/lit/ - Literature

Yes please.

>>16708646
I will try to simplify. The idea is that gnosticism claims knowledge of the deep workings of reality much like moderns do. The scientific instinct is "gnostic" because it tries to expose, challenge, and subvert creation. This is what Voegelin believes.

Blumenberg says that instead modernity is not the fulfillment of this gnostic impulse, but the failure to come to terms with it. there is nothing that can ever definitively prove Descartes' demon isn't real and that everything is an illusion. Descartes demon is a demiurge: a god of deceit. Descartes can't refute the demon, but he can't refute the fact that he is terrified of the demon either. there is something OTHER than the demon, and that is the dualism between the cogito and a (presumably) illusory universe (I'm working off a reading of Cartesian doubt as being filled with the same anxiety and terror of an anti-divine Other that Job was: it wasn't just a quaint thought experiment asking what if nothing aint real broo). from there, the rest is history.

the point is simply that it makes no sense to think modernity is gnostic because the possibility we are all slaves of an evil demonic god is too fucking much for people. the best we can do is assert our irreducible, atomic individuality in the face of such a reality and get on with the work of society - which is exactly what Descartes and the heirs of his subjectivism ultimately do. they compromise with the world, they do not negate it, like a gnostic would.

>>13049233
>G = {A, B, C} is polytheism
this is incorrect representation. Trinity ≠ three things adding up into one, but precisely One. Three hypostases, a single ousia. 'I, Me, Thou.' Every form of Personality. I and Other-I. The Many & the One. Distinction without Separation (in the same sense of how there are many languages: multiple forms of expressing Rational existence. The 'True' Language is not a single language that supersedes all others, but precisely the knowledge of all languages together; i.e. multiplicity but no longer separated. Hence Pentecost. The Apostles speaking all the languages of the world at once etc.)

formal representation of Trinity would be more along the lines of this:
A = A
not-A = B
B = B
not-B = C
C = C
not-C = A
A = A

Cyclical. Enclosed. the One. ' O ' . Holy, Holy, Holy...