Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.

Countrymen,

ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT

This is delightful, a regular calisthenics for the learned.  It reminds one of a genius’ conversations with people he truly despises … dripping with disgust only barely veiled by large words that mean little on their own and even less tossed together in a sentence.  To the one who shared the URL with me, I responded:

Whoever wrote this is a poor student of Kant and a plagiarist of a word. Emphaticalism is, at origin, Empathicalism, a fictitious Parisian philosophy (think Sorbonne, the birthplace and home of Communism) in the Hepburn/Astaire movie Funny Face. George and Ira Gershwin wrote the music. The movie is a classic of the type.

I think the word is used in another movie, too, but I cannot remember which, if any. Perhaps Bell, Book and Candle. I cannot remember exactly.

In any case, the philosophy is fictional. The word is meant to play off the word existentialism, which also is not a philosophy, although it is not fictional.  Existentialism is an approach to philosophy, shared by some Christians (Kierkegaard, Tillich, Teilhard, Francis of Assisi, Bonaventura, Augustine, Luther) and some non-Christians (Heidegger, Marx, Sartre).

The reference to Maslow is important to pick up. Abraham Maslow, Harvard shrink, humanist determinist, smiling Pavolovian, Communist or worse, if that were possible, lapsed Jew, quite a following mid-20th Century, especially among advertisers/marketers, who employed him to help them tickle the human impulses to make them buy this and that at the stores. Nasty piece of work. Like most (if not all) psychologists, certifiable.  One founder of the Human Potential/New Age movement: self-actualization. Meant, really: buy what I want you to buy and think what I want you to think. When one of our offspring and I came up the CA Coast, visiting the Franciscan Missions, we passed the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, a Maslow operation, and I discoursed on its antecedents and consequences, pointing out its heavy influence on subsequent developments, especially in pop culture and new age consciousness (aka marketing).

For what Abe Maslow hath wrought, see this four-part article, New Age Marxism, by Judi McLeod at Canada Free Press:  Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four.

So this guy’s emphathicalism is a crony-capitalist/communist subversion expert’s wet dream.

Kant was a great philosopher who succumbed to an all-too-common temptation. After proving (irrefutably) that the existence of God cannot be proved by either practical or pure reason (those are technical terms of classical philosophy), Kant flops over, mounts a very, very, very clever variation of the ontological proof for the existence of God, and says the existence of God can be proved by an argument from/for morality. He is utterly wrong. God does not exist and cannot be proved. If he did, He would be a creature of existence, finite, graspable only by one or more of the five senses. God is the Ground of Being (Tillich), the prius of existence, beyond infinite, and utterly beyond human cognition.

[Compare the cosmological proof for the existence of God, which is more popular in our positivist/humanist age than the ontological proof but is equally no proof at all except of an unexamined premise, namely, that God is the prius of the proof.  Nevertheless, in usage by the pious, both the ontological and the cosmological proofs for the existence of God are justifiably comforting and expansive as explications of the Glories of God — so long as they are taken not as proof of anything more than an unexamined premise and as absolutely not relating to any so-called existence of God.  God does not exist.  God is the ground, the prius of existence.]

There is no proof for the existence of God. Believe me, He (another symbol, an anthropomorphism) needs none! 🙂 Every proof for the existence of God proves, as Nietzsche said, that God does not exist (colloquially, God is dead).

Godel demonstrated that nothing can be proved. How soon we forget. Religion, thank God, is not subject to proof. It moves by the validation of direct experience. Nobody sacrifices their life because something has been proved to them. If they sacrifice their life, it is because they have direct experience of Him to Whom they belong and the standards of conduct they are certain He expects. Proof is not in the picture.

The word God is a symbol for that (Ground of Being) in which the symbol, God, participates. It is not a name. God has countless names. None is the word God.

Hegel succumbed to a temptation similar to Kant’s: he recognized the world as embodiment of Spirit — true — and then, inexcusably, believed he knew and could identify the end-state of that embodiment: Prussia of his day. Kierkegaard and Marx plus others rebelled against that fatuous totalism.  Oetinger, a few years senior too Hegel, said that the end of the ways of God is corporeality — true — but he did not identify the end-state of said corporeality as this or that time or condition of history.

Kant, however, did recognize — true — that the Scottish Enlightenment of his time was the finest in Europe. The reason: every Scots child, no matter the station of their birth, read Greek and Latin from Grammar School forward and was educated from Grammar School forward. That was a lasting blessing of the Presbyterian (Calvinist) Kirk (Church). It is pretty simple, really, how to achieve a nation’s greatness: from their earliest years its citizens and residents learn its foundational language(s).  In the universe of the Latin Church — Europe, Americas, parts of South and Southeast Asia, parts of Africa and the Middle East — that is Greek and Latin.

Update 1: A light is shining on social science — aka made-up shit — including psychology.  Also here.

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA