/lit/ - Literature

>>15759746

No worries, I know the feeling well. To every thing there is a season. Don't feel obligated to respond any more than you feel inclined to.

>I think a True Buddhist would look at someone like Jonas, who says that we have to deepen our alienation with the world to force a climactic rupture, and laugh and laugh. He'd say aversion is as much a move in the Game as anything else.

Aversion is certainly a move, often a very important one ("Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding."), but it cannot become a self-reinforcing mechanism, it has to be uniquely chosen each time.

>let go of the belief that engaging with evil affirms the system of negation that leads to evil in the first place, where avoidance implicates it all the same.

Exactly, engagement with and aversion from evil thoughts both occur in the World, in Being. In a healthy mind, each have their due places.

>here are those who are not in a position to affirm it. To affirm Being and all the suffering it entails would also feel like a betrayal of that Manichaean compassion for plants and animals: the passive sufferers of this whole drama.

A more radical phrasing: suffering itself is affirmation, and all Life is the affirmation of suffering, of Being. Now, that isn't to say that we don't have a moral perspective on life and a duty to civilize nature, it's to say exactly the opposite: that nature is anarchic, pure affirmation, free of Man's moral perspective and owing no duty to any civilization beyond what rote instincts of socialization or kinship are already present in their blood; hence, Man has "dominion over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." We must limit unnecessary suffering in nature, for though it is not sinful (unnatural), we are obliged to by natural law and our God-given power of morality.

I feel like I'm on shaky ground, my lack of theological rigor and understanding is palpable.

>Tiantai Buddhism has a very interesting answer to this...I'll just acknowledge gnosticism doesn't have a monopoly on the answer.

Buddhism is among the more close-to-the-bone of pessimistic schools, the image of Pessimism (in the scheme of pessimistic thought –> pessimistic logic/way of thinking –> Pessimism as personal/unconscious moral philosophy) itself, a direct gateway to the negative Outside. Tread lightly, it easily ensnares the modern mind.

>gnostics love Life, but hate the World. They love life so much they'd rather die

Of course, authentic spirituality is will to martyr one's body in the name of the Body, the issue is when this becomes a schematic tendency which overrides the (romantic/transcendent) Body for the sake of the (phyiscal/immanent) body, suffering being the widest gateway for this sort of placing of the immanent over the transcendent. Gnosticism is tricky that way, it bemoans the body in order to later say that the Body is too good for it.

As always, glad to chat & respond at your leisure.