goldenecitrone
post tenebras lux
I've been converted, I'm afraid. I now have no doubts about the existence of Phildwyer. Or his capacity to down red wine. Hope you had a good time, Phil. 
The Rational Proof of God's Existence
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"And what doeth the saint in the forest?" asked Zarathustra.
The saint answered: "I make hymns and sing them; and in making hymns I laugh and weep and mumble: thus do I praise God.
With singing, weeping, laughing, and mumbling do I praise the God who is my God. But what dost thou bring us as a gift?"
When Zarathustra had heard these words, he bowed to the saint and said: "What should I have to give thee! Let me rather hurry hence lest I take aught away from thee!"- And thus they parted from one another, the old man and Zarathustra, laughing like schoolboys.
When Zarathustra was alone, however, he said to his heart: "Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!"
The saint answered: "I make hymns and sing them; and in making hymns I laugh and weep and mumble: thus do I praise God.
With singing, weeping, laughing, and mumbling do I praise the God who is my God. But what dost thou bring us as a gift?"
When Zarathustra had heard these words, he bowed to the saint and said: "What should I have to give thee! Let me rather hurry hence lest I take aught away from thee!"- And thus they parted from one another, the old man and Zarathustra, laughing like schoolboys.
When Zarathustra was alone, however, he said to his heart: "Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!"
parallelepipete
Aelod cysylltiol y Taliban Cymraeg
That was the sound of Poi E fumigating the room to get rid of gods. Though from the smell, I think a new supernatural entity might have just come into being!Jo/Joe said:ooooarghh, what was that?
*leaves room*
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
gurrier said:
Quite right. Personally speaking I am a member of the Cult of the Tooth Fairy.
Proof that Alan Greenspan is Satan, and Anatole Kaletsky the Angel of Death:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1061-1844850,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1061-1844850,00.html
Just as a kind of afterword, I've been reading a lot of apophatic theology lately. I think its a load of bollocks--it argues that God can only be spoken of negatively, as what He is not--but it has led me to re-read the late Derrida (some of you probably know that Derrida turned to the theological "via negativa" in the last ten years of his life). I've been particularly impressed by "Specters of Marx," which offers an excellent theological reading of "Capital." I thought I'd post one particularly striking passage here. Derrida is discussing the same issue as I did earlier in this thread: the fact that exchange-value (and by extension money and financial value, the powers that rule the world) are *spiritual* forces.
The important point for my case here is that it is *not* incumbent upon those who seek to prove the existence of God to prove the existence of spiritual forces per se. The world is demonstrably ruled by the spiritual force of money. The only question at issue, then, is the nature of this spiritual force. From the description of that nature, we can deduce the existence and nature of other spiritual forces, including God. Anyway, here's Derrida. I'll post some more later if you want, or maybe someone is already familiar with this book and would like to discuss it?
"Marx declares that the thing in question, namely, the commodity, is not so simple (a warning that will elicit snickers from all the imbeciles, until the end of time, who never believe anything, of course, because they are so sure that they see what is seen, everything that is seen, only what is seen). The commodity is even very complicated; it is blurred, tangled, paralysing, aporetic, perhaps undecidable (ein sehr vertracktes Ding). It is so disconcerting, this commodity-thing, that one has to approach it with “metaphysical” subtlety and “theological” niceties. Precisely in order to analyse the metaphysical and the theological that constructed the phenomenological good sense of the thing itself, of the immediately visible commodity, in flesh and blood: as what it is “at first sight” (auf den ersten Blick). This phenomenological good sense may perhaps be valid for use-value. It is perhaps even meant to be valid only for use-value, as if the correlation of these concepts answered to this function: phenomenology as the discourse of use-value so as not to think the market or in view of making oneself blind to exchange-value."
The important point for my case here is that it is *not* incumbent upon those who seek to prove the existence of God to prove the existence of spiritual forces per se. The world is demonstrably ruled by the spiritual force of money. The only question at issue, then, is the nature of this spiritual force. From the description of that nature, we can deduce the existence and nature of other spiritual forces, including God. Anyway, here's Derrida. I'll post some more later if you want, or maybe someone is already familiar with this book and would like to discuss it?
"Marx declares that the thing in question, namely, the commodity, is not so simple (a warning that will elicit snickers from all the imbeciles, until the end of time, who never believe anything, of course, because they are so sure that they see what is seen, everything that is seen, only what is seen). The commodity is even very complicated; it is blurred, tangled, paralysing, aporetic, perhaps undecidable (ein sehr vertracktes Ding). It is so disconcerting, this commodity-thing, that one has to approach it with “metaphysical” subtlety and “theological” niceties. Precisely in order to analyse the metaphysical and the theological that constructed the phenomenological good sense of the thing itself, of the immediately visible commodity, in flesh and blood: as what it is “at first sight” (auf den ersten Blick). This phenomenological good sense may perhaps be valid for use-value. It is perhaps even meant to be valid only for use-value, as if the correlation of these concepts answered to this function: phenomenology as the discourse of use-value so as not to think the market or in view of making oneself blind to exchange-value."
By the way, if that passage is obscure, Derrida is talking about how the exchange of two different objects (a cow and a lamb for instance) requires the ability to see the *value* of the cow in the physical *body* of the lamb. This is the ghostly "exchange-value," which develops into money. I discuss this in detail, to great hilarity from the "imbeciles" to whom Derrida alludes, in the first ten or so pages of this thread.
