The garden, ark and babel form the myths of bronze age. Abram and family are in a time after the collapse. Although it seems to be a bit of an anachronism as the major collapse is being described in genesis. But they are still writing about a time when whole villages can be razed without worry.
I just read your Babel story and loved it! I'm a sucker for "Imagine this..." scenarios. And any "imagine this" that takes me to the foot of the Tower of Babel is an imaginative leap worth making. I also enjoyed your translator riff. And isn't that what we've all become -- translators who try and make sense of what we're all babbling about. :-) ... Thanks for writing that post... and for sharing it.
Alan writes, "But because speech is colored always by human perceptions, passions, interests, and desires, the world as captured in language is necessarily partial"
All of that has it's source in the divisive nature what we are made of, thought.
Thought divides the single unified reality in to conceptual parts.
The world as captured in language is necessarily partial because when we observe the world, we, who are made of thought, see the conceptual parts that thought has created. We are made of a medium that operates by a process of division, and so we see division everywhere we look. It's like wearing tinted sunglasses and then all of reality looks tinted. The tint, and the perceived division, is not a property of reality, but rather a property of the tool being used to observe reality.
The implication of "the world as captured in language is necessarily partial" is that philosophy and (most of) religion are powerless to overcome this limited partial view, because these methodologies are made of thought, that which is generating the perception of division. And so, the more we try to analyze the division in order to overcome it, the more division we create.
We can observe that every philosophy and religion in history which is attempting to bring people together inevitably subdivides in to internal factions which typically then come in to conflict with each other. The universal nature of this process demonstrates that it's not the content of particular philosophies and religions which is the true source of this division and conflict, but rather something deeper, the inherently divisive nature of that which all philosophies, religions and people are made of, thought.
This is why human suffering and conflict goes on and on and endlessly on in century after century. If the source of the conflict and suffering was something wrong in the content of thought, by now we would have found the correct content of thought, and all would be well. But the true source of the suffering and conflict lies deeper, not in the content of thought, but beyond our reach in the nature of thought. The content of thought is just a symptom of thought's fundamental nature.
Philosophers and clerics tend to hate this way of looking at the human condition, because they've built up a huge pile of sophisticated thoughts which they then use to define themselves, and justify their purpose in the world.
But the true purpose of philosophy is to destroy itself, to reveal though a process of rational analysis the impotence of rational analysis. And the true purpose of religion is, as Jesus once said, to "die to be reborn", ie. to surrender the "me" and the illusion of division.
The problem of course is that once one attempts to share such understandings of the human condition in language, we're back in the same old thought generated division game, the ancient cultural patterns repeat themselves yet again, and the human circus continues, going endlessly round and round the noisy merry-go-round to nowhere.
You practice what my seventh-grade English teacher would call “effective repetition.” And it *is* effective: I’m beginning to agree with you!
But here’s my stumbling block: Let’s assume you’re right. Thought itself is divisive. And every conscious effort to overcome our divisions is doomed before we begin. Okay. Now what? Where does your insight lead us? What does Day 1 of TannyConsciousness look like? (“Just the distinction ‘Day 1’ indicates that you really don’t get it,” says Phil.)
Related question: Why does the Dalai Lama want to return to Tibet? It seems… divisive.
Repetition: Some times unfamiliar ideas need to be made more familiar before they will be considered.
To address your reasonable question....
First, it seems useful just to try to understand the human condition. It's unlikely we'll arrive at useful solutions if we don't understand what the problem is.
Next, attempting to better understand the human condition is interesting, a value in itself.
Next, if the ultimate source of our problems is the fundamental nature of thought itself, this insight might cause us to take any and all ideologies a little less seriously, and thus be less likely to kill each other over them.
Next, taking our analysis deeper helps us better understand many of the things that humans do. As example, if I study Religion XYZ, then I'll learn only about Religion XYZ. But if I study the nature of thought, I may discover that all religions are a response to that nature.
