Treatise V - on God as a Semantic Problem

V. THE PROBLEM OF ANTITHETICALITY

We understand and represent the world in terms of binary opposites. The transubstantial qualities of things are always formed of theses and antitheses, whether these are simple, complex or ideal-complex transubstantials. This is a quality embedded in language, and therefore embedded in our conception of the world. A proposition can only be True or False (even if we cannot know if it is, as is the case with negative-synthetic propositions). Things either happen or they don’t, something either is or isn’t, I either am or I am not. Herein lies the problem – the loophole – by which neg-syns become possible, even though, as we have already demonstrated, they are not fit propositions upon which to base knowledge.

The Origin of Binary Opposites
As we have seen, our conception of existence begins with our conception of consciousness – namely, self-consciousness – and thus a conception of the “I” as distinguished from “Other” things. And yet, existence is preceded by being, in the sense that before we become self-conscious of ourselves as “I” in relation to “Others”, we simply are. We function among things (in our individual early childhoods, or indeed in the early childhood of our species) unable to distinguish events, or to distinguish ourselves from those events. We have no abstract representations and concepts yet, we use no word/signs, we have no conception of a system of intersignificance, we do not “know” things, because we have no language yet. But as our experience grows, and as we start detecting patterns of things and phenomena around us, we begin to order the world we perceive. We hear certain sounds by those around us, we start to notice that particular types of sounds are applied consistently to certain types of things and events, and so we begin to become a part of language and gain understanding of the word/signs in use by those around us. One of the first things we learn to differentiate is the sound that is consistently applied to us by those in our immediate vicinity, usually parents and relatives and siblings. So one of the first things we begin to have a consciousness of is ourselves, since so much of what we experience early on directly – and almost always – concerns ourselves. People looking at us, pointing at us, holding us, carrying us and constantly calling us by a certain sound that becomes a word/sign in its own right as our name. This name differentiates us from other people, first the immediate parents, relatives and siblings, then other people who are distinguished from this early intense interaction of nominal word/sign among a tight group of people, and become distinguished as “strangers”. So The “I” is formed early on in relation to the “Other”, first vis-à-vis “Mother” and “Father”, then siblings, then relatives, then strangers and friends, etc. In other words, without the “Others” there would be no idea of “I”. And so becoming a person, a human being, an individual, begins with binary opposites, with antitheses to self. And we see that from there onwards, all things become known to us in the same way, as what they are not, as what they are relative to other things, completely in accordance with the overall positive and negative formulas for the existence of things. As we have seen earlier, we can only know things as what they are not, as “standing out”, as existing distinctly from other things, which we consciously or unconsciously hierarchize into differing degrees of type based on their formal qualities and for the sake of facilitating the process of understanding, knowing and ordering the world for the sake of optimizing our functionality in the world. After first differentiating ourselves as an individual vis-à-vis others (parents, then family, then strangers and friends, and, in more complex latter stages, as citizens, nationals, human beings, etc.), we begin also to differentiate certain perceived phenomena that happens outside of us. At first we’ll distinguish between things that involve “me” and that don’t involve “me.” Then we’ll start to distinguish between various types of things that involve me and don’t involve me, until our knowledge of the world evolves into a complex and rich interaction of a wealth of interconnected binary opposites and theses and antitheses. In fact, the language we use becomes exactly that system of intersignification by which we represent and understand everything in terms of binary opposites through which we create knowledge. Knowledge begins with the coming into existence of the “I”, and thenceforth, all knowledge is based on the “I”, because the “I”, the conscious individual, is the only thing in the universe that knows or can know. If I did not exist, the universe would not exist – as far as I know. As we saw with the origin of word/signs, the very basis for creating “things” lies in the binary nature of word/signs, in their being composed of both signifier and signified. We see then that to have word/signs at all is to have them as a result of a binary opposition between signifying subject – Man – and signified object – observed thing. This gap is where knowledge is born, and as a result of the essential opposition of signifier and signified, we will always see a world that is our world, not the world, not the truth, not the thing-in-itself.

