Bush, Gingrich, Israel and the NIE report
Psychosemiotic Deconstruction of Pivotal Historical event
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/124569
In Two Parts.
Part I. Bush Apologetic for NIE, Hopes Israel Not Offended
http://www.newsweek.com/id/91673
"...In private conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week, the president all but disowned the document, said a senior administration official who accompanied Bush on his six-nation trip to the Mideast. "He told the Israelis that he can't control what the intelligence community says, but that [the NIE's] conclusions don't reflect his own views" about Iran's nuclear-weapons program, said the official, who would discuss intelligence matters only on the condition of anonymity.
"Bush's behind-the-scenes assurances may help to quiet a rising chorus of voices inside Israel's defense community that are calling for unilateral military action against Iran. Olmert, asked by NEWSWEEK after Bush's departure on Friday whether he felt reassured, replied: "I am very happy." A source close to the Israeli leader said Bush first briefed Olmert about the intelligence estimate a week before it was published, during talks in Washington that preceded the Annapolis peace conference in November. According to the source, who also refused to be named discussing the issue, Bush told Olmert he was uncomfortable with the findings and seemed almost apologetic.
"Israeli and other foreign officials asked Bush to explain the NIE, which concluded with "high confidence" that Iran halted what the document describes as its "nuclear weapons program..
****
Kieth Olberman tonight (1.15.08) reported THIS, Bush saying "he can't control what the agencies say".
When, in fact, it is known that Cheney's WHIG war cadre had surpressed its release for months, while pressuring for wording that supported attacking Iran.
Further: he stated the NIE report "doesn't reflect his views." Why not? Why have National Intelligence Estimates at all, if his "views" are going to override them in favor of Jewish perceptions? What gives him the right to act on personal "views" at all?
He undoubtedly thinks these "views" are grounded in a "Christian faith"; he is over there where Jesus walked defending the Holy Land. Thus today's NYTimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/world/middleeast/15prexy.html?scp=1&sq=Bush+puts+forth+his+faith
In Heart of Islamic World, Bush Puts Forth His Faith
By Steven Lee Myers
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — President Bush’s Christianity is so central to his life that it is not surprising that it would figure prominently in a visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories.
What is striking, though, is how much his faith is coloring his approach to the biggest foreign policy challenges: the war in Iraq, the push for an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, and his broader appeal for democracy as a counterweight to combating extremism in the Islamic world from Iran to Lebanon.
As he traveled from Israel to the Persian Gulf and, on Monday, to Saudi Arabia, keeper of Islam’s holiest sites, Mr. Bush repeatedly cited monotheistic faith, contending that it served as the foundation for freedom, justice and representative government.
“A great new era is unfolding before us,” Mr. Bush said in a speech on Sunday in an opulent hotel in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. “This new era is founded on the equality of all people before God. This new era is being built with the understanding that power is a trust that must be exercised with the consent of the governed — and deliver equal justice under the law.”
Mr. Bush’s brand of Christianity has unquestionably shaped his unswerving support for Israel, a support that is shared by many American evangelical Christians. ...
In an interview with Al Arabiya television on the eve of his trip, he clearly sought to temper the view that his faith has put him in opposition to Islam. “I pray to the same God as a Muslim prays,” he declared.
****
The logical, theological and existential contradictions in this will be explained fully in detail elsewhere. Continuing the deconstruction:
****
In follow up questioning about whether he had reversed the NIE report to Ohlmert, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino says "I've never heard the President say anything critical of the intelligence agencies." ("As if he ever would say such things in your personal presence," sneered Olberman, deconstructing her lying comment. )
THE STANDING CONTEXTUAL BACKGROUND OF THIS EPISODE IS BUSH'S SPEECHES OVER THE SUMMER OF '07
ACCUSING AHMADINEJAD OF THREATNING NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST. THIS INFLATED RHETORIC LYINGLY HUSTLED TERROR TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF IGRNORANCE TO GET THE NATION COMMITTED TO FIGHTING IRAN BEFORE THE TRUTH CAME OUT. if this is so, it justifies charges of high criminality. .
