[MD] Dualism and Eagleton's God Delusion

[david buchanan]

Ron, DM, Kevin and all MOQers:

Ron Kulp took a stab at it:
I think Eagleton is using the old defence against atheism, why not anything 
at all? He seems to be using existence itself as validation for a god and 
that god is distinguishable by it's antithesis, nothingness.. ...

dmb says:
I'm putting two threads together here because the answer to this question - 
why is there something instead of nothing? - entails a discussion of 
dualism. And I think it goes along way toward explaning the MOQ in terms of 
the issues Kevin has raised about dualism. The short, unpacked answer is 
that there is something rather than nothing because thoughts and words 
create distinctions. These distinctions are the cause of all things, or 
rather they ARE all things. Every distinction creates a limit, a border, a 
definate slice of reality that is somehow distinquished from everything that 
it is NOT.

In effect, the Many, the world of the ten thousand things, is an 
interpretation of the One. The One take the role of the other pole in the 
question. It is Nothing. But this is not to be confused with empty space. 
Nothingness in this sense should be understood as No-thingness. This the the 
undifferentiated aesthetic continuum, the primary empirical reality. In this 
formulation, of course, the One is DQ and the things derived from it are 
static quality.

The idea that reality is composed of opposed forces has appeared in just 
about every culture. We can see it in the YinYang symbol, in Taoism and even 
in Hegel's or Marx's dialectics. But I suppose this is just one more 
indication that dualistic thinking is basic to the distinction-making 
function of thought and language. Even more interesting, I think, is that 
there has been a long line of mystics who assert that our world of things is 
illusory and insist on the inclusion of the underlying unity from which it 
all springs. The MOQ's basic structure, then, reflects this. As a form of 
philosophical mysticism and of the perennial philosophy, the MOQ is an 
intellectual description of what the wise guys have been saying for a mighty 
long time...

"The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the motherr 
of ten thousand things."  Lao-tzu

"The ultimate truth transcends all definitions and descriptions, transcends 
all comments and disputations, transcends all words." Nagarjuna

"When difference is not evident, there is neither difference nor identity." 
Nagarjuna

"In the ultimate dark Abyss of the ..primal ground or Urgrund, there is no 
differentiation but only pure identity." F.W.J. Schelling

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the word was 
God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by it; and 
without it was not anything made."  John 1:1-3

"The root of all things is difference." "The whole of existence is 
imagination within imagination, while true Being is God alone." Ibn Arabi

"Everything is of the nature of no thing." Parmenides

""the one and many ..run about together, in and out of every word which is 
uttered."

I vaguely recall a legend from the East which says words are what bring 
things into existence. The impression is that this worked on the level of a 
folk tale so that uttering a word could bring the thing into existence. So 
it seems to me that this basic insight has had some form of recognition 
since the very ancient time of magical thinking.

By the way, this would be approximately the opposite of "essentialism" 
insofar as it seeks some kind of essence underlying things rather than a 
no-thingness as the source. So it seems quite unlikely that Ham's view would 
illuminate this issue.

And finally, we return to Eagleton's notion of God as "the condition of 
possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer 
to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not 
add up to two, ...He is what sustains all things in being by his love; and 
this would still be the case even if the universe had no beginning..."

What I see here is an attempt by Eagleton to say something similar, but he 
is operating with both materialistic and theistic assumptions. Here we see 
God as setting the stage for a universe of entities like some kind of 
postmodern Deist rather than a mystic. Interestly, I think, in the 2nd 
chapter of his Literary Theory, he takes Husserl to task along with several 
others and basically says that anyone who tries to deny the subject/object 
distinction is a reactionary crank. See, my complaints about his Marxist 
Catholicism aren't a personal attack. I think his frame of reference 
basically rules out any similarities between his views and the MOQ. As I 
understand it, his "conditions of possibility" are unrelated to the basic 
assertion of mystics.

As I understand it, dualistic thinking leads to all sorts of error and it 
seems to me that the notion of possibility and/or potentiality as real 
things is one of those errors. Logic allows us to negate things and we 
thereby create fictions and fictional problems. Every concept can generate 
its opposite and so we end up asking questions like, "Why is there something 
instead of nothing?". But again, there is something because we make a 
distinctions such as the distinction between something and nothing, which is 
what generates the question. Unlike the nothing of dualistic thinking, which 
is merely the opposite of something, our No-thingness is quite something. It 
generates all things. It does not the conditions of possibility, but rather 
is the mother of all that actually is.

"the unreal never is: the Real never is not" Bhagavad Gita

Most of this quotes were gathered by Thomas McRarlane of the California 
Institute of Integral Studies.

Ken Wilber's work was also helpful and covers much of the same ground. Of 
the figures in the West, his favorite mystics are Plontinus, Schelling and - 
surprizingly - even Plato gets some good press on this account.

But the point here is to illuminate the MOQ's basic structure, the 
static/dynamic split. This is a dualism, as any intellectual description 
MUST be, but notice that this split does NOT entail opposed forces or any 
kind of ontological gap. Instead, two forms or kinds of the same reality 
with one kind basically being a subset of the other, a derivation of the 
other. I mean, this dualism has a unity built right into it. Both aspects 
can be known from experience too, so that we don't have to speculate about a 
realm where possibilities reside or otherwise get lost in fictional 
abstractions. If the static world is built of analogy upon analogy, if it is 
a creation of imagination, then creativity is and always was the "condition 
of possibility", not the universe as a stage set for entities. The latter 
puts the cart before the horse, if you will.

As far as I can tell, Aristotle has nothing to do with it.

Did I weave some threads together here, or just make a mess?

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