To Be, To Not Be
Once I exist – once I know I exist – I can also conceive of not-existing. Thus, I either am or I am not. Thus a thing either is or is not. But how is this possible? If we look at the qualities of positive things, we see that the primary quality of spatio-temporality is the first way we conceive of a “thing”, since “thingness”, or existence of “thing” is achieved by recognition of the temporal and spatial dimensions of objects as distinct from other objects. Things occupy space, and they are also part of a temporal “string” of time in which they are always part of an infinitely shifting past and an infinitely occurring future in every moment of time. Hence we can determine that that is a tree, and that it can be nothing else, because nothing else can occupy that particular spatio-temporal locus currently occupied by the thing whose qualities we have recognized as belonging to a tree, and not anything else. This is also the manner in which original consciousness of self and other as separately existing things also develops, through this spatio-temporal conception of the primary qualities of things as “things” in their thingness. How does this influence the emergence of binary opposites and antitheticality? Because the first, most fundamental, primary conceptions of things through empirical, sensual experience creates a thing in relation to other things, and thus understands that thing as being thing because it is not another thing. That space is its space, the thing next to it is that thing’s space, and so on. Therefore, things either exist or they don’t (e.g. There is no car this apartment can be a fact, because either there is a car or there isn’t, and as ridiculous as it is to state such an obvious proposition, it is still a logically valid proposition), things either occupy a certain place or they don’t. But this isn’t to say that the universe is composed of binary opposites that we see. Instead, we only perceive of the universe that way. It is in our nature, and in the nature of our language to do so, but this is not to say that such qualities exist in nature in and of themselves. As we stated before, the fact that we perceive certain things as distinct from other things doesn’t necessarily mean that those things are different things in and of themselves as far as nature is concerned. There is no real reason why a tree should be a distinctly perceived thing from the grass and earth around it, or that leaves should be distinct from branches, or that clouds should be distinct from lakes or a river. We perceive them as different because of necessary Human Bias, because we facilitate our existence and interaction in and with the world “around us” by distinguishing between leaves and branches. Perhaps we can use branches as strong weapons when we cut them off trees’ trunks, or perhaps we perceive that they can hold our weight and be used as safety in the event of some sort of terrestrial danger… And likewise, leaves can be picked off and made into a pile that could provide soft bedding, or, if dry, can be lit and made a fire out of for warmth or cooking. But in their very nature, it makes no sense (perhaps) that leaves should be distinguished from branches, since they together compose a single organism, as does perhaps a tree and everything else. Perhaps life cannot essentially be differentiated into things. But due to necessary Human Bias, we do differentiate “things” in accordance with our needs and with the nature of our perception of first the primary quality of thing in terms of spatio-temporality, and also by their secondary qualities, in terms of their formal, causal and multiplicity qualities. Whereas we see a frog and recognize it as such with its formal qualities and thus understand “frog” as word/sign that refers to that particular thing, perhaps nature is blind to it being anything different, perhaps it is just one of millions of conglomerations of atoms and molecules that coalesce around certain distinct chemical codes and have evolved as such over millions of years because certain coded patterns proved more adept at self-persistence than others, and so eventually this ever changing type of form that we perceive exists as it does. We give reason to its characteristics, its long, powerful legs, its viscous tongue, its protruding eyes situated at the top of its head because we see how it’s useful for it, but nature didn’t necessarily create this because of those reasons, but something came into existence eventually because other ways of being and characteristics didn’t prove as successful, dies out, and the type of genes and codes that did survive kept being reproduced, since more organisms that had those features survived, and so on… something we have “perceived” and labeled as “Natural Selection.”