THE ONLY REASON IT IS NOT LABELLED AND TREATED AS SUCH IS BECAUSE IT WOULD BE BAD FOR THE ZIO-CON JEWS, TO WHOSE GOD BUSH HAS PROSTATED HIMSELF.
Part II. GINGRICH BACKS HIM UP
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/124569
Gingrich: NIE Report Deliberately Worded to Hurt Bush
by Gil Ronen
(IsraelNN.com) The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that downplayed the danger from Iran's nuclear program was "fundamentally dishonest," former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich said in an exclusive interview with Israel National Radio's Tovia Singer.
"If you simply change about three words you change the whole report," Gingrich said, adding that the report seems to have been "deliberately written to maximize the pain to the Bush administration." It was written by three former State Department officials who were "deeply opposed to what President Bush is doing," he said, and who wrote the report "to maximize confusion."
Gingrich characterized the NIE as "very misleading, very destructive and very unfortunate… almost a bureaucratic coup d'etat."
****
-Comments: a. Gingrich doesn't know any more than we who followed the incident. He is not speaking from knowledge but opinion.
b. The revision of the wording of the NIE was in order to correct the impression that the 16 agencies had concluded there was evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran. It was not based on new data, but resulted from analysis of what the data on hand justified concluding. Thus, Gingrich, the civilian politician, acting no doubt on signal, substitutes his judgment over theirs. Pandering to the Jewish base he and extremist right wing Xian eevilvangelicals pander to, like Bush.
Psychosemiotic Deconstruction
The procedure followed in the psychodynamics of Gingrich's construction is this: 1. allude to a subtle feature of the document (that its language had, in fact, been carefully designed); 2. taking this feature to be evident to others as well, give it a preemptive twist ('--designed' ); then 3. issue the result as fact (S*=>Gingrich: NIE report deliberately worded to hurt Bush.). The procedure consists of constructing an assertion that predicates further on a projected reading of the given ("tokenized") content.
The predicated motive "to hurt Bush" evokes the Oedipal death wish toward father/president, which Freud showed is the most strenuously rejected from consciousness of all Id- impulses. The vehement reversal of all suggestion of wishing death to the father is given the name "reaction formation." The http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/124569text of its unconscious thought is: "NO! NO! I don't hate him! I LOVE HIM!" --"NO! NO! NOT TO LET DARK INTEL AGENCIES -- symbolic of the unconscious itself, already -- HURT BUSH! THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO HELP HIM!"
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Sunday, January 13, 2008
"What is the status of morality?"
This was a poll question at the Phora. I used the occassion to work through a psychosemiotic approach.
***
I can't answer this poll question with categorical perspecuity without clarifying its language.
Straightening this out needs doing in order to prevent circular definitions, contradictions, and generally non-progressive intellectual metapolitical maundering (I've been doing politics in my mind a lot recently). A COMPLETE (OR COMPLETING) SYSTEMATIC, CONSISTENT THEORY OF SIGN-USE (psychosemiotics) resolving all such questions in a single ideal language of communication at one stroke, by laying down its rules for designation and grammar -- is the only way I work in addressing questions of general philosophy anymore. It includes anything anybody ever thought or said in their locutions, but formally reconstructed to avoid said failings.
One might ask the "status" (with options) of:
The words
1. Moral (once used for a branch of philosophy, "moral philosophy", contrasted with "science")
-ality (code of conduct; 'ethics')
-ism (compartmentalized morality, suggesting over concern with judging behavior of others)
***
-use of words: (syn.: "ought to be"
a. distinctions ('right', 'wrong'; "concepts of..") (Hume, Reid)
b. judgments (claims or assertions predicating moral use of words) (Kant)
c. statements (affirmation of sentences that express moral judgments) (Stevenson; most analytic philosophy)
***
-issues. Individual or group actions predicated on in moral terms expressing agreement or disagreement on on what ought to be.
***
-point of view (Kurt Baier: contrast "Logical Point of view") Mode of consciousness in/from which the totality of acts is considered under moral terms
***************
2. Status ?
-metaphysical? -- What do moral distinctions predicate (attribute to the subject term/act predicated of)? Is that supposed to be the question?
