Starchild: Welcome back M.D.. What do you propose to discuss today?
M.D.: I would like to discuss a point of agreement between us.
Starchild: And what could that be?
M.D.: Well, simply this, we both understand that the self is our illusory disjunction from nature.
Starchild: What do you mean by this assertion?
M.D.: I mean that to the extent that there is a sense that I exist, I am a disjunct from everything else.
Starchild: I think I understand what you mean.
M.D.: In my early years, even before I turned to a life of philosophical crimes, I was always repulsed by Cartesian dualism. First of all, if I am a substance, a thinking self, then I am what I am and there is no possibility of self-overcoming. Second, because if I exist as a disembodied thinking substance, then I am totally other than the natural world and trapped in my own mind for eternity. If the disjunction is real, then we are hopelessly trapped in our own subjectivity. Even God himself cannot save us from our condition. He is just a mind thinking perfect thoughts in comparison to my perversity.
Starchild: Like yourself, I have always felt an affinity to nature and the notion of becoming. Philosophers like to talk about the epistemological question as how we know we are not brains in a vat. If Descartes was correct, then we are basically minds in a vat.
M.D.: So if we accept that we are an illusory disjunction from nature, then our task must be a form of self-overcoming.
Starchild: Indeed. Thus, I posit both the self, the disjunction, and the soul, enlightened through the emanation of divine light, the conjunction of God and humanity. Through the light of divine knowledge and through the power of divine grace, we are able to become, to overcome, ourselves as disjunctions. Thus, we are commanded to love God, the source of knowledge and grace, and to love our fellow creatures. Thus, we transcend the disjunction. God as the Creator is the source of the disjunct, and God as Sanctifier is the source of the conjuct.
M.D.: You are aptly named "Starchild." Unfortunately, you have consumed my ration of love and light, so I must respectfully suggest an alternative to the transcendence of the disjunct: what I call the reduction of the disjunct.
Starchild: Please explain.
M.D.: As you are aware, the universe may be conceived as a divine hierarchy stemming from the realm of being to the realm of life to the realm of discursive thought and culminating in the Intellect. Every being falls in some place in the hierarchy: inanimate, animate, humans, and angels and demons. Any hierarchy posited relies upon the belief in the reality of the disjunctive. There can be no authority without the real disjunctive. As such, because the disjunctive is in fact an illusion, there is no real hierarchy and no real authority. This is the reduction of the disjunctive.
Starchild: I'm not sure I follow you.
M.D.: Starchild, the universe consists of only gross matter subject to mechanical physical laws. The sense of disjunct, the sense of separation from nature, the sense of meaning, this is all an illusion. Everything that exists can be broken down into physical entities that conform to the laws of physics. The world consists only of meaningless and mindless things. This is the reduction of the disjunctive.
Starchild: You spoke earlier of apathy. Is this related?
M.D.: Apathy is nothing more than seeing through the illusion of the disjunctive. I spoke earlier of the true, the good, and the beautiful. These are all normative concepts. For example, it is what we say that is accorded true or false. 'P says "p"' can be analyzed as 'P believes "p" is true' (if P is not dissembling). To assert something with conviction is to suggest that you have formed a normative judgment that something is the case, that it is an objective fact.
Starchild: What do you mean by "objective."
M.D.: That is hard to say because I am actually lying. But it comes down to the notion that the assertion accurately describes something beyond subjectivity or personal taste. Of course, I can make true assertions about my subjectivity or my personal taste but they would possess different criteria of truthfulness.
Starchild: But why do you say it is normative?
M.D.: Because every judgment is normative. If I measure the length of a block of wood, I form a judgment about its length with reference to a norm, my measuring stick. If I decide someone is lying, I form a judgment about that person's credibility, based on my life experience and knowledge. What you or I say about an objective world is derived from our own sensory and intellectual process.
Starchild: But how does this relate to the reduction of the disjunct?
M.D.: It has everything to do with it. God is fundamentally the concept of authority itself. He is the King and Judge. And what is authority? A true authority should be believed because he or she is speaks the truth. What God says is not true because God says it, what God says is true because God is truth. A false authority is one that claims he or she should be believed because he or she is an authority. You can diagnosis a cultural breakdown in authority, when people begin to demand belief solely on the basis of their role in some earthly hierarchy. The claim of authority is symptomatic of its absence.
