make a claim to universal validity. It includes what might be called skepticism and relativism, though it avoids diluting such skepticism or relativism by making claims that nothing can be known or that all is relative. Instead this is a theory of freedom that exists as consciousness of itself. This freedom includes a freedom from the need to claim objectivity or universal validity. In this sense the theory is "post-philosophical" or "post-metaphysical." Pragmatism is one of its fathers. It offers itself as a tool constructed from concepts. It understands this tool to likely be of use only to a few who happen to be sufficiently similar to the creator of this tool. The creator of this tool was hugely influenced by thinkers who came before him. Nevertheless he feels (I feel) that the current theory is an especially digestible update of these influences.
The essence of this theory has already been presented on Reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fichte/comments/69t6n9/freedom_incarnate_creative_misreading_of_the/
Note that this particular post is largely composed of difficult quotes from my influences. Other posts in the Fichte subreddit elucidate, interpret or creatively misread these quotes in terms of the theory that I share as a poem, conceptual art, or tool made of words to be used in unforeseen-by-me ways.
No comments:
Post a Comment