Knowledge as Absurdity
You will have realized the difficulty in trying to explain something in any terms other than that which language affords us. In the above description, I have tried to explain a conception of knowledge that exists outside of our narrow linguistic definitions and outside the scope of necessary Human Bias, but in the process have used nothing but linguistic definitions that can only be in accordance with necessary Human Bias. I have used binary opposites and definitions that run contrary to that which I am trying to say with them. I still have to talk of “leaves” and “branches” as different “things” even to be able to say that maybe they are “not different things”! In other words, it is impossible for me to adequately convey any sense of anything outside the scope of language, which is the sole basis of all knowledge, and is determined by my Human Bias. I can only see the world, relate to the world and describe the world a certain way, and that way is embedded in language. I can only deal with the word/signs that make up the system of intersignification, and nothing outside of it. Thus, even though I may be aware that I can not know things in themselves, that does not mean that I can see and understand the world in any other way. I even used the expression “the world around us” when we are clearly ourselves a part of the world, and thus it seems strange to think of the universe and the world “without us”, if not absurd. I have a certain set of experiences, education, upbringing and ideas which shape the way I see the world and which differs from other people, especially people of another culture. But even as a human being my view of the world is essentially different to that of other creatures’ (as far as we can surmise), due to my different physical attributes and senses. So when I say something, know something, state something, I am very much a factor in the statement, not outside of it. And yet, as we saw, that first, necessary step to the creation of knowledge is to create the I against which to distinguish all else, even though it is absurd to speak of “all else” or “all around” or “everything” without including us in it. But then when we do include ourselves in it, it becomes impossible to talk about it, to represent it, to “know” it, because we lose objectivity towards it. So if this first essential binary opposite is itself problematic and absurd, and yet if it is necessary for the founding of any knowledge, then all else that results from it, the whole universe of knowledge, of language, of all things represented by word/signs, becomes problematic. Thus, knowledge becomes absurd.

Insufficient Doubt, and Mystery
And so we see that truth propositions, monads of knowledge, etc. are nothing but things that are observed to occur all of the time, thus satisfying the fundamental qualities of spatio-temporality, causality, consistency and so on. But ultimately, we cannot know something exactly, in itself, 100 percent. Even our most certain knowledge will never go beyond 99.99 percent or more, but never 100 percent. As we had stated earlier, there isn’t even a way to say with complete certainty whether we exist or not. And so, everything is really just a theory, and our most firmly held beliefs are held in place by two very tenuous principles which we have already introduced: namely, either Insufficient Doubt (involving mainly positive things + simple transubstantials), or Mystery (involving mainly negative things + ideal-complex transubstantials). Because of this nature of the ambiguity of knowledge, every proposition is essentially defined in a fundamentally binary way as either True or False, and ones that are one or the other, also have the possibility of being the opposite, though perhaps not the probability. Even a proposition as obvious as “The Earth is Round” is, at a minuscule level, problematic, and for all I know, everybody and everything conspired against me to give me the impression that “The Earth is Round.” It’s not impossible, but highly improbably, and hence, through the use of Insufficient Doubt, I believe this proposition to be True, not False – even though a possibility of its falsehood exists. I trust that the photos I’ve seen, the things I’ve read written by science, and my own observations hold true. After all, why is there a horizon on open seas, and why do I see the mast of a sailing vessel before I do its hull? It seems obvious… and yet mankind has known of horizons and of the fact of masts being seen before the hull for millennia, without ever asserting that “The Earth is Round”, in fact, asserting quite the contrary proposition that “The Earth is Flat.” We see then that no knowledge, no matter how obvious, is completely obvious as either True or False, but only tipped one way or the other through the perception and application of either Insufficient Doubt or the quality of Mystery.

Through the Loophole
Now we’ve come to the crux of the issue, because we can now see precisely why we can make negative-synthetic propositions seem logical – because all knowledge is problematic in some degree. Therefore, what shifts between Insufficient Doubt and Mystery is merely a matter of gradation. The difference between these is not qualitative, but merely quantitative. If I cannot know for sure the Earth is round, nor can I know for sure that God does not exist or that I do not have a Soul. And if it’s in my interests to know I have a Soul and that there is a God (which we have demonstrated to be the case due to the factor of Lack which results from a perception of Fear and Pain that is indexed to the essential Vanity of existence vis-à-vis consciousness of Death), then I can take advantage of this problematic nature of knowledge to state the improbable but also the possible.