Starchild: Such as today.
M.D.: Indeed. But the work is incomplete. But underlying our concept of authority is a shadow person. God is the truth. The true authority should be believed, thus, because he or she manifests the reality of God's truth, perhaps analogous to the voice of conscience. We imagine that if God were in the room, God would agree with the authority. God can be viewed as the objectivity of human subjectivity, the source of the Intellect, the Logos.
Starchild: But why do we bring God into it, especially since you don't believe in a God.
M.D.: Starchild, our language posits a disjunct between authorities and non-authorities. We believe what true authorities say, and we question non-authorities, yes. If someone could clearly establish to us that a message was definitively, without question, the voice of God, we would believe it, yes? That is to say, the criteria that establish the message is from God are the same as the criteria that establish its truthfulness. God's authority and God's truth are one.
When we are small children, our parents are like gods to us. We believe what they say because they are our parents. In fact, it is because are our parents functions as gods that we can learn language. (You can understand why Sanskrit and Hebrew are attributed directly to God.) We repeat what they say, we repeat what they think, we try and please them for the most part. We obviously can't doubt our parents, because we do not yet have the language and sophistication for doubt. Thus, our defiance of our parent's authority would not result in questions, but rather in speechlessness.
Remember, doubt functions as a transfer of authority, not as the destruction of authority. For example, as we get older, we may remember an episode one way, our parents may remember it another way. We may doubt our parents' memory, which is to say we treat our memory as authoritative. Likewise, we may begin life treating the Bible as an authority on the explanation of the origins of species. That is to say, we treat the Bible as if it were the words of God and those words were intended to instruct us on matters of natural history. We may later doubt this account, thereby transferring our sense of authority from the Bible to say biologists proposing an evolutionary account.
To put it differently, the principle of God is simply the principle of the objectivity of the subjectivity. For someone to actually be wrong, someone else must actually be right. Both language and human forms of life presuppose the objectivity of subjectivity. I think you can see that the debate over evolution is not so much a debate about truth, about what is the case, so much as a debate over the right norms of truth. If we dispose of the objectivity of subjectivity, all we are left with is an anthropological description. We can describe what evolutionary biologists say is the case, and we can describe what creationists say is the case, and account for their various justifications for their positions. But we can also see that the root of the debate is not "objective truth" but rather each party's arbitrary commitment to a norm of authority. Whether we regard the biologists as right or the creationists, we posit a convention or a rule--believe that one. Only after the commitment is any justification possible. Thus, turning toward or against an authority is an act of will.
Because I reject God, I reject any objectivity of subjectivity. What is true for me is true for me and what is true for you is true for you. Inexplicably, our judgments can sometimes agree and communities can construct conventions and customs. Even more inexplicable, we can sometimes form correct predictions.
Let's think about it. What I experience is private. To the extent I take a sign to be referential, the reference is private. It refers to something present in my subjective experience. To the extent that a sign is referential to you, I cannot know that by witnessing your subjective experience, only by witnessing your speech and behavior (in my subjective experience). What unifies human life is not an objective world, a thing-in-itself, as no one has ever experienced a thing-in-itself. Even if it did exist, it would have no connection to our experience or our language. Indeed, what unifies human life is language--or the possibility of language.
Stephen Hawkings wrote a book called the Grand Design. Interesting book, but it remains a narrative, a story in language. The unification of human life requires language, and language is founded on rules, norms and conventions. There has to be a right way to compute a sum. Thus, I don't have much truck with the notion of God as a being or substance, but I do think God conceptually is the right way of all things. That is to say, God is manifest when the right way is followed, and, because the right way is never ultimately followed, God is the end of all things. If God were a being or a substance, then a higher being would be manifest when God followed the correct path, and God would be called to a higher end by the higher being.
You can see to say that God exists is akin to saying language is meaningful. A sign in language cannot refer to language, the totality in which it participates. A sign can only be a manifestation of language. Thus, the assertion "language is meaningful" lacks a sense. Likewise, "the Word" cannot refer to God, "the Word" is God, and "the Word" is the manifestation of God in human life. Thus, the assertion of God's existence lacks a sense. At the same time, the assertion "language is not meaningful" presents something of a contradiction. Obviously, the proposition lacks any reference, so it is meaningless as an assertion--its can't be true or false--but it is a lie, because if language and life were truly divested for us of meaning, then we couldn't say anything.
