/lit/ - Literature

>>22447360
>Christcuck word salad

Only finite beings can be subjects of finite knowledge (conceptual knowledge expressed in propositional statements). God transcends finitude so hard that he even transcends the relation of being(-finite) itself, and thus all possible predications and propositions. The entire cosmos all the way down to its most generic genera isn't enough to describe God since He precedes it and created it. Yet we still have knowledge of Him and He still operates upon reality and has wishes for us, thus humbling us, because even our highest knowledge (of finite things, as finite beings) still can't grasp all the way through to God. There is a whole realm of experience and reality beyond God, beyond even the concepts experience and reality.

It's beautiful once you get what it means. We can only speak paradoxically of God, hence we say that he "is" (we attribute being to him) but also that he "isn't" (we know that our normal being-attributions necessarily fall short, and he must BE in a way that is higher even than Being). Same with negative theology: We say that God is Great, but we don't presume to define Him with this as if it's one of His actual attributes, because He is so great that He even precedes perfect greatness.

>he thinks he can fully explain God

>>22447386
>There is a whole realm of experience and reality beyond God,
beyond the world we know* and all possible worldly knowledge of it

>>22447360
It's always hilarious to me when Christcucks try to reasonably define God, like Spinoza, and end up admitting "He" doesn't exist at all and basically the only reasonable thing we can say is that an impersonal universe exists.

I'm not a Christian, and I'd never engage in an Abrahamic religion, but this is literally the right way to interpret God under all Abrahamic religions; he is beyond being and so cannot be properly described by our words.

>>22447382
You should be able to understand such a simple concept. Whether you're religious or not... Oh god, did I just get trolled?

>>22447360
Yet somehow he became a man? Lol

>>22447455
>Christcucks... like Spinoza
oh nononono.....

>>22447955
Sorry, I meant "similar to how Spinoza did", I could see how you might have gotten confused. The underlying thrust is that theists, whether nominally Jews or Christians, have the exact same issue. The more reasonable you try to be, the more you have to reject a personal God.

>>22447360
Nature exists and man exists as a part of it. The universe is filled with energy and we can't touch that, we have no control over nature that is beyond other humans. Life is then about relationships, we can't touch anything else.

>>22447360
>we do not know what God is
>(two assertions about what God is)

Does this pass for Christian theology?

god is not real, cope

>>22449641
Saying what something is not isn't saying what this is.

I've read it in the Organon of Aristotle

>>22447386
>God cannot be subject to our knowledge
>Proceeds to make statements about God
Make it make sense

>>22449956
But how do you know what it isn't if you don't know what it is? For example, how do you know that something isn't red if you don't know what color it is?

>>22449750
God loves you dearly and will try to steer you towards the best in your life, cope

>is beyond being
>is fully man
do christcucks really?

>>22449988
That's the paradox. All talk of God is an ascent. The most primitive consciousness begins by naively attributing actual attributes to God or trying to make God "like" the mightiest things around, like lions or lightning. But what it is really doing in abstract is attributing "greatness" to God. As consciousness develops and philosophy becomes possible, people then think they've solved the problem by attributing only the loftiest abstractions to God: Great, Infinite, All-Knowing, etc. And these are all true mediately, just like the savage's were. But the loftiest philosophical thought realizes that the essence of God has not actually been exhibited or captured yet. He is so everything that he is that he exceeds the categories themselves. Thought taken to its limits necessarily realizes that even the loftiest categories and concepts presuppose a God that founds THEM, even the very categorial structure of reality relies on God and can't be used to pin God down from within (unlike even the concept "all of creation, the Cosmos"). Look up docta ignorantia.

>>22447360
"I am that I am"
Awful translation but it goes to show "what" God is.

>>22447360
>He is not anything
>literally God is not
So, God doesn't exist? Neat.

>>22450034
What I'm still missing (also from de docta ignorantia) is a reasoning of what makes all positive propositions about god unsatisfactory. Why can't we simply stop at saying god is "great"? Presumably, at least speaking with Nicholas, it's because god transcends being great. But where does this assumption come from? Are we proceeding bottom-up, just trying to find the most all-encompassing thought and then ascribing the name "God" to it, without any practical relevance? Or do we proceed top-down, from the proposition that there is a god, and trying (and failing) to describe him? If so, where does this knowledge that there is such a thing as god about which we can or cannot know things come from?

>>22447360

>>22450072
God doesn't merely exist, no.

>>22450110
Nor not exist

>>22447360
If it is true that God is ineffable, then one can correctly describe himself as ineffable, and so he is not ineffable after all. If God is straightforwardly ineffable, then all of the claims, all of the doctrines that Christians believe (that saints throughout the ages have died defending) are false or at best meaningless.

>>22450150
He does THOUGH.

>>22450168
>does
Does does not
He be non-being?

I follow not >_<

>>22450183
>does not merely not exist
Meaningless

>>22450196
Agreed

>>22450207
Why? Is that your concession?

>>22450183
The principle of being cannot be a being himself, or there would be another principle of account for his being-ness, and so on as infinitum. Therefore the principle of being must transcend being. Or so Plato thought.

