The Epistle to the Reader

 Reader,

Here I put into your hands not a grand philosophical adventure which has emerged from my idle time, but a simple letter. In his Essay concerning Human Understanding, John Locke (1689) has already done you that service over three hundred years ago. He tried to derive a scientific epistemology from sense data, not relying upon any innate notions, as the Cartesian rationalists, in order to defend the scientific method. Michael Ayer, however, has discovered that Locke really does maintain three innate notions: matter, mind, and God. Therefore, Locke is not the true father of British empiricism, but rather an English Cartesian rationalist. Bastard!

Instead of looking like a fool with the "grand philosophical adventure," I would like to relate to you a simple parable: Imagine yourself in a dentist's waiting room. Other people are all around you for the same purpose: to see the dentist. Before you are various magazines lying on top of coffee tables, you look at this one or that one distracting yourself before your appointment with the dentist. Your name is called and thus you go to see the dentist. Life is very much like this parable. You are in a room or a time with others waiting to die. You do not know exactly when your name will be called, as with death, so you distract yourself with various magazines on the table, so with life, we distract ourselves with whatever we can in order to distract ourselves or to kill the time before our name is called to see the dentist (or, death).  Aristotle does not like parables, but Plato loves them. Regardless of your philosophical taste, one thing is “morally certain”: my parable is not nearly as stupid as Locke's Essay, nor is my parable over six hundred pages long.

My parable, however, is not to encourage existentialism. I am not looking for any meaning out of life, since the myth of God has died. If I am reducible to a machine, then I have the encouraging thought that this experience may end one day. Perhaps another parable is in order to demonstrate my thoughts more "clearly" and "distinctly" about modern life. Imagine yourself in an American civil war Hospital. Everywhere you see “pain,” suffering,” “blood,” “brutality,” and “disorder,” You smell the disgusting odor of rotting flesh, and see infection, and amputation. Doctors are cutting limbs off of humans as if they are butchers in a meat packing plant. You hear men crying out in pain, cursing their officers, God, whomever; or you hear them call out to their mothers before they die in their filthy, bug invested, and rotten beds.  

You are truly disgusted, but you realize that this experience is your life. Your dreams and hopes are amputated in the future as the respective vicissitudes of life cut them off from their roots. Life will show such horrors that will make the Civil War Hospital seem mild and less odious. While you are in the civil War hospital, you will reach for any narcotic (alcohol, opium, etc.) to decrease the pain and irritation of the environment. Analogously, the contemporary American will reach for any narcotic to deal with American existence, because it “smells,” “bloody,” “violent,”” boring,” and “monstrous.” Europeans need to visit our Civil War Hospital existences and pimp their existentialism, and see how successful they market their product. Jean Paul Sartre can say “other people are hell,” but take him to Andersonville and see what the Frenchman says, Verdun.    

Suppose the myth of God has not died in modernity. We would have meaning to our lives, because God has preordained by his divine providence a special purpose for each one of us. No more cynical parables about the Waiting room and the Civil war Hospital. According to the Christian myth, God forsake His only son (Jesus Christ) for our salvation by allowing us to butcher Him like a lamb, so to wash away our sins and provide us with a second chance: immortal life. Now, we have a parable of hope, which ironically involves murdering God in order to provide us with immortal life. If you do not see the irony, perhaps I can point it out to the reader. We murdered Jesus, so to have immortal life with Him. Even Jesus believed this to be too much, because Jesus asked God on the crucifix why He has forsaken Him. We had to kill God in order to have salvation forever.

The Christian parable, however, involves two obvious opposites: on the one hand, murder and death of Jesus Christ (i.e., God), and, on the other hand, eternal salvation. This appears to be a contradiction, which is as ugly and mad as the Waiting Room and Civil War hospital parables; but those two parables do not suffer from such an opposition. We murdered Jesus (whether man or God), who is probably the only good Christian ever existed. I find this Christian parable more nauseating than the Waiting Room or the Civil War Hospital. In my two parables, nothing beautiful or remarkable is destroyed for sake of the ugly and stupid. They just merely remind us of the “ugly” and the “stupidity” of humanity. The Christian parable, on the other hand, tells us how we destroyed the beautiful, the profound, in order to save humanity, which is not worth saving. It is like “throwing a pearl to the swine.”   