Next, we can reason that the best philosophy is the one most in touch with the nature of reality. And what is reality? Overwhelmingly nothing, at every scale. Understanding the nature of thought can help us understand why we typically focus on "things", the very tiniest fraction of reality, instead of the nothing, the vast majority of reality.
Next, there can be personal value in understanding the nature of thought. Psychological suffering is made of thought. Why not try to understand that which our suffering is made of?
The best way to see the inherently divisive nature of thought is probably not to read anybody's theories on the matter, but to instead observe it in action within one's own mind.
As a place to start, we can observe how our mental experience is divided between the observer "me", and the observed "my thoughts".
That's the divisive nature of thought in action, imposing a pattern of division upon itself.
Good answer. What occurs to me is that we're interested in different questions. Your interest is essentially philosophical: "the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline." In question form: What is true? What is reality? What is the nature of thought? ... They are interesting questions, but they're not my top priority. My questions are more like: "Why am I here? How shall I live? What shall I value? How should I spend the limited amount of time I have in this life?"
Philosophy is what the guys did in Athens. They sat around contemplating the Good -- then they screwed little boys and drank to excess and dramatized the ancient Greek myths that taught us about tragedy and that Oedipus could not avoid his fate because his fate was inevitable. And the same shit was going to happen, generation after generation.
Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, my ancestors were trying to work out a way of life that was responsive to what they perceived to be their higher calling. Screwing little boys was off limits. Screwing your neighbor's wife was also off limits. Drinking to excess was not encouraged. Mimicking the values of the rest of the world was considered a bad move. Were they successful? No, not entirely. But I think they might have had a sense of a destination, one that was embedded in the Story they told their kids... who told their kids... who told their kids... and now I'm sitting here today, telling it to mine. The good news? This Story is now familiar to at least four billion people. Yes, of course there are lots of problems with the Story -- we keep killing each other (or the violent men do). But what gives me hope -- and that's what at the center of all this: Hope -- is that we now have a narrative framework to address what ails us. Almost two billions Muslims running around, people who see themselves as children of Abraham. So what we have is NOT an old-fashioned tribal conflict in which the people who worship the Moon kill the people who worship the Steve the Supreme Leader. Instead, we have a family disagreement. And while family disputes are not easy, they are potentially addressable.
Anyway, my point here -- and I do have one! -- is that we can get stuck on what exactly is the nature of thought. Or we can talk about how we spend the limited amount of time we have here. What's should we do? How should we behave? What is a just society? Those are practical, down-to-earth questions that I believe are a primary focus of my Tribe. We spend less time on the nature of G*d and more time on how we should live our lives. This is a gross generalization, of course. But I hope you get my point.
We agree that some ideologies are indeed better for humanity than others, and thus content of thought strategies can provide real value. I'm not dismissing that at all. Remember please, as a hippy I'm a child of the Catholics, and thus essentially a watered down wannabe Jew with too much hair. :-)
By the way, over the last six months or so I'm working on growing a long white beard. So with the beard, combined with the gray hair, I should resemble an Old Testament prophet before much longer. :-) The Book Of Bozo, coming soon!
You ask, "Why am I here? How shall I live? What shall I value? How should I spend the limited amount of time I have in this life?"
My argument is that each of your questions arise from the nature of thought, particularly how it operates through a process of division.
Your questions assume "I" is divided from
"they", and that "life" is divided from "death", and that "limited" is divided from "limitless". Like all of us human beings, you are observing reality through a lens that operates by a process of division, and so you see division everywhere you look.
And it is that perception of "me" as being divided from "everything else" that is the mother of all religions. Practical people like yourself seek reunion with other people through morality, and more philosophical types like myself seek reunion with nature, reality, god, however we might phrase it.
But the bottom line of all these stories is the same. The experience of division, a deep sense of isolation, resulting in a quest for reunion, with something, anything.
