Personalism 102

And at some point, matters will come to a head.

The question everyone has after reading Ginsberg is: what is Moloch?

My answer is: Moloch is exactly what the history books say he is. He is the god of child sacrifice, the fiery furnace into which you can toss your babies in exchange for victory in war.

He always and everywhere offers the same deal: throw what you love most into the flames, and I can grant you power.

As long as the offer’s open, it will be irresistible. So we need to close the offer. Only another god can kill Moloch. We have one on our side, but he needs our help. We should give it to him.

Ginsberg’s poem famously begins “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”. I am luckier than Ginsberg. I got to see the best minds of my generation identify a problem and get to work.

(Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!)

Limited Atonement simply says that Jesus died on the cross to atone only for the elect. In other words, his sacrifice was not for the world entire but just enough to cover each and every one of the elect that God called to himself.

Goethe wrote:Alles Vergängliche
Ist nur ein Gleichnis; Das Unzulängliche,
Hier wird's Ereignis; Das Unbeschreibliche,
Hier ist's getan;
Das Ewig-Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan.

To take the simplest example, the form of our subject-predicate thoughts corresponds perfectly to the structure of object-property facts. If there is an explanation of this correspondence to be given it seems it could go in one of three ways: either the form of thought explains the structure of reality (a form of idealism), or the other way round (a form of realism), or maybe there is a common explanation of why there is a correspondence between them, for example on a form of theism where God guarantees a match.

Mr. Janus wrote:What's your antidote to nihilism within our "closed timelike curve", dude?

And which old gods do you find useful?

Therefore we have a mind whose thoughts have a form which mirrors the structure of the facts that make up the world.

This kind of an explanation is a nice try, and plausible, but it is rather speculative. That our minds really developed this way in light of those pressures is a question that is not easy to answer from the armchair. Maybe the facts do have a different structure, but our forms are close enough for practical purposes, i.e. for survival and flourishing. And maybe the correspondence does obtain, but not for this largely evolutionary reason, but for a different, more direct and more philosophical or metaphysical reason.

To explain the connection differently one could endorse the opposite order of explanatory priority, and argue that the form of thought explains the structure of the world. This would most likely lead to an idealist position of sorts. It would hold that the general features of our minds explain some of the most general features of reality. The most famous way to do something like this is Kant’s in the Critique of Pure Reason (Kant 1781/7). We won’t be able to discuss it here in any detail. This strategy for explaining the similarity has the problem of explaining how there can be a world that exists independently of us, and will continue to exist after we have died, but nonetheless the structure of this world is explained by the forms of our thoughts. Maybe this route could only be taken if one denies that the world exists independently of us, or maybe one could make this tension go away. In addition one would have to say how the form of thought explains the structure of reality.

Another way in which there might be nothing to explain is connected to philosophical debates about truth. If a correspondence theory of truth is correct, and if thus for a sentence to be true it has to correspond to the world in a way that mirrors the structure and matches parts of the sentence properly with parts of the world, then the form of a true sentence would have to be mirrored in the world. But if, on the other extreme, a coherence theory of truth is correct then the truth of a sentence does not require a structural correspondence to the world, but merely a coherence with other sentences. For more on all aspects of truth see Künne 2003.

There once was a man who said "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."

Dear Sir,
             Your astonishment's odd.
I am always about in the Quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by
                         Yours faithfully,
                                                 God