>>22450212
See:>>22450215

>>22450078
It's implicitly premised on Greek and medieval Christian realism which assumes that essences can be made evident. The Greek ontology of knowledge instinctively assumed that to know something was to bring it "into the light," to actually "show" the way "through" to "its' ownmost self" (essence), and they really saw this as a kind of "seeing" of the thing by a special faculty. The whole Socratic and Platonic project is basically a collective effort to systematize bringing things' being or essential nature into the light of understanding (through maieusis), and as this project progresses, you get all the characteristic Socratic/Platonic aporia, e.g. in difficult dialogues like the Parmenides. Plato's own answers to "where does this method ultimately lead us? what are the ultimate essences that can be known?" are (probably) negative-theological, or at least they inspired a lot of negative theology, whereas Aristotle is an immanent realist (a position that has its own notorious problems, e.g. the problem of the reality of universals).

This creates a rift throughout the entire Western philosophical tradition as to the reality and "location" of transcendents (universals, essences, but also the essence of the One itself). One can attempt an Aristotelian immanent solution and accept the problems that come with it. This is more or less what Spinoza ultimately does, although on Cartesian grounds which are subtly different, and this notoriously causes even more problems and actually creates a fairly horrifying universe of dead "ideal mechanism." Conversely one can say that there is no guarantee that the "farthest" knowledge of essences that can be reached by worldly reason actually corresponds to the limit of understanding. Which is a complicated way of saying that when you know everything there is to know at a worldly level, like let's say Aristotle claims to do, and you know ALL the genera and ALL the categories of being and so on and so forth, there's still something more to know, which means that this sort of worldly knowing is not enough.

>>22450623
Plato's reason for taking the latter course and not Aristotle's radically immanent course (with all its own aforementioned difficulties) is partly due to him being a Pythagorean and quasi-Orphic. To understand the differences between the two it's useful to look at how they treat number and the derivation (through participation) of number from the fundamental unit etc.

>Are we proceeding bottom-up, just trying to find the most all-encompassing thought and then ascribing the name "God" to it, without any practical relevance?
That's basically it, but the Platonists would say that what you are doing is limning the utterly necessary shape of a thing in your consciousness that you are also logically and necessarily revealing is un-knowable by your consciousness in its worldly form. Aquinas is good on this:
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1012.htm

The neo-Platonists would say that part of what you realize when you approach this refined knowledge of the necessity yet unknowability of God is that you yourself must be rooted in the same essence-beyond-all-finite-essence. So really what you are doing is not just intuiting a meta-essence, but realizing/remembering your own identity with it. Which is of course nondualism. This seems to be present in many of the Gnostic sects. It's in Pseudo-Dionysius and in things like the Cloud of Unknowing.

Check out Nadler's "Spinoza and Philo: The Alleged Mysticism in the Ethics." It's a good introduction to Philo's views on the subject which are basically Christian Platonist. Compare the Philo quotes in that paper with this Plotinus quote (will include in next post).

>>22450626
Plotinus (Enneads 1.6, On Beauty):
>And this inner vision, what is its operation? Newly awakened it is all too feeble to bear the ultimate splendour. Therefore the Soul must be trained—to the habit of remarking, first, all noble pursuits, then the works of beauty produced not by the labour of the arts but by the virtue of men known for their goodness: lastly, you must search the souls of those that have shaped these beautiful forms.

>But how are you to see into a virtuous soul and know its loveliness? Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.

>When you know that you have become this perfect work, when you are self-gathered in the purity of your being, nothing now remaining that can shatter that inner unity, nothing from without clinging to the authentic man, when you find yourself wholly true to your essential nature, wholly that only veritable Light which is not measured by space, not narrowed to any circumscribed form nor again diffused as a thing void of term, but ever unmeasurable as something greater than all measure and more than all quantity—when you perceive that you have grown to this, you are now become vision itself: now call up all your confidence, strike forward yet a step—you need a guide no longer—strain, and SEE.

>>22450631
This may also interest you, it's Rudolf Steiner's thoughts on the nature and value of Hegel's transcendental-ontological logic:
>Now we must ask: how is it with the position of the network of concepts in regard to super-sensible reality? When he, who through the methods of clairvoyance discloses the super-sensible reality, now approaches this reality with his concepts, he will thus find the network of concepts coincides just as much with the super-sensible world. From the other side the super-sensible reality throws its rays as it were on the network of concepts, as on the one side does the sensible reality. ...
>The shadow of the hand would never arise if the hand were not there. The shadow-picture resembles its archetype, but it has one peculiarity: it is [itself] nothing! Through the FACT that in the place of light the non-light comes, through the suppression of the light the shadow-picture comes into being. The concepts arise in exactly the same way, through the fact that BEHIND our thinking soul there stands the super-sensible reality.
>It is of extraordinary importance for Anthroposophists to make their way into these pure concepts. It is at the same time an important and strongly effective means of training the soul, and a means of overcoming a certain indolence and slovenliness of soul. These are effectively banished by Hegel's ‘Dialectic’. One has, you know, this unequivocal feeling of the slovenliness of the concepts in the perusal of modern books, when one has trained oneself in Hegel's system of concepts.

All of this is basically nondualist and presupposes that any clarification of one's own concepts, one's own thought, any real philosophy in other words, WILL both purify and clarify THE categories underlying all possible cognition (and/or immanent reality itself), AND it will also converge on the necessity of going BEYOND these categories through a leap into some kind of direct, unmediated, supra-categorial knowledge, in which one recognizes (Erkennen) one IS reality and the categories are IN oneself. In other words, one's microcosmos reveals itself to have been always already identical with the macrocosmos. "As above so below," "thou art that (tat tvam asi)" etc.

>>22450638
We may distinguish immanent nondualism from transcendent nondualism wherein the former does not extend to absolute monism but merely makes claims about a sort of eudaimonic enlightenment flow w universe which is not necessarily God or even if united w God does not imply dissolution of individuality in God or the all...