[MD] Dualism and Eagleton's God Delusion

[Ron Kulp]

Dmb,
I think you did a great job at unifying these threads and getting down
to the business at hand although
I believe you misinterpret essentialism, or perhaps I am, Ham gave me
the impression when conveying
What "essence" is and he states that essence is that no-thingness of
which all things spring.

I am of the same belief on your thoughts about dynamic quality also and
I deeply appreciate
Your connecting quotes from the expanse of human understanding on this
subject from various ancient
Sources as well as more modern ones.when I lay the tao te ching and the
old testament together
I see the similarities just as you did, but often times here when you
convey that, some get
Pissy.
Your post has got my cpu usage up to about 97% on that one, thanks.
-Ron

-----Original Message-----
From: moq_discuss-bounces at moqtalk.org
[mailto:moq_discuss-bounces at moqtalk.org] On Behalf Of david buchanan
Sent: Friday, March 02, 2007 1:56 PM
To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
Subject: [MD] Dualism and Eagleton's God Delusion

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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