The Shaky Foundations of Logic
If, then, all propositions have some degree – no matter how slight – of uncertainty, then the very foundations of logic in language also become problematic. If all Truth propositions have the possibility of Falseness, and vice versa, logical reasoning becomes blurred. But thanks to Insufficient Doubt, we can usually block out the possibilities and focus instead on the overwhelming probabilities that a certain proposition holds true or false. We can say “I have a brain, my brain facilitates thought, therefore I think” and we would all agree, regardless of whether there is even the slightest doubt concerning each proposition. Who’s to say that we as individuals with corporeal existence are not instead possessed by the brain – in other words, that we are not merely figments of the brain’s imagination, whereby even the brain itself is a figment of this imagination? Who’s to say that we don’t think we think, when really thought merely manifests itself through us, although we are not necessarily the origin of that thought? And so what’s to say, if I am a figment of another imagination and if thought is not mine but has the illusion of being mine, what’s to say that “I do not think”? This seems absurd to us, but the logic rests only in the language, in the syntax, not in any independent truth outside of language. Thus “I am the figment of an imagination that thinks of me as believing I exist, I therefore only imagine I think with my brain when really another thinks of me as thinking with my brain, therefore I do not really think” becomes a wholly logical proposition, even though we have doubts as to its validity. But despite all our doubts to the contrary, we cannot help but admit that there still remains a grain of possibility of its Truth, if not much probability. We cannot know. Logic then, it becomes apparent, is no measure of the truth of something, merely the possibility of the truth (or falsehood) of something that can be made logical independent of whether something is of a certain nature in-itself – which we can never know. It can be held as True or False simply by being consistent within the framework of our system of intersignification. Therefore logic too, like knowledge, exists only in that gap between signifier and signified in our perception of the world, and can be no measure of Truth. Instead, everything we know is actually a truism no matter how certain we think we are of a proposition’s truth.

God and Existence
Being is a concept that naturally extends from the Human Bias of existence. I conceive of myself as existing, standing out, from other things, therefore I am and therefore everything else also is. Without me, nothing would exist; without anything else, I would not exist. I am, therefore everything is. If I exist, and I believe I do (although I do not know), then so does everything else. Things are. So just as the idea of our existence is a result of an inherent bias, so is the existence of everything; in fact, existence itself is a bias. And so we say “this is a thing” or “this is” as readily as we say “I am…” And yet, without other things, we could not define ourselves or what we are. It’s impossible. Am I a human being, an animal, a man, a Turk, a Muslim, an anarchist, an idiot, a philosopher, a writer, what am I except as a subject defined by what I am not? Nothing. So too with everything else, for nothing could be defined except by me and through me. But this raises a concern: that we are not sure that we exist if existence is merely a relative concept. That means that the most essential thing in life – Me – is actually merely a concept, a name, an aggregation of word/signs, whose existence is questionable. Hence we need a third party, something that can independently arbitrate and satisfy not only our feeling of existence, but fully satisfy our Will to Exist, and thus, our Will to Truth. Hence, God. Why? God exists precisely because he does not exist, precisely because the need for God exists. In other words, God is no mystery at all, hence the need for him to be a Mystery. Man and God become the ultimate binary opposites; in fact, as we saw before, we can only speak of Man-God, for without one becomes impossible the other.


VI. EXISTENCE WITHOUT GOD

So then why not believe in God if we have such a need to? But how can we when we doubt everything, and when we come to the idea that God exists precisely because he doesn’t exist? Now that we understand God as word/sign, how can we believe in God anymore? For God arose out of Lack and assumed all the qualities we perceive to be painfully lacking in the world – or, alternatively, assumed all the anti-qualities of that which we perceive to be painfully evident in the world. Has God then not become a joke, and a crude, clumsy, simple-minded one at that? Can continued belief in God be anything but childish for someone who has come to such philosophical conclusions as a result of some rigorous philosophical thought processing? God is dead indeed, and although this is no new pronouncement, it is always a new pronouncement when one person can say it and mean it for the first time in his life. Whenever one of us kills God, he kills God for the first time. It’s always revolutionary, it’s always new, it’s always strange, and it’s always the first time in history anyone has ever killed God. But herein lies the hardest part of killing God, for to kill God as substance is easy, just cease to believe, and poof, it all disappears in a puff of smoke. The trick – perhaps a seemingly impossible one – is to kill God as word/sign, for language knows a lot more than any of us do, and little do we realize that language let’s us know what it pleases and builds our world in its own image without us even realizing it.