Then obviously, I should say, the status of morality is not a Quantitative property, or moral disagreements could be settled by measuring. In this sense it is "non-cognitive"; but so is predicating quality of a material object (it is as false that the sky is blue as it is that lying is wrong, if you take that line). The difference is that qualitative distinctions applied to objects have a causal basis in sense perception, wheras moral distinctions do not; or, again, they could be settled by empirical investigation. Moore's Naturalistic fallacy refuted this forever, if Hume hadn't already.
As to the metaphysical status of the subjective factor expressed by moral distinctions, it is the fourth (4th) of the seven (7) layers (strata, text levels) of conscious experience, sandwiched between (5th: "I") and
(3rd: "embodied"), schematically signified by
"I DO (x)" (-- "THEE WED" completed for reproduction). Its existence, with this status, serves two general functions in relating the person to reality: 1. to connect him/her to the three dimensional world of space and time structuring sense experience in which the planetary body interacts with others; 2. to prove the existence of God
(by understanding that the categorical imperative, demanding respect for action conformable with rationality as such, proceeds from the realm of things in themselves, the noumenal v. phenomenal. (Kant)
I'm not much on moralism as a point of view, though. Taoists have little use for it. "There is no such thing as right or wrong; there's only ying and yang."
Having taken this welcome opportunity to clarify this, I shall drop the prolixity ("don't let her explain; explaining takes so long..") and, as before, simply use moral terms as situations and issues come up. This clarifies what I shall be doing (squaring the moral role of philosopy itself).
("Philosophy within the limits of conscious sign-use as a completing totality")
***
I can't answer this poll question with categorical perspecuity without clarifying its language.
Straightening this out needs doing in order to prevent circular definitions, contradictions, and generally non-progressive intellectual metapolitical maundering (I've been doing politics in my mind a lot recently). A COMPLETE (OR COMPLETING) SYSTEMATIC, CONSISTENT THEORY OF SIGN-USE (psychosemiotics) resolving all such questions in a single ideal language of communication at one stroke, by laying down its rules for designation and grammar -- is the only way I work in addressing questions of general philosophy anymore. It includes anything anybody ever thought or said in their locutions, but formally reconstructed to avoid said failings.
One might ask the "status" (with options) of:
The words
1. Moral (once used for a branch of philosophy, "moral philosophy", contrasted with "science")
-ality (code of conduct; 'ethics')
-ism (compartmentalized morality, suggesting over concern with judging behavior of others)
***
-use of words: (syn.: "ought to be"
a. distinctions ('right', 'wrong'; "concepts of..") (Hume, Reid)
b. judgments (claims or assertions predicating moral use of words) (Kant)
c. statements (affirmation of sentences that express moral judgments) (Stevenson; most analytic philosophy)
***
-issues. Individual or group actions predicated on in moral terms expressing agreement or disagreement on on what ought to be.
***
-point of view (Kurt Baier: contrast "Logical Point of view") Mode of consciousness in/from which the totality of acts is considered under moral terms
***************
2. Status ?
-metaphysical? -- What do moral distinctions predicate (attribute to the subject term/act predicated of)? Is that supposed to be the question?
Then obviously, I should say, the status of morality is not a Quantitative property, or moral disagreements could be settled by measuring. In this sense it is "non-cognitive"; but so is predicating quality of a material object (it is as false that the sky is blue as it is that lying is wrong, if you take that line). The difference is that qualitative distinctions applied to objects have a causal basis in sense perception, wheras moral distinctions do not; or, again, they could be settled by empirical investigation. Moore's Naturalistic fallacy refuted this forever, if Hume hadn't already.
As to the metaphysical status of the subjective factor expressed by moral distinctions, it is the fourth (4th) of the seven (7) layers (strata, text levels) of conscious experience, sandwiched between (5th: "I") and
(3rd: "embodied"), schematically signified by
"I DO (x)" (-- "THEE WED" completed for reproduction). Its existence, with this status, serves two general functions in relating the person to reality: 1. to connect him/her to the three dimensional world of space and time structuring sense experience in which the planetary body interacts with others; 2. to prove the existence of God
(by understanding that the categorical imperative, demanding respect for action conformable with rationality as such, proceeds from the realm of things in themselves, the noumenal v. phenomenal. (Kant)
I'm not much on moralism as a point of view, though. Taoists have little use for it. "There is no such thing as right or wrong; there's only ying and yang."