Wasn't it the Jews who invented monotheism, the idea of a single God? So being smart and ambitious, they sought reunion with the single undivided source of everything.
The nature of thought isn't just some academic jerk off abstract entertainment. It's the source of the human condition. The content of thought is important, but it's a symptom, not the source.
I’m still waking up, so maybe I shouldn’t blunder in here at this hour.
But:
•The text doesn’t show the Almighty as somehow threatened by Babel, indeed the humor in the text has been pointed out to me. They set out to build a tower up to the heavens but the Creator has to go down just to see it, things like that
• The key sentence seemeth to be in 11:6, “nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do.” In other words, if this mass-production (brick for stone, slime for mortar) epic totalitarian enterprise isn’t somehow stopped, broken up now, its inhuman idolatrous future is easily extrapolated out, spreading to fill the world. Here at Babel was seen the tremendous unity of a Nazi rally; lacking virtue, there was societal harmony to a fault
• I’ve not read the book, but surely when Kass says the city, our cities, must look to the transcendent, he isn’t talking about us finding morality in the stars. No, what he saying is that we mustn’t, like Babel, regard our scene as the whole show. This comes up in matters of governance all the time, can a democratic majority ever be wrong? Certainly it can, if indeed we have recourse to an overarching transcendent moral standard, one not derived from the majority. This is why the American Founding alluded to pre-existing, pre-political “truths” about “nature and nature’s G_d,” such that people already have rights prior to the creation of the government and the government has a duty to “secure” these rights, not invent or bestow them.
Again I can’t speak for Leon Kass but from here it looks like he’s pointing out the difference between Chris Cuomo:
“Our rights do not come from G_d.. That’s your faith, that’s my faith, but that’s not our country. Our laws come from collective agreement and compromise.”
and John F. Kennedy:
“[T]he same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe--the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of G_d”
The garden, ark and babel form the myths of bronze age. Abram and family are in a time after the collapse. Although it seems to be a bit of an anachronism as the major collapse is being described in genesis. But they are still writing about a time when whole villages can be razed without worry.
I really enjoyed reading this. You may enjoy my post on Babel from a while back. I actually originally started reading your blog because I love babel references. https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/translating-a-really-old-profession
I just read your Babel story and loved it! I'm a sucker for "Imagine this..." scenarios. And any "imagine this" that takes me to the foot of the Tower of Babel is an imaginative leap worth making. I also enjoyed your translator riff. And isn't that what we've all become -- translators who try and make sense of what we're all babbling about. :-) ... Thanks for writing that post... and for sharing it.
Alan writes, "But because speech is colored always by human perceptions, passions, interests, and desires, the world as captured in language is necessarily partial"
All of that has it's source in the divisive nature what we are made of, thought.
Thought divides the single unified reality in to conceptual parts.
The world as captured in language is necessarily partial because when we observe the world, we, who are made of thought, see the conceptual parts that thought has created. We are made of a medium that operates by a process of division, and so we see division everywhere we look. It's like wearing tinted sunglasses and then all of reality looks tinted. The tint, and the perceived division, is not a property of reality, but rather a property of the tool being used to observe reality.
The implication of "the world as captured in language is necessarily partial" is that philosophy and (most of) religion are powerless to overcome this limited partial view, because these methodologies are made of thought, that which is generating the perception of division. And so, the more we try to analyze the division in order to overcome it, the more division we create.
We can observe that every philosophy and religion in history which is attempting to bring people together inevitably subdivides in to internal factions which typically then come in to conflict with each other. The universal nature of this process demonstrates that it's not the content of particular philosophies and religions which is the true source of this division and conflict, but rather something deeper, the inherently divisive nature of that which all philosophies, religions and people are made of, thought.