Ultimately, the problem of God is a semantic problem. But if we need God and cannot bear its Lack, then what solution could there possibly be other than to simply continue believing in the crude agglomeration of all painfully evident Lack that is this “God” we worship, value, adore, and in whose name we even die for? Instead of basing our beliefs in negatives and Lack, can we not base our beliefs in a positive sense of immortality? Afterall, if being and existence is something we have – and something we are conscious of having, as humans – and something we thereby cherish above all else, then our creation of and belief in negative word/signs serves first and foremost to alleviate the stress of the imminence and impending certainty of Death. But aren’t we being shortsighted in our prognostications, and then building up Lack-filling ideals prematurely? Do we not see that Death itself is merely an illusion? We know that energy/matter can neither be born nor disappear, there are a certain number of atoms in the universe, and as a result, there is a certain amount of energy. All matter and energy does is merely change form. In other words, when we “die” all we are doing is becoming something else, but still some “thing” – in other words, everything that constitutes what we are still exists, still “lives” to all intents and purposes.

But you’ll notice that I used the term “what we are” above. For that’s the crucial issue: it’s not so much our “whatness” but are “whoness” that we value above all else. In other words, it’s not loss of body and form and change of matter, but the fact that what will end is who we are, our so called “soul”, our mind, our consciousness, our ego, our self. That will certainly end, and therein lies our dilemma, and the source of our despair, and the foundation of our metaphysical beliefs: not the end of existence (for as we know, we never cease to exist, just change), but the end of the vanity of existence. And yet even though we know that people came before us and will come after us, thinking the same thoughts, living through the same dilemmas, experiencing the same life, albeit in their own unique ways, reading the same books, saying similar things as us, somehow we cannot help but think we are unique, special, alone, and how could we not? Such is the vanity of existence, but it’s that vanity, that ego which is precisely also our spur to life, to accomplishment, to regeneration, growth, action and power. It’s the most important tool that has evolved through the history of life, culminating in humans. Therein lies our dilemma: the sense of self, the ego, that which is our most important tool – our very being – is also at the same time our greatest obstacle in overcoming the need for metaphysical belief, in the deception of hope, in our ongoing need for negative word/signs in our language, as part of our semantics. The ego is the double-edged sword: it props us up and cuts us down in the process, impeding our ability to rise above the idolization of Lack and the ignorance and darkness of Faith. Soul and God and Heaven and the Afterlife, are all nothing but Ego-Props, desperate attempts to belief that although matter comes and goes in various forms, now our body exists, now its is something else, the Soul – us, Me, I – is immortal. So how can we get over ourselves?

Ideas Toward a Reformation of Language:

1. We must cease to think in terms of True and False. We must instead think in terms of what we experience and what we do not experience. All else must be without value, all experiences must be of equal significance.
2. All words in our language written with capitals must be eradicated. I, God, Soul, all names, all denominations, all categories, all ideal-complex transubstantials, all of it must be eradicated. We must end existence and only be. We must be an aggregation of experiences, not things or names. The is a perfect substitute for I, you, we, etc… or anything that has been stripped of a name. Simple and complex transubstantials must replace all ideal-complex transubs.
3. Our use of word/signs must be kept to a bare minimum. We mustn’t try to describe anything. We must only experience.
4. Each of us will always be aliens in our own world. That which we describe, we will never know; that which we speak of may as well be a million light years away from us, even though it is right before our very eyes. To speak, to use word/signs, is to see a world composed only of colorful shadows and wondrous shapes. To describe a world with only shadows and shapes, to make it knowable, is pointless. We can only entertain ourselves with shadows and shapes, which is all that literature and philosophy amount to.
5. Science is a wonderful tool for helping us find out all the things we don’t know. The more it advances, the more we will be aware of not-knowing, and thus the wiser we will be as a species.