Having taken this welcome opportunity to clarify this, I shall drop the prolixity ("don't let her explain; explaining takes so long..") and, as before, simply use moral terms as situations and issues come up. This clarifies what I shall be doing (squaring the moral role of philosopy itself).
("Philosophy within the limits of conscious sign-use as a completing totality")
Thursday, January 3, 2008
The 8th IS
The 8th Is
And the God Who Doesn't Exist (fetishized non-Being)
Logicians have been saying "existence isn't a predicate" since Kant pointed out that the difference between there being real vrs. only imaginary 30 talers in my pocket isn't marked by the real one having a property the other lacked -- tacitly attributing a non-existent-but-real status to the non-existent. The philosopher Alexis Meinong actually recognized the existence of self-contradictory things, such as the round square, which could not possibly be real. This drove a wedge between use of "existence" and "reality". The modern logical insight that the grammatical sign used to conjoin words and phrases into determinate true or false sentences, "is" in English, expresses a function (operation, ) proper to discourse, and presupposing it, not objects*, is a fundamental clarification of thinking about existence, or reality, in systematic, coherent terms. The distinction between formal and informal modes of speech (the above is informal), between object language and metalanguage (as in Carnap's LSL), as well as that between unreconstructed vs (theoretically) reconstructed discourse (in explicit true or false statements) is based on this clarification, and must be assumed as background of any metaphysics pretending to be rigorous as well as systematic.
If one turns from "existence" as clarified by the Existential quantifier "There is an x such that..." of symbolic logic, to the little grammatical particle "is" from which it is derived by analysis of function, at least six other uses are found: the is's of
assertion
identity
predication
class membership
class inclusion
present tense
If "existence" -- informal use -- is counted as seventh in this list, as the cognitive gravity center around which the others cluster, the question arises, could there not be an 8th? Wouldn't there have to be? -- in a sense including logical but also (a) non-logical (compulsive) necessity?
The informal use, as in "unicorns do not exist" already posits an eighth through its own negation. "To be is to be the opposite of what it is not to be". In strictly logical terms, this ought to be no more than a confused idea. What it is to be, be-ing, or Being, is a reification of the completed relation of referent and object in a name. What is named, or referred to by a definite description (Russell), is what exists. Any "8th" (for the seven +1 -- shifting token types for numbers) can only be the reality of whatever Being or Existence stand out from, as named. The 8th is thus the predicate of non-Being through its name.
Is God real
It is this sense that merges in informal metaphysical discourse, I suggest, with the use of "real", contrasted with "unreal.". Logical texts, to my knowledge, never point out that "existence is not a predicate", as insight into the logical structure of discourse, does not imply that "reality" is not a predicate, leaving the question of the relation of reconstructed to unreconstructed metaphysical thinking hanging in the air. Even the hallowed assertion "God exists", widely taken as formulating the difference between two distinct species of human being, "theist" and "atheist", according to whether they do, or don't "believe in God", as they say ... even this most simple and fundamental assertion whose content would have been supposed determined as true or false, if rigor meant anything, has never been definitively assigned definite metaphysical status. This is due to a compound confusion, in that "God exists" if "God" is a name, logically speaking; but "God is a name" is not given except through use of the word "God", with intent to refer. Thus whoever uses it globally, for the totality completing itself in their experience, can affirm they "know" God exists, because they use the word with intent to refer -- which is actually all they are
"knowing", at all, as demonstrated by the grounds for the claim.
A.J. Ayer's Language Truth and Logic already demonstrated the non-illocutionary force of "God exists". "God" is not used as either name or descriptive expression from which verifiable true or false propositions follow. The fact that the logical positivists never received a response on this point broke the back of religion within the limit of pure reason. The compulsion -- not cognition -- generating God use by God users -- continued with assertions of "His" existence undeterred. The dichotomizing of human psychology on the basis of it was retained intact. In the face of the split between reason and practice in sign-use. the notion took hold that there was an extra-logical domain of knowledge, achievable through freedom by affirming the Unreal as Real: the "God" that doesn't exist as an object in the world is nevertheless made Real by affirmation of His Name in Faith. This was the main idea of the neo-liberal theologians who paralleled logical empiricist philosophy through and after mid-20th century. "The God that exists is the God that appears after God disappears in the agony of doubt," Paul Tillich wrote in The Courage to Be. "God is dead", claimed T.J. Altizer. I always took it to mean "linguistically dysfunctional"; that the term "God", as a token, no longer communicated, but stood in the way of communicating, what it once did. Theologians of this sort kept the token going by holding a mirror to empirical scientific reality and saying: the Not This that is real.