Starchild: I don't hear you speaking atheism.
M.D.: I told you that you cannot really be an atheist unless you understand the concept you are denying. Starchild, God is meaning, or rather, meaning is the symbol, the manifestation of God. Asserting the non-existence of God is not enough. We must destroy language, and destroy all the bearers of meaning. This is the ultimate reduction of the disjunction--the elimination of the possibility of a disjunction altogether.
Starchild: I don't know that I buy what you are saying. Imagine the world was composed of inanimate matter that conformed to physical laws, and life miraculously emerged (from either natural or supernatural cause) and that life was shaped by evolutionary pressure, the struggle for survival, and ultimately became complex enough to invent language. Wouldn't this life be able to make valid judgments at least about simple things like whether there was a lion in the next bush. After all, if you were terrible at that sort of thing, you wouldn't leave many offspring.
M.D.: First of all, Starchild, you present me with a narrative, a story. I am to take this narrative as a true description of a possible world. But who is giving me this description? One of these beings living in the jungle? If so, then the narrative is either true by fact of convention--all the beings assent to it--or its is deemed true within a particular community. The narrator for all we know could be a brain in a vat being tricked by aliens into think he or she dwells in such a world. I would like to say these kind of narratives suggest a God.
Starchild: How so?
M.D.: When we start describing the true state of things, we presuppose that we are hearing the voice of God giving us "God's-eye-view" on the world. Then we are left with an account of why it is likely that life on the planet would be able to formulate reliable and true beliefs about that world. Here is what is important to note: there are settled questions and unsettled questions in our language. Settled questions are set forth in normative conventions of speaking. We say that a hot stove will burn you if you touch it and the sun will rise tomorrow, for example. Our praxis presumes that these conventions are conventions because they are right, but all we can ever establish is that we say our conventions are right because they are, in fact, our conventions. We live as if our grammar manifests the intelligible form of reality. We presuppose, groundlessly, that our subjectivity is grounded in an objectivity. Thus you see, God is grammar, which is subject I detested as a school boy.
Starchild: Something continuously bothers me in your analysis. You seem to be say that if I can trust my grandmother to look out the window and reliably apprise me that it is snowing, then God has to exist.
M.D.: You have me wrong. I am saying God doesn't exist, so you can't trust your grandmother to truthfully tell you it is snowing. But the principle is the same. Truth is accorded to what we say. What we say occurs in some physical medium but what we say is not meaningful based on its medium of presentation but rather based on its content. The generation of true statements, or judging the statements of others to be true, must exhibit some manner of uniformity or there could be no consistent agreement and ultimately no language--we couldn't understand one another. This uniformity is the symbol of the objectivity of the subjectivity. This uniformity is not the efficient cause of these judgments as it is concomitant with the practice of issuing these judgments themselves. While being concomitant with the judgments, this uniformity is also the purpose of this practice. Thus, when we go about measuring and recording the lengths of boards with a measuring rod, there is presumably some measure of uniformity revealed in this practice. (If there wasn't, we wouldn't bother.) At the same time, we may modify our procedure in order to promote the end of greater uniformity. And presumably (but without being able to prove it), we suppose from God's-eye view that these more uniform measurements comport with what God would measure if he were measuring the boards. That is to say, our measurements are not true because they are uniform, they are uniform because they are true. We have thus discovered another King manifesting.
Starchild: Now you sound as if you have become some kind of strange theist.
M.D.: Absolutely not. God does not exist. Thus, it is balderdash to talk about what God would measure if he was measuring boards. We can perhaps talk about uniformity but we can never talk of truth. Second, we cannot speak of uniformity because all that exists are physical things moved by efficient causes. This uniformity is nothing more than the medieval notion of a formal and,or final cause. These types of things cannot exist. Consider chess. We call a piece a king, but its "kingness" is not a physical ingredient of the piece. Although the king is typically manufactured in accordance with design conventions, we could just as easily use a quarter, so its "kingness" is not some physical form that the piece takes. A "king" is just a name.
Starchild: But the essence of the king is manifest in its role in the game of chess.
