Dialectic of The Holy (religion and existentialism)

Chapter 4 Dialectic of Religion and Existentialism, Hegel, Instinct and Projection

Alternate Frames

Existentialistics (as an “I” position for self-and-others): non-religious completion of conscious “I” totality vs. thought. Religious sign-use frames the conscious totality “under God”. The same conscious totality is framed in non-religious sign-use as “existentialism”. The same generality, or inclusive application, of binding limits of private tokenspace are subsumed under both “God” and “What Is”, relative to different token levels. Thus, existentialists can understand what religionists communicate, though they do not make assertions using the sacral terms, by aesthetic resonance to echoed holiness. There is freedom of choice in the level of sign-use for the totality in texting tokens (QIII).

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The Case for Religion

Karmic feedback from projecting texts for the totality: looping in their measure of the Holy.

The religious S* user will say to the existentialist: “you are depriving yourself of karmic feedback by not speaking religious language, though the intonations may reverberate privately at higher notes in the octave. What is latent should be made manifest in order not to lose integrity of personal frame over the developmental life trajectory from birth to death. Nothing external can do this except by reflection (‘projection’). The opposite view leads to idolatry, worship of objects as Holy. Yet, projections from womb existence, birth trauma, libido-proprioceptive impressions proceed ‘instinctively’, whenever a flow-of-energy event draws content aroused (‘loops in’) these developmental levels. From them arise the unconscious group-fantasies acted out in public tokenspace.”

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Existentialist Reply

The non-religious existentialist may well reply thus: “Advancing projection of the Holy in public Tokenspace, as opposed to private, is refuted by Hitler’s Germany. “Die Fuehrer” cathected instinctive reaction of folk-Germans to projected Holiness. “Heil” is short for “Heilege”. ”Heilege Nacht” -- Holy Night -- is sung every Christmas the world over to echo Incarnation of the Holy. But German blood consciousness would not have regarded this bond as idolatrous, but a manifestation of the Holy Spirit itself, according to Hegel’s notion that The Trinity culminated world history after the Incarnation in Prussian Spirituality.”

If religious sign-use frames factual discourse, then the dialectic of religion and existentialism as alternate grammars of self-reference, (this dialectic) turns on issues pertaining to idolatry and communication of The Holy. Psychosemiotics holds that the subjective unity connecting a completed life trajectory of life “on the token side”, requires some resonance of fetal origins from which the sense of holiness originates, as a completing factor. Such projection completes consciousness, not thought. On the other hand, projections of the Holy lead by group-blood instinct to Church-State fascism. Herein is the proposed meta-frame for a new level of dialectic.

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Dialectic, Antinomy, Irony and Self-Contradiction

Dialectic: Predication of incompatible alternates of/on the same subject term. Ex.: The self-professed “orthodox” wing of Judaism projecting use of The Bible as Holy deed to Jerusalem. Christians reject use of the Old Testament as vehicle of The Holy apart from the New Testament . The Orthodox Jewish projection forecloses the symbol of union of opposites in the Incarnation. This private group-fantasy is politically shielded from negation by respect for the Name. Because the Germans used it (‘Judenhassen’ for badgering Jews), “Name the Jew” is dialectically potentiated by “Orthodoxy”. What Freud identified as the “reaction-formation” mechanism, built into the grammar of “anti-Semitism”, is “knocked off” by discourse that “names the Jew”. It now comes down to a metaphysics of The Holy in history.

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Antinomy -When both sides of a contradiction can be proven <= when asserted, reality foreclosed under self-contradiction (Note: unreconstructed grammar of ordinary language allows asserted foreclosure.)

-of pure reason <= Kant: Space is both finite (bounded) and infinite (unbounded) in extent; -both infinitely and non-infinitely divisible into particles. Similarly, temporal duration is both finite (“time had a beginning and will end”) and infinite (“time did not begin, will not end”). In these and other points of medieval controversy unresolved in the Modern era, Kant shows the contradictions reason led to, proving both sides of these propositions, arose from silent assumption (unconscious projection) of a subjective factor as objective – in this case, space and time. The fact that assuming they had objective existence led to antinomies was Kant’s argument for showing their subjectivity. He called space and time “forms of sensory intuition”; apriori conditions of phenomenal given-ness; only constructs of dinge an sich. This doctrine of subjectivity of perceived space ant time was the radical edge of 18th-19th century Idealist metaphysics. Acceptance of the irrefutably established anatomical mediation of knowledge of the external world by sense perception framed the issues later philosophers were required to work through.

Hegel’s philosophy elaborated Kant’s Idealist – Realist dialectic of perceptual knowledge as historical, absorbing both space, time, and all contradictions into the Absolute –his version of the completing totality – as partial perspectives. This theme, of The Absolute resolving all possible contradictions of reason within itself is continued in the Scottish philosopher T.H. Green, and Britain’s F.H Bradley in the late 1800’s. Dialectically trumped, to use its own terms, by G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell’s phenomenal ‘realism’ (“sense datum” theory of perception).