Meanwhile, the existential tradition in Europe from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche to Sartre and Heideggar vied with Biblicalists Karl Barth, Emile Brunner; Rudolf Bultmann's de-mythologizing program; Ernst Cassirer's work on Symbolic Forms in natural languages; religious historian Mircea Eliade's Myth of Eternal Return; paralleled from l900 by the ever widening influence of psychodynamic depth psychology, merging the physiology of sexual arousal, motivation, ritual and symbol, religious ideas and the matrix of individual-group relations, leading from family to politics. These are only some of the many profound new perspectives twentieth century unfolded to put the spotlight on what religion is all about. Bridging the language of organized religion and psychoanalysis, to go with the great novelists Mann and Hess, were Rudolf Otto's Idea of the Holy, landmark echo of the Magisterium of old; and William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. James make the further bald face suggestion, in his classical "Will To Believe", that "belief in God" was a matter of wishing, rather than thinking, the world was a certain way. The kind of thing reserved for the Right to Believe to vouch for, when reason and all else fails.
The Reality Function
If the particle "is" is understood as having a function, not as standing for anything ('exstence'), should "reality", as in "is real" also be properly understood through its function?
Here is where Sigmund Freud and the theory of repression come in. "Reality" IS, indeed, a "predicate", in the sense of what it's use says about the user. It is a kind of welcome to the world. There is not just use of the word according to certain rules, however; there is also, in addition, the inner attitude of 'something to confront', or contend with. An acceptance -- minimal cathexis of its representation with libido -- of it as subject for further opposites. Or rejection: denial, refusal to recognize, turning away from, suppressing the name.... This psychological rejection of something's 'reality' is noisily chattered by use of such phrases as "that's unreal". Such hubris, mastering ocean waves by speaking to them, has a sliver of justification in the functioning of the sign-use apparatus. There is a gap between two kinds of memory, one for token and one for text, making it possible to call things what they are not, but 'ought to be' to fit the wishes of the caller. One of Freud's earliest neurophysiological ideas was that instinct demands that perception be brought in agreement with desire. We see what we want, and what we want is to gratify pleasure on it, as in eating or copulating. One memory will prompt a picture -- a baby crying, for instance; another memory cuts in, depending on associations, to add the tag: "needs mammary", etc (which can be suppressed).
Now, contents that are rejected from consciousness continue to be psychically real: counted as real by the unconscious, which is its motive for defending against them. What is denied, at one level of processing (conscious), is affirmed at another (the unconscious -- these may exchange places). The person as a functional conscious ego-totality, a reflective "I" for themselves, preserves the viability of its acquired adaptation and memory in a given sign-use situation by warding off painful, or discomfort-threatening perceptions; but it will require more energy to ward these off (for ego defenses), the more conflict there is between conscious and unconscious, memory 2 and memory 1 content. The organism instinctively tries to preserve an unperturbed happy state in accordance with the pleasure principle. In Oriental religious traditions, the frustrations objective reality imposes on this demand tends toward nirvana, and Freud came to recognize a death instinct running deep and silently behind the scenes of libidinal striving, working to bring the suffering of unfulfilled desire to an end. In Occidental religious traditions, no limit is placed on the possible fulfillment of pleasures on earth below, or on the experience of blissful joys of heaven beyond, so long as soul, heart and mind remain true. Many traditions there are, all claiming to fulfill the human potential. Occidental religions, unfolding larger ego potential, generate more ego-conflicts with recalcitrant reality.
Such a psychosemiotic move, quite acceptable to ordinary English grammar, amounts to a "token tautology", a use of signs in which a text verifies itself on its own token . "Word" is a word.