M.D.: Its role in the game is merely defined by arbitrary rules, it is not some magical process.
Starchild: Its meaning is manifest through the normative structure of chess, just as the meaning of truth is manifest through the normative practices associated with the rendering of true judgments. What could be more magical than the manifestation of what is higher.
M.D.: There you go again with your magical thinking.
Starchild: M.D., I have been doing some serious thought about this issue, and it occurs to me that science and technology concerns itself with the physical manipulation and transformation of physical objects. For example, we may design a faster computer chip or a better mouse trap.
M.D.: Agreed.
Starchild: Whereas magic concerns itself with the transformation of what something means. For example, we conduct an inauguration and presto, we have a new president.
M.D.: Conducting an inauguration is hardly magic Starchild. It's just a ceremony.
Starchild: But an ordinary citizen walks in, we conduct a ceremony, presto, a new thing, a president, walks out. Likewise, the appropriate magical authorities take a piece of paper, ink in the appropriate occult symbols, and presto, it suddenly has value (except in Zimbabwe). Isn't this how magic works? You conduct a ceremony in the proper way and it effectuates some kind of change on a thing? Obviously, conducting a ceremony does not physically alter a thing or person (unless it is a sacrifice), but it can change the meaning of the thing or person.
M.D.: No Starchild, it is just a collective illusion, like personhood.
Starchild: But if we eliminated all these illusory meanings, I don't see how we could even talk.
M.D.: Exactly--that is the point. The universe is unintelligible. We impose a delusional meaning on things--a good, a truth--but this is just superstition. This is the reduction of the disjunction. We have apathy when we see the world through the lens of physics: as a set of meaningless things conforming to mechanical laws. But it is important to understand that we do not embrace the law of physics because they represent truth. We do so on aesthetic grounds. The hierarchy is the reality of the disjunctive, and we collapse the hierarchy by intellectually collapsing or reducing the hierarchy to merely its lowest rung. We deny the reality of intellect, we deny the reality of life. In this way, we eliminate any real distinction between good and bad, true or false, and real or false authority. Of course, the scientific reduction can only be the first stage of freedom. Ultimately, we must collapse the disjunction between being and nonbeing altogether, until all that remains is a silent scream like an aborted embryo. You can see the importance of abortion for me, not from any normative or ethical considerations, but because it serves as symbol of my philosophy. If every living embryo were aborted, we would soon accomplish the ultimate reduction of the disjunction.
Starchild: You are mad.
M.D.: I am merely an artist. The destruction of the beautiful can only take place through the manifestation of ugliness. We must suffer for the sake of our art. But let's consider: what is language aside from a set of normative practices, a set of objective rules of usage: a right way? How can there be a description of anything without presupposing meaningful language? If we deny the objectivity of subjectivity, if the deny the possibility of an objective norm, then language is meaningless and therefore the scientific description is meaningless. And how could we solve a problem in math or logic if no objective rules were possible?
Starchild: You seem to be suggesting that something like a God exists.
M.D.: Meaning is ultimately the manifestation of God in the world. Not in the sense of meaning understood as something our words refer to, but meaning as manifest in our ways of life. This fact is useful to me as an atheist, because it means that God cannot really be conceived of as a thing that can be disclosed in the scientific investigation of the universe (he is rather manifest in the possibility of scientific investigation at all). Likewise, because we can't referentially talk about God, we can't formally prove God's existence either. Of course, the fact that there can be a logical proof of anything presupposes the existence of a Logos. Thus the existence of God cannot be proved through scientific inquiry, nor can the existence of God be proved by the discursive reasoning of philosophers. Although the traces of God can be seen everywhere (in the manifestation of truth and love), these traces are inchoate. We can simply label them delusional and point out all the ethnic and cultural differences among religious groups. As an atheist, I can hold my own in an argument, because God cannot ultimately be demonstrated through science or rational demonstration (any more than the existence of meaning can). However, although I can cause people to doubt the existence of a King, they continue to play chess, even after they deny the existence of the King. They continue to live their lives as if the Good, the True, and the Beautiful were valid concepts. Most atheists are little more than crypto-theists--and how can be we expect to hold on to them? They might end up concluding like you, Starchild, that God is a logically primitive concept necessarily entailed by the concepts of the true, the good, and the beautiful, and that these concepts are essential to a meaningful and full life. Atheism must be more than a theoretical point of view, it must be a praxis.