This is why human suffering and conflict goes on and on and endlessly on in century after century. If the source of the conflict and suffering was something wrong in the content of thought, by now we would have found the correct content of thought, and all would be well. But the true source of the suffering and conflict lies deeper, not in the content of thought, but beyond our reach in the nature of thought. The content of thought is just a symptom of thought's fundamental nature.
Philosophers and clerics tend to hate this way of looking at the human condition, because they've built up a huge pile of sophisticated thoughts which they then use to define themselves, and justify their purpose in the world.
But the true purpose of philosophy is to destroy itself, to reveal though a process of rational analysis the impotence of rational analysis. And the true purpose of religion is, as Jesus once said, to "die to be reborn", ie. to surrender the "me" and the illusion of division.
The problem of course is that once one attempts to share such understandings of the human condition in language, we're back in the same old thought generated division game, the ancient cultural patterns repeat themselves yet again, and the human circus continues, going endlessly round and round the noisy merry-go-round to nowhere.
You practice what my seventh-grade English teacher would call “effective repetition.” And it *is* effective: I’m beginning to agree with you!
But here’s my stumbling block: Let’s assume you’re right. Thought itself is divisive. And every conscious effort to overcome our divisions is doomed before we begin. Okay. Now what? Where does your insight lead us? What does Day 1 of TannyConsciousness look like? (“Just the distinction ‘Day 1’ indicates that you really don’t get it,” says Phil.)
Related question: Why does the Dalai Lama want to return to Tibet? It seems… divisive.
Hi Alan,
Repetition: Some times unfamiliar ideas need to be made more familiar before they will be considered.
To address your reasonable question....
First, it seems useful just to try to understand the human condition. It's unlikely we'll arrive at useful solutions if we don't understand what the problem is.
Next, attempting to better understand the human condition is interesting, a value in itself.
Next, if the ultimate source of our problems is the fundamental nature of thought itself, this insight might cause us to take any and all ideologies a little less seriously, and thus be less likely to kill each other over them.
Next, taking our analysis deeper helps us better understand many of the things that humans do. As example, if I study Religion XYZ, then I'll learn only about Religion XYZ. But if I study the nature of thought, I may discover that all religions are a response to that nature.
Next, we can reason that the best philosophy is the one most in touch with the nature of reality. And what is reality? Overwhelmingly nothing, at every scale. Understanding the nature of thought can help us understand why we typically focus on "things", the very tiniest fraction of reality, instead of the nothing, the vast majority of reality.
Next, there can be personal value in understanding the nature of thought. Psychological suffering is made of thought. Why not try to understand that which our suffering is made of?
The best way to see the inherently divisive nature of thought is probably not to read anybody's theories on the matter, but to instead observe it in action within one's own mind.
As a place to start, we can observe how our mental experience is divided between the observer "me", and the observed "my thoughts".
That's the divisive nature of thought in action, imposing a pattern of division upon itself.
Good answer. What occurs to me is that we're interested in different questions. Your interest is essentially philosophical: "the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline." In question form: What is true? What is reality? What is the nature of thought? ... They are interesting questions, but they're not my top priority. My questions are more like: "Why am I here? How shall I live? What shall I value? How should I spend the limited amount of time I have in this life?"
Philosophy is what the guys did in Athens. They sat around contemplating the Good -- then they screwed little boys and drank to excess and dramatized the ancient Greek myths that taught us about tragedy and that Oedipus could not avoid his fate because his fate was inevitable. And the same shit was going to happen, generation after generation.
Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, my ancestors were trying to work out a way of life that was responsive to what they perceived to be their higher calling. Screwing little boys was off limits. Screwing your neighbor's wife was also off limits. Drinking to excess was not encouraged. Mimicking the values of the rest of the world was considered a bad move. Were they successful? No, not entirely. But I think they might have had a sense of a destination, one that was embedded in the Story they told their kids... who told their kids... who told their kids... and now I'm sitting here today, telling it to mine. The good news? This Story is now familiar to at least four billion people. Yes, of course there are lots of problems with the Story -- we keep killing each other (or the violent men do). But what gives me hope -- and that's what at the center of all this: Hope -- is that we now have a narrative framework to address what ails us. Almost two billions Muslims running around, people who see themselves as children of Abraham. So what we have is NOT an old-fashioned tribal conflict in which the people who worship the Moon kill the people who worship the Steve the Supreme Leader. Instead, we have a family disagreement. And while family disputes are not easy, they are potentially addressable.