In the Gay Sciences (1882), Nietzsche says: "Whither is God? He cried; I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are   his murderers. ….Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the grave diggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him” (Nietzsche, 181). What does Nietzsche mean by these curious remarks, because how could we kill God, who, by definition, is un-killable? How did we kill Jesus Christ? That too is an equal mystery. Understood in this way, God is no longer an organizing principle of order to our world and lives. We may display Him to others like our grandmother’s china, but we really do not use Him as He is used in the past as the chief cause of everything. 

Instead, we rely upon the “scientific method” to solve our problems. We hope for the “progress” of the Enlightenment to end our social and moral distress.  “Technology” will solve our problems. Modern man relies upon himself, not God, for his direction. Modern man has a great atlas. The First World War and its fundamental question was how many men were killed by the machine today. A war of statistics was the byproduct of glorious and progressive modernity. The Second World War (the sequel) was more insane than the First World War: Death camps, atomic bombs, butchering mass nonmilitary populations, etc., According to the Christian myth, Jesus resurrected for our sake. Maybe, someone needs to resurrect God this time, because humanity is not getting better as the Enlightenment promised, but only more ugly and stupid.  

The sensitive reader may think that this epistle is a lamentation and mourning of the death of God, and that the writer has deliberately used a classic of the Enlightenment, John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, to rail against modernity. The intelligent reader would say,‘You begin your epistle with two nasty parables (not the work of a modern philosopher), then talk about the absurdity of Christian myth of Christ (because of the wretchedness of man), and then go onto Nietzsche’s death of God and how God is a better myth than Modernity.’

 I concede all of this, but that does not change the fact that Locke promised pure empiricism grounded on no innate notions, but degenerated to that which he railed (French Rationalism), because he maintained three innate notions: God, matter, and mind. Analogously, at a macro level, the Enlightenment and its child modernity have promised things, to which they have neither delivered nor fulfilled, such as “progress,” “better future,” more understanding”, etc.,. Instead, you are left with a void and empty space, which was once the home of your soul. Modernity is worse than Locke, because modernity has made man a machine and he is no longer a subject. Man is laboring, consuming, depreciating entity. None of my parables are as ugly and stupid as this consequence of modernity. While Locke is only a fool who rails against that which he maintains (innate notions), modernity has ‘alchemically’ transformed man from a subject to be perfected to a machine. Modernity is far worse than that English fool. 

“Alchemically transformed” is an interesting phrase to describe the transformation from man, as a subject to be perfected, to the machine, because “alchemy” is a pre modern subject of natural magic, which is a vision of world where transformation is possible. To show “this alchemical transformation,” two different philosophers, one pre-modern the other modern, will be compared to one another.

 On the Dignity of Man (1486), Pico Della Mirandola says, "at man’s birth the Father placed in him every sort of seed and sprout of every kind of     life…If the seeds of sensation, he will grow into a brute. If rational, he will come out a heavenly animal. If intellectual, he will be an angel and a son of God” (Pico, 5). On Pico’s view, man has three options, which means man has the ability to perfect himself. He can follow is (a) lower order (i.e., his sensatons) and become no better than an animal or a soulless machine. Or, (b) he can follow his reason and become a “heavenly creature,” which is clearly more than a mindless brute. Or, (c) he can follow his intellect and become an angel or a son of God. If man follows the highest inclination (intellect), he may discover what Paul and Augustine called the “inner man,” which is the part of man that mortifies itself in the body of Christ. Clearly, Pico believes that man can be no better than a brute or soulless machine, but he also believes that man can achieve the divine. Ergo, Pico’s vision of man is a subject meant and capable of perfection. 