Starchild: Do you deny the existence of God or do you defy the existence of God?
M.D.: It should be clear that there can be no ultimate distinction between these positions. I refuse to acknowledge any higher authority outside of the most debased aspects of myself. Otherwise, a disjunction results. Thus, I refuse to acknowledge the real existence of a true, a good, and a beautiful. And I choose the false, evil, and ugly as a means of liberation from the bondage of God. It makes no sense to label something an illusion and remain ensnared in it. We need courage--we couldn't deny God if we lacked courage in the first place. We need to maintain our courage as we descend into the depths of the darkness of evil. At the same time, evil is parasitic on the good. In order to seduce others into my way of thinking, I must walk a fine line: there must be something desirable, something meaningful, about what I offer in order to ensnare others. I have to use the authority of science to persuade others, as if the question of truth was a meaningful one. But ultimately I seek the end of truth, desire and meaning. Let's return to the reduction of the disjunction.
There is the philosophical reduction of the disjunction. We make a difference between human beings and living things and the inanimate world. Scientific naturalism gives us a philosophical means of reducing this disjunction: there is not being and life and intellect, there is only being and the illusion of life and consciousness. There are only really things that are subject to deterministic scientific laws. Thus, we divest the world of meaning and truth.
But there is a praxis associated with philosophical reduction, that is vivisection. We see something that seems different from the order of things: it seems to have beauty, consciousness, life. Yet when we cut that thing open and dismember it into its component parts, we come to understand that the beauty, consciousness, and life cannot be found. There is a self-liberation in the act of vivisection, but we also give our victim a great gift: freedom from their illusion of disjunction from the world of things. Life, consciousness, these are the great lies. The Science and Philosophy of Murder, in its reduction, reveals the truth: there never was anything in the body, it was always just a body, a mechanical thing, a complex clock. Thus, I have come to see that murder is the ultimate imperative for those of us who truly understand the implications of the European enlightenment. There is no soul, there is no life, no vital principle. The body is not a vessel, it is merely a thing.
Likewise, it is important to consider how we treat the dead. Humans, in their superstitious animism, believe that bodies hold spirits or souls, and after the spirit or soul departs, we should pay respects to the body, as the former vessel of the dear departed one. Obviously, this just perpetuates animism and organized religion. Thus, we must take great care to disfigure and disrespect corpses in all manner imaginable. The body is after all, merely a thing, at it is important to treat it with abuse and dishonor until it becomes unrecognizable except as a thing. After we have had our liberties with the corpse, cremation serves as the best reminder that this thing has always and only ever been dust--no spiritual life has ever been breathed into it.
Obviously, murder takes great courage and fearlessness. It is the culmination of a long course of philosophical enlightenment. The atheist should never start with the contemplation of murder: we seek the destruction of taboos, not transgression. A single extreme transgression like a murder in the hands of the inexperienced is likely to result in spiritual backlash, even remorse and repentance. We are fortunate that intoxication and sexuality provide means (albeit temporary) for relief from the disjunction of life. Transgressive sexual acts and drug and alcohol abuse form the best starting point. Note that there is a danger of complacency here. Atheists should aspire to more than merely a life of onanism and alcoholism culminating in suicide. Our hatred of life must be expanded beyond abuse of ourselves--this only preserves the disjunction. The same practices of degradation and humiliation that we would perform on a corpse can also be performed on so-called "living persons." After all, there is no essential difference from the standpoint of physics between a "person" and a "corpse". Yet certain temptations present themselves in the use of sexual powers. The most wicked is, of course, the possibility of conception, of new life, emerging inadvertently through our conduct. Obviously, this situation can be remedied through abortion, and even infanticide, but the best practice is to confine sexual expression to those acts which are incapable of resulting in issue.
Thus, you can see that the reduction of the disjunction is not simply a philosophy but a way of life, leading to true seeing. Further, as we descend deeper into the reduction, we gradually become desensitized. We no longer become capable of discerning life from death, pain from pleasure, good from bad, truth from falsehood, beauty from ugliness. With time, we become strong enough to see that murder is merely liberation from delusion. We become free. We become predators. At first, we kill like wicked men, but over time, we grow to resemble the tiger and the lion. With maturity, when we attain true apathy, we learn to kill with the total indifference of Nature herself.