Yet if a subtle linguistic shift is allowed from the informal "non-existent", to the psychological "unreal", the question of what is going on, in the sense of what is communicated by, advancing "the reality/unreality of God" is not just afirmation or rejection of "being", but rejection, in principle, of a systematic judge of the experienced totality of conscious being
And the God Who Doesn't Exist (fetishized non-Being)
Logicians have been saying "existence isn't a predicate" since Kant pointed out that the difference between there being real vrs. only imaginary 30 talers in my pocket isn't marked by the real one having a property the other lacked -- tacitly attributing a non-existent-but-real status to the non-existent. The philosopher Alexis Meinong actually recognized the existence of self-contradictory things, such as the round square, which could not possibly be real. This drove a wedge between use of "existence" and "reality". The modern logical insight that the grammatical sign used to conjoin words and phrases into determinate true or false sentences, "is" in English, expresses a function (operation, ) proper to discourse, and presupposing it, not objects*, is a fundamental clarification of thinking about existence, or reality, in systematic, coherent terms. The distinction between formal and informal modes of speech (the above is informal), between object language and metalanguage (as in Carnap's LSL), as well as that between unreconstructed vs (theoretically) reconstructed discourse (in explicit true or false statements) is based on this clarification, and must be assumed as background of any metaphysics pretending to be rigorous as well as systematic.
If one turns from "existence" as clarified by the Existential quantifier "There is an x such that..." of symbolic logic, to the little grammatical particle "is" from which it is derived by analysis of function, at least six other uses are found: the is's of
assertion
identity
predication
class membership
class inclusion
present tense
If "existence" -- informal use -- is counted as seventh in this list, as the cognitive gravity center around which the others cluster, the question arises, could there not be an 8th? Wouldn't there have to be? -- in a sense including logical but also (a) non-logical (compulsive) necessity?
The informal use, as in "unicorns do not exist" already posits an eighth through its own negation. "To be is to be the opposite of what it is not to be". In strictly logical terms, this ought to be no more than a confused idea. What it is to be, be-ing, or Being, is a reification of the completed relation of referent and object in a name. What is named, or referred to by a definite description (Russell), is what exists. Any "8th" (for the seven +1 -- shifting token types for numbers) can only be the reality of whatever Being or Existence stand out from, as named. The 8th is thus the predicate of non-Being through its name.
Is God real
It is this sense that merges in informal metaphysical discourse, I suggest, with the use of "real", contrasted with "unreal.". Logical texts, to my knowledge, never point out that "existence is not a predicate", as insight into the logical structure of discourse, does not imply that "reality" is not a predicate, leaving the question of the relation of reconstructed to unreconstructed metaphysical thinking hanging in the air. Even the hallowed assertion "God exists", widely taken as formulating the difference between two distinct species of human being, "theist" and "atheist", according to whether they do, or don't "believe in God", as they say ... even this most simple and fundamental assertion whose content would have been supposed determined as true or false, if rigor meant anything, has never been definitively assigned definite metaphysical status. This is due to a compound confusion, in that "God exists" if "God" is a name, logically speaking; but "God is a name" is not given except through use of the word "God", with intent to refer. Thus whoever uses it globally, for the totality completing itself in their experience, can affirm they "know" God exists, because they use the word with intent to refer -- which is actually all they are
"knowing", at all, as demonstrated by the grounds for the claim.
A.J. Ayer's Language Truth and Logic already demonstrated the non-illocutionary force of "God exists". "God" is not used as either name or descriptive expression from which verifiable true or false propositions follow. The fact that the logical positivists never received a response on this point broke the back of religion within the limit of pure reason. The compulsion -- not cognition -- generating God use by God users -- continued with assertions of "His" existence undeterred. The dichotomizing of human psychology on the basis of it was retained intact. In the face of the split between reason and practice in sign-use. the notion took hold that there was an extra-logical domain of knowledge, achievable through freedom by affirming the Unreal as Real: the "God" that doesn't exist as an object in the world is nevertheless made Real by affirmation of His Name in Faith. This was the main idea of the neo-liberal theologians who paralleled logical empiricist philosophy through and after mid-20th century. "The God that exists is the God that appears after God disappears in the agony of doubt," Paul Tillich wrote in The Courage to Be. "God is dead", claimed T.J. Altizer. I always took it to mean "linguistically dysfunctional"; that the term "God", as a token, no longer communicated, but stood in the way of communicating, what it once did. Theologians of this sort kept the token going by holding a mirror to empirical scientific reality and saying: the Not This that is real.