In L’Homme Machine (1748), Julien Offray de La Mettrie argues that "the human body is a machine which winds its own springs. It is the living image of perpetual movement. Nourishment keeps up the movements which fever excites. Withoutfood, the soul pines away, goes mad, and dies exhausted (La Mettrie, 93). La Mettrie clearly argues that man is nothing more than a machine and that any discourse concerning the soul independent of the body is mad and non-sense. The soul is not in the equation of La Mettrie’s view of man. Instead, man is a complex machine with springs and parts, which provide the “image” of perpetual motion.

Just as the “mad man” declared the death of God, so the “mad man” may now have to declare for the myth of resurrection of God. The “mad man” may reason since God died and resurrected for us, we should kill the myth of modernity in order to resurrect God from His grave. Without God, as an absolute datum, everything becomes relative in time, space, person, and nation, so, in this shifting state of relativity, historical events, actions of nations and individuals may appear sane, not ugly or stupid, but these events are really insane, ugly, and stupid.

We say, for example, that we had to drop the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, because it saved countless American lives. Many Americans argue that if the atomic bombs were not necessary, then why did we have to drop two bombs on the Japanese? On the other hand, the Japanese had made several attempts to negotiate a peace with the United States before those bombs were dropped on those respective cities. The American pretense of an unconditional surrender as justification for dropping those bombs was non-sense, because the Japanese’s surrender was conditional on them keeping their Emperor. President Truman may have wanted to impress upon Stalin our willingness to use such weapons on our enemies. This may appear sane, because of the relative position of time, space, and nation. Japanese were our enemies, so we used whatever means possible to destroy them. Stalin and the Soviet Union were our cold war adversaries and we wanted them to know that we meant business and we were not going to be intimated by the Red Army in Europe. We are stuck in the diachronic sequence of history. Now, if the myth of God were resurrected, what appears sane would be insane, for God is outside of history and sees everything (past, present, future) as the now. He would see more than likely the insanity of dropping those bombs, because He would not be stuck in shifting relativity of things, but sees everything completely.

A pre modern painting illustrates perfectly the pre-modern idea that from God’s perspective everything of man in his history is mad: Hieronymus Bosh’s (1500-1505) The Garden of Earthly Delights. Bosh’s painting has three inside panels which describe monstrous sized fruit and birds. The first inside panel shows God with Adam and Eve before the fall. The Second panel illustrates the natural depravity of man after his fall from grace. This world is too lustful for our world and must be the world before the great flood. Or, the second panel could be our world. People are doing all sorts of sexual acts which are almost border line pornographic. Bosh uses bright paints and glazes to highlight the decadence of man, so to impress upon the viewer how ugly, stupid, revolting man’s actions are from the point of view of God. The third inside panel shows the horror of hell as a consequence of the depravity of the second panel. Hell is destitute of all vivid color and images of the second panel. Hell is merely a waste land of the depraved after man’s grotesque orgy in the second panel. The sequence of three panels tries to imitate through art what it might be like to view man’s history from the point of God without the distraction of diachronic sequence or time, but to see man as he is and always will be from on singular and absolute point of view of God. When you close the three insider panels of Bosh’ Garden of Earthly Delights, you see an image of the world as described in Genesis.

The world is a great sphere. Above is the sky. The middle is the earth, and the earth rests on water. Again, Bosh is trying to illustrate the point that we (at that time) may not see the earth as a whole, but God does. Bosh more than any other pre-modern painter is trying to explain the necessity of God as an absolute datum in perception of man throughout history, because neither can man see himself as whole through history, nor could man at that time see the whole of his planet. Modernity has provided us with the opportunity to see the planet as a whole through scientific achievement, but it has not provided us the ability to transcend our position in history and to see it as a whole.

Modernity has achieved the outside panels of Bosh’s Garden of Earthly delights, but has not been able to penetrate the inside panels. Accordingly, by resurrecting the myth of God, we may participate in God’s perspective of our history, because the scientific method and modernity have only achieved more monstrous ways to treat each other: death camps, dropping atomic bombs, and genocide. The perversions of Bosh’s second inside panels of the Garden of Earthly Delights with its pornographic imagery are mild pleasantries compared to the horrors of First and Second World Wars.