Nietzsche describes the earth as a machine transforming substances through the interaction of lawful forces. Life within it takes part in this same function through the transformation of its life forces. There is no need for God in this machine.Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Mon Dec 06, 2021 9:54 pmHe is speaking of facts in certain senses. One is that 'the modern view' undermined, in numerous senses, the 'story' through which Christianity had been normally communicated. One metaphysical system (a means of explanation) overturned the previous one in certain important, relevant, crucial and also somewhat irrefutable ways. For example: the notion of the Red Sea parting, the notion of a primordial garden in which two God-created beings existed in deathlessness.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Dec 06, 2021 9:03 pmI actually agreed with you thus far. Nietzsche's not speaking of any fact there: he's using a metaphor for "Modern people tend not to even have a relevant place for the God concept anymore."
Really there are a whole range of things that cannot any longer be believed by people who have been raised up in the new metaphysics (which is sort of a non-metaphysics) unless they make a deliberate choice to believe what cannot be believed.
Oddly, the will must enter in here to *patch up* the belief-fabric that had been rent.
The way I see it is that the Christian Story operates in much the way that the former Epics did. They are stories which have been concretized in absoluteness. They are *set in stone* so to speak and cannot be altered. If they are altered, and to push on my metaphor of fabric, they unravel in weird ways. And then (it seems to me) people exist within a semi-unbelievable story that is hard to defend. In fact they might try (as you seem to try by referring to Adam & Eve as some original mating pair) in a willed act of reconciliation, an attempt to bridge or reconcile two distinct epistemes.
But we can only deal with Christianity, and the elements of belief, as in a Novel. And the Novel is still being written. (If you catch my drift).
To say 'God has died . . . and we killed Him' is to express a series of ironical truths. The first Christ was nailed to the cross, but the undermining of the Story of Christianity is a murder in another sense.
As you know my view is that the Christian Story requires a special exegesis, but that exegesis is necessarily gnostic. However, I also tend to believe that most people either find a way to hold together, intact, a Story that they can believe in and do not have the energy, or perhaps the mental agility (?) to penetrate the many seeming metaphors that Christianity deals in.
It is also true that the more that one sees how the World really functions (I refer to ecological and natural systems and the reality of *will-to-power* as an accurate description of how power actually functions in this world) the more that one must internalize this understanding, and that means seeing that we are all profoundly complicit within *systems* that cannot but operate according to these principles.
I think that is what Nietzsche *saw* is just this:
In my view this is a description, an overpowering one that must have come on him quite strongly, that has to do with the 'world outside of ourselves'. That is to say the natural and the ecological world of 'life' within a material biological system.“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms striving toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self- creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself— do you want a name for this world? A solution for all of its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!”
What 'God' is, and how God enters this world, only occurs in human persons. I do not see the Christian God as being present in the natural world, because that world is really cruel and amoral. If mankind were subtracted from the picture, there would be no Christian God operating in this material-biological world. Whatever God is there, in that world, would carry life on as it now exists in the jungles and forests. It is a world that feeds on itself. Life and death in a horrifying, yet beautiful (in an utterly strange sense), system.
God in this sense comes through men (through people). God 'imposes' in men through the invisible world of metaphysics. How could metaphysics apply in the natural world (that is through a transcendental metaphysics?) What need as *the world* (the natural world) for transcendentals? None at all that I can discern.
So it seems to me that with Nietzsche (and I suppose many others) the order of focus shifts. That is, if one has seen what Nietzsche saw. I almost feel bad in pointing some of these things out but even Sartre, in a way, got it ironically right.
At a certain point the realization dawns: It is just you & me and here we are stuck in this strangely decorated room, no longer really fitted to us, where we have no choice but to work it out here.
However, can Man be other than an animal serving this machine? Can Man evolve from a mechanical being into a conscious being? I believe that the purpose for the essence of Christianity is to produce this potential.