Meanwhile, the existential tradition in Europe from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche to Sartre and Heideggar vied with Biblicalists Karl Barth, Emile Brunner; Rudolf Bultmann's de-mythologizing program; Ernst Cassirer's work on Symbolic Forms in natural languages; religious historian Mircea Eliade's Myth of Eternal Return; paralleled from l900 by the ever widening influence of psychodynamic depth psychology, merging the physiology of sexual arousal, motivation, ritual and symbol, religious ideas and the matrix of individual-group relations, leading from family to politics. These are only some of the many profound new perspectives twentieth century unfolded to put the spotlight on what religion is all about. Bridging the language of organized religion and psychoanalysis, to go with the great novelists Mann and Hess, were Rudolf Otto's Idea of the Holy, landmark echo of the Magisterium of old; and William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. James make the further bald face suggestion, in his classical "Will To Believe", that "belief in God" was a matter of wishing, rather than thinking, the world was a certain way. The kind of thing reserved for the Right to Believe to vouch for, when reason and all else fails.
The Reality Function
If the particle "is" is understood as having a function, not as standing for anything ('exstence'), should "reality", as in "is real" also be properly understood through its function?
Here is where Sigmund Freud and the theory of repression come in. "Reality" IS, indeed, a "predicate", in the sense of what it's use says about the user. It is a kind of welcome to the world. There is not just use of the word according to certain rules, however; there is also, in addition, the inner attitude of 'something to confront', or contend with. An acceptance -- minimal cathexis of its representation with libido -- of it as subject for further opposites. Or rejection: denial, refusal to recognize, turning away from, suppressing the name.... This psychological rejection of something's 'reality' is noisily chattered by use of such phrases as "that's unreal". Such hubris, mastering ocean waves by speaking to them, has a sliver of justification in the functioning of the sign-use apparatus. There is a gap between two kinds of memory, one for token and one for text, making it possible to call things what they are not, but 'ought to be' to fit the wishes of the caller. One of Freud's earliest neurophysiological ideas was that instinct demands that perception be brought in agreement with desire. We see what we want, and what we want is to gratify pleasure on it, as in eating or copulating. One memory will prompt a picture -- a baby crying, for instance; another memory cuts in, depending on associations, to add the tag: "needs mammary", etc (which can be suppressed).
Now, contents that are rejected from consciousness continue to be psychically real: counted as real by the unconscious, which is its motive for defending against them. What is denied, at one level of processing (conscious), is affirmed at another (the unconscious -- these may exchange places). The person as a functional conscious ego-totality, a reflective "I" for themselves, preserves the viability of its acquired adaptation and memory in a given sign-use situation by warding off painful, or discomfort-threatening perceptions; but it will require more energy to ward these off (for ego defenses), the more conflict there is between conscious and unconscious, memory 2 and memory 1 content. The organism instinctively tries to preserve an unperturbed happy state in accordance with the pleasure principle. In Oriental religious traditions, the frustrations objective reality imposes on this demand tends toward nirvana, and Freud came to recognize a death instinct running deep and silently behind the scenes of libidinal striving, working to bring the suffering of unfulfilled desire to an end. In Occidental religious traditions, no limit is placed on the possible fulfillment of pleasures on earth below, or on the experience of blissful joys of heaven beyond, so long as soul, heart and mind remain true. Many traditions there are, all claiming to fulfill the human potential. Occidental religions, unfolding larger ego potential, generate more ego-conflicts with recalcitrant reality.
Such a psychosemiotic move, quite acceptable to ordinary English grammar, amounts to a "token tautology", a use of signs in which a text verifies itself on its own token . "Word" is a word.
Yet if a subtle linguistic shift is allowed from the informal "non-existent", to the psychological "unreal", the question of what is going on, in the sense of what is communicated by, advancing "the reality/unreality of God" is not just afirmation or rejection of "being", but rejection, in principle, of a systematic judge of the experienced totality of conscious being
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