Starchild: What you say is entirely perverse and repulsive. I am not convinced. If there is no good, I do not see why we would choose evil.
M.D.: Starchild, I am not the only proponent of the reduction of the disjunction. There are thousands, many in prominent positions of authority, who share my philosophical views on the reduction of the disjunction. You can purchase books in any large bookstore that extolls versions of my philosophy. I grant you that many of the secrets I reveal are esoteric. Only a small minority will publicly acknowledge the praxis I proscribe for the reduction of the disjunction. At the same time, politically, support for sodomy, abortion, and suicide continues to grow. Some moral philosophers even make the case for infanticide. Although eugenics has experienced some set backs, it made great strides in the early part of the twentieth century. As far as some of the sexual practices I discussed, these practices are gaining in increasing in popularity and acceptance in western cultures generally. Religious and political authorities are increasingly being called into question. With science and technology resulting in nuclear proliferation world-wide, the prospects for the ultimate reduction of the disjunction grow stronger. In many ways, cross-culturally, my philosophy and my praxis are winning. Think, Starchild, humans only have so many taboos. Most human taboos come down to taboos about killing, dead things, sex and food. And a taboo is simply a taboo. How many taboos can we eliminate before people realize that killing an innocent or degrading a corpse is no ultimately no different from eating pork or sodomy? That the end of taboo is never the end of the world but the creation of a new form of life?
Starchild: I mentioned earlier a distinction between technology and magic. Technology works to produce or alter things, and magic works to change the meaning of a thing. What you describe seems to be a kind of magic, and what it accomplishes is the divestment of meaning from the world. The divestment of truth, the divestment of goodness, the divestment of beauty, the divestment of life. You seek the exorcism of God from the universe.
M.D.: I don't acknowledge the existence of any supernatural beings. But yes, that is precisely what I seek. There is the atheological doctrine--my truth that is false--based on the denial of God, and then there is my liturgy--my ethics that is evil-- based on murder and sexual depravity--leading to my ultimate end--total nothingness, total alienation from God.
Starchild: But then what you really describe is not a rational philosophy at all, but a set of depraved occult rites founded on blood sacrifice and sex magic.
M.D.: In one sense, the reduction of the disjunction could be conceived of as a form of ritual human sacrifice. However, if we truly understand the reduction of the disjunction, we realize that in murder, nothing dies except illusion. Further, our sacrifice in not undertaken in the name of God but in the name of nothingness. Last, if magic works to change the meaning of a thing, we aim at the destruction of magic, at the destruction of the possibility of any meaning. I practice anti-magic, I seek to dis-enchant the entire universe. My praxis might be falsely mistaken with Satanism, but Satan after all is not the opposite of God: he still possesses power, and knowledge, and even (however so perverse) goodness. My God is nothingness.
Starchild: Do you have any closing words?
M.D.: Indeed I do. Atheists must realize that the intellectual denial of God is insufficient. If we consider the Christian doctrine of Incarnation, Jesus is hypostatic union of God and humanity. This implies not only that divinization of the human being is possible, but that it is the true end of all humanity. If we knock God out of the equation, but we leave the ancient notion of a human nature in place, divinization remains a theoretical possibility, especially given the hidden nature of God anyway. Much more important is the destruction of humanity, that is to say, we must change language, culture and institutions until the notion of human nature disappears altogether. Humanity must overcome itself, as Nietzsche prophesized.
Starchild: I believe this concludes our dialogue. Obviously, M.D., by his own admission, admits that his philosophy is depraved and immoral, and he readily acknowledges that most atheists neither share his views nor embody his philosophy. Although M.D. endorses the practice of murder, he does so on strictly immoral grounds. That is to say, even he acknowledges that murder is conventionally regarded as wrong.
( The character of M.D. was inspired by a certain French writer of the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth century. It is not the intent of this dialogue to "refute atheism" or present a straw-man caricature of atheism but rather to present one (or two) strands of atheist thinking. It is our hope in presenting this dialogue not to persuade anyone for or against one of the two points of views presented, but rather to assist in clarifying the issues and to stimulate others to think out the logical ramifications of their own ideas.)