Anyway, my point here -- and I do have one! -- is that we can get stuck on what exactly is the nature of thought. Or we can talk about how we spend the limited amount of time we have here. What's should we do? How should we behave? What is a just society? Those are practical, down-to-earth questions that I believe are a primary focus of my Tribe. We spend less time on the nature of G*d and more time on how we should live our lives. This is a gross generalization, of course. But I hope you get my point.
Thanks again Alan,
We agree that some ideologies are indeed better for humanity than others, and thus content of thought strategies can provide real value. I'm not dismissing that at all. Remember please, as a hippy I'm a child of the Catholics, and thus essentially a watered down wannabe Jew with too much hair. :-)
By the way, over the last six months or so I'm working on growing a long white beard. So with the beard, combined with the gray hair, I should resemble an Old Testament prophet before much longer. :-) The Book Of Bozo, coming soon!
You ask, "Why am I here? How shall I live? What shall I value? How should I spend the limited amount of time I have in this life?"
My argument is that each of your questions arise from the nature of thought, particularly how it operates through a process of division.
Your questions assume "I" is divided from
"they", and that "life" is divided from "death", and that "limited" is divided from "limitless". Like all of us human beings, you are observing reality through a lens that operates by a process of division, and so you see division everywhere you look.
And it is that perception of "me" as being divided from "everything else" that is the mother of all religions. Practical people like yourself seek reunion with other people through morality, and more philosophical types like myself seek reunion with nature, reality, god, however we might phrase it.
But the bottom line of all these stories is the same. The experience of division, a deep sense of isolation, resulting in a quest for reunion, with something, anything.
Wasn't it the Jews who invented monotheism, the idea of a single God? So being smart and ambitious, they sought reunion with the single undivided source of everything.
The nature of thought isn't just some academic jerk off abstract entertainment. It's the source of the human condition. The content of thought is important, but it's a symptom, not the source.
I’m still waking up, so maybe I shouldn’t blunder in here at this hour.
But:
•The text doesn’t show the Almighty as somehow threatened by Babel, indeed the humor in the text has been pointed out to me. They set out to build a tower up to the heavens but the Creator has to go down just to see it, things like that
• The key sentence seemeth to be in 11:6, “nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do.” In other words, if this mass-production (brick for stone, slime for mortar) epic totalitarian enterprise isn’t somehow stopped, broken up now, its inhuman idolatrous future is easily extrapolated out, spreading to fill the world. Here at Babel was seen the tremendous unity of a Nazi rally; lacking virtue, there was societal harmony to a fault
• I’ve not read the book, but surely when Kass says the city, our cities, must look to the transcendent, he isn’t talking about us finding morality in the stars. No, what he saying is that we mustn’t, like Babel, regard our scene as the whole show. This comes up in matters of governance all the time, can a democratic majority ever be wrong? Certainly it can, if indeed we have recourse to an overarching transcendent moral standard, one not derived from the majority. This is why the American Founding alluded to pre-existing, pre-political “truths” about “nature and nature’s G_d,” such that people already have rights prior to the creation of the government and the government has a duty to “secure” these rights, not invent or bestow them.
Again I can’t speak for Leon Kass but from here it looks like he’s pointing out the difference between Chris Cuomo:
“Our rights do not come from G_d.. That’s your faith, that’s my faith, but that’s not our country. Our laws come from collective agreement and compromise.”
and John F. Kennedy:
“[T]he same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe--the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of G_d”