Re: I Am Homophobic

On Tue, Dec 11, 2001 at 03:55:20PM -0500, Bijan Parsia wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Dec 2001, Kendall Clark wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> > Yeah, there's always been a tension between the things people were
> > happy to attribute to God (creation, acting to reconcile godself to
> > the world, and so on) and things people were unhappy because *when
> > attributed to human persons* they were monstrously evil. The earliest
> > intutions about this matter -- as represented for me by Origen --
> > where that according to our moral lights God ought to be morally good,
> > not a monster. (Of course there is an alternative rendering, which I
> > always found unsatisfying since it left me mute and wordless: "God
> > sees more than we do so God's moral lights are different than ours, so
> > what God does that seems evil to us may well not be to God" -- a line
> > I've always found deeply unsettling and, to be honest, grotesque.)
> > 
> > This tension is nowhere better explored than in Kierkegaard's Fear and
> > Trembling.
> 
> 
> Sure it is. Although F&T is pretty good (the breastfeeding stuff
> is...odd).

Heh. I should have said just that I prefer F&T. And I do. :>

> I'm not sure about the grotesquery of the "big picture" argument. In the
> Republic, Socrates argues that generally you don't make something
> beautiful by making each part as beautiful as it can be after its
> kind. So, the happiest city may have some lest than perfectly happy
> classes (e.g., the philosopher kings would be happier as philosophers than
> kings).
> 
> Which really means that god chooses the *overall* good, in some weighted,
> prolly Moorean way.

Yeah, but I meant *grotesque* not in a fully articulable epistemic way but,
rather, in a kind of angst-ridden, existentially fractured totally fucked up
way in which it's *really* hard to conceive of something weighting... the
Holocaust. (And that whether weighting means quantitatively, qualitatively,
or both.)

Which, even if it doesn't ultimately bear on the holiness v. goodness
argument, sets me to thinking about evil and the imagination and how the
facts of some evil overawe my imaginative capacities to understand (and so
to *fully* emphathize), which seems to short-circuit my capacity to reason
about the good *according to some patterns*, i.e., big picture weighting
patterns especially.

I wonder if Plato and Socrates would have had the same reaction to the
Holocaust?

It also sets me to think that while the Transatlantic Slave Trade & African
Diaspora were more devastating in terms of absolute numbers (I've seen
estimates as high as 100,000,000 (!!)), there is something about the
*compression* of the Holocaust that just breaks me. (Despite being mostly a
pro-Zionist wanker, the first few chapters of Elie Wiesel's *Night* are
haunting in this regard (though there is interesting literary speculation
about its authenticity, that seems to matter existentially not at all).)

At least in *that* sense the Holocaust seems sui generis (which is probably
more limited than is generally assumed: i.e., a lot of nasty Zionist
business gets conducted under the umbrella of a *very* expansive sense of
Holocaust sui genericity). Probably the same argument goes for the Armenian
genocide in the early part of 20th century, which some point to as the first
properly modern genocide.

Of course that could also be a residue of my Eurocentric mindset. I'm not
sure.

> HOWEVER, Plato's the Euthyphro is the place where the (epistemic,
> at least) priority of determining morality over holiness is
> established. (In the Western philospohical tradition.)
> 
> (Although, it seems likely that *ontological* priority of the good over
> the holy is argued there too.)

Yes and yes. Note that in the history of Christian thought there is a pretty
fair mix of thinkers coming down on both sides. Karl Barth, perhaps the most
read modern systematic theologian, found the idea of any (epistemic) notion
of goodness (or any ontological reality of the Good, for that matter) not
only deeply offensive but also inauthentically Christian. (Of course he went
around in the grips of a kind of neoscholasticism without ever realizing it,
so...)

Kendall