If I accept that knowledge of value is necesary for exhange, why would this knowledge have to come from sight, and not reason? I see no reason why something like an objects value could not be known by reason. I also see no reason why value thus known would be insufficient for exchange. If this is the case then the fact that we exchage objects is not proof that value is visible, which is what it seems that you are arguing.phildwyer said:
There was no hilarity at the idea of exchange-value, which more or less everyone on the thread accepts. The hilarity was at the expense of your third category '*value*' which is neither use- nor exchange-value, and which is definied as either 'the concept of labour' or 'labour as a totality'. Both of these are signifiers for which I'm still unable to envisage any useful referents.
Fruitloop said:
The notion of "labour as a totality" is the means by which Marx surpasses Adam Smith's labour theory of value. Marx understood that value was not produced by particular acts of labour, as Smith had thought, but by an *abstraction* from such acts into the general concept of socially necessary labour time (SNALT as it is know to devotees). It is this conception of labour that is expressed in financial value. But you're right, *no-one* on this thread understood this bit, and this was the point at which our discussion degenerated into a riotous orgy of idiot scepticism. So look, just forget about "value," and let's talk in the imprecise but more easily grasped terms of "money." What is money?
Money is a medium of representation that has achieved the practical power of transforming essence by changing appearance. It is the force which turns things into what they are not. To possess money is to possess this anti-natural, magical power. Furthermore, quite apart from its innate capacities, money is ontologically the most unnatural force of all, because it is an externalized representation of human activity, of human life. Money is the objectified form of subjectivity, at once the cause and the effect of conceiving of human beings as things. Money, in short, is the power that transforms human beings into objects: death. As Marx puts it in the 1844 Manuscripts:
"The distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternisation of impossibilities--the divine power of money--lies in its character as men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind. That which I am unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all my individual essential powers are incapable, I am able to do by means of money. Money thus turns each of these powers into something which in itself it is not--turns it, that is, into its contrary. (International Publishers 1975, 3.312)"
According to Marx, the effect of money on the natural, physical world is precisely magical: it over-rides the laws of nature and abolishes the distinction between fantasy and reality. Finally, then, money is an efficacious sign (hence the Spanish word for cash, effectivo). It is a dead symbol of human life that has achieved a fetishistic, performative power, and the effect of this power is to confuse reality with imagination, to destroy the natural essences of things, and to extinguish the entelechy (soul) of human beings. Marx again:
"Money as the external, universal medium and faculty (not springing from man as man or from human society as society) for turning an image into reality and reality into a mere image, transforms the real essential powers of man and nature into what are merely abstract notions and therefore imperfections and tormenting chimeras, just as it transforms real imperfections and chimeras--essential powers which are really impotent, which exist only in the imagination of the individual--into real essential powers and faculties…. Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and confuses all things, it is the general confounding and confusing of all things--the world upside-down--he confounding and confusing of all natural and human qualities." (ibid.)
This is an extremely precise description of what the witch-hunters of the sixteenth century called "Satan." It has rarely been recognized as such, partly because the manuscripts of 1844, like the Grundrisse, which expresses itself in similar terms, remained unpublished until the materialist, Soviet interpretation of Marx had calcified into orthodoxy, but also because of the ubiquitous success of the process it describes.
We are now fully accustomed to take *appearance* for *reality,* to assume that the world as it *appears* to us is *real.* To put it another way, we are no longer conscious of mediation, we believe that our perception of the world is immediate. To take a medium of representation for reality is to fetishize signification as performative, to believe that signs constitute things. Once sufficiently captivated by signs that we can no longer perceive their referents, we lapse into the supposition that anything which is not immediately perceptible is not real. There are no longer any *res non apparens*; if anything does not appear it is nonexistent. And this issues in the kind of blind literalism which assumes that, because we do not encounter a ruddy fellow with horns and a goatee, Satan does not exist. As we have seen by the blind stubborness of many on this thread.
I dunno man, Marx was a materialist and everyone knows it. This whole thing of "we think we see evrything that can be seen, and nothing more is to be seen" is as silly as "we can't see it so its not material", which is what you seem to be saying. And what was wrong with my point two posts ago, I'm interested?phildwyer said:
Who's 'we'? I certainly don't think of sensory data as being uniquely real, whatever that might mean. Neither does the requirement that any explanation should account for the apparent state of affairs in question without any extraneous content equate to a fetishisation of the sign AFAICS.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
long story short: has god's existence been proved on this thread? y/n
Fruitloop said:
Hmm I think Phyldwyer is on the road to envisaging Nymps and Sylphs and other spirits hidden in the woods or streams. He thinks that money because it has influence therefore is "spirit".
I think this line of argument is even weaker than the old Billy Graham idea that if an appetite exists there is something to satisfy it. He maintained that you get thirsty and there is water, you get hungry and there is food so that as there is an appetite or for satisfaction of spiritual needs then that implies that there is Spirit.
I am off to the bank to check my spiritual capital
Hocus
118118 said:
I'm not saying its visible. The value of the cow must be *perceived* in the body of the lamb, but by the mind, not the eye. However, the physical shape and appearance of objects, and even animals, and even some *people* is indeed influenced by exchange-value. When something is produced to be exchanged, rather than to be used, it *looks* different. But this is another matter.
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