Think about this: What if memory is not an element of our natural existance, but something later and extrinsic? What if memory is a deficiency, a decadence of our minds? Like a certain posture or limp that one might develop because of an injured leg.
Bloomfield,
That’s an interesting “what if.” I’m curious to know more about what you meant.
Carol
Thanks for more profundity!
‘Freedom’'s just another word
for nothing left to lose.
‘Freedom’ equals liberation,
so yes, that’s one of the
reasons I like transience.
Not even this body is yours!
Bloomfield’s point about the one bit
of good outweighing the
99 bits of evil is a good one,
but that is a two-way street.
There was in the last century
evil so horrific that it
was arguably incommensurable
with any good that has
ever happened–unless it is
divine good, in which I don’t
believe. The world is
irretrievably damaged by
the Holocaust if it
is still real. The best
hope for the world is
that the Holocaust is
vanished like the snow.
The idea that the Holocaust is still
chugging along and always
will be, is, for me,
mind boggling in its
awfulness.
I do appreciate Augustine’s
vision, I think, that
creation is God’s goodness
overflowing, so that
being is itself good.
But I don’t believe
it, myself. I have never
been able to accept
the idea that the Holocaust wasn’t
positively evil, but
merely the absence of good!
Hitler wasn’t merely
‘deficient in goodness’.
Buddhism also maintains
there is no evil, but
only ignorance and
unskillfulness.
But I have considerable
trouble with the idea
that the fundamental
problem with the
Nazis’ behaviour was
that it was (very) unskillful!
The presentist
does insist that,
although the present alone
is real, it is a fact
about the present that
Bloomfield won an essay
contest a couple of
years ago. There are
past-tensed
truths, even if there
is no past,
according to the presentist.
It is true now that there
was a Holocaust, even though
the Holocaust is vanished
like the snow.
So maybe this will get
us a world about
as meaningful as one
where it is true now that
there was a Holocaust
and, in addition, the Holocaust always
will exist–it is still
very much happening in the past.
Mostly the above remarks
are my own subjective
take on things–not
meant as arguments!
Thanks again, Jim
On 2002-10-31 12:07, jim stone wrote:
…
Bloomfield’s point about the one bit
of good outweighing the
99 bits of evil is a good one,
but that is a two-way street.
There was in the last century
evil so horrific that it
was arguably incommensurable
with any good that has
ever happened–unless it is
divine good, in which I don’t
believe. The world is
irretrievably damaged by
the Holocaust if it
is still real. The best
hope for the world is
that the Holocaust is
vanished like the snow.
Jim, you really baffle me: on the one hand you talk about good and evil, on the other hand you say you don’t believe in “divine good”. How can you have a criterion for “good” or “evil” with out some moral/religious conception? I don’t think you can reject God [or any comparable transcendent value system] and still meaningfully discuss good and evil.
If you think that you can avoid this quandry by defining evil as “physical pain” and good as “pleasure or the absence of pain”, you’ll have to explain to me why you cite the Holocaust as the supreme instance of evil: In terms of physical suffering it is paralleled even in the 20th century, and probably in centuries before. (I am not downplaying the horrors of the Holocaust, I am just trying to understand Jim’s position.)
To me it seems that what makes the Holocaust so evil is the moral depravity, the cold absence of the moral restraint of civilization. That aspect of it you can only grasp in a concept of evil that has moral, not just physical/empirical, content.
cskinner, I’ll come back to the memory thing. Thanks for asking.
I think the point is
well taken that
the badness of the Holocaust
isn’t merely a matter of
physical suffering. It is
largely a matter of the
depravity of the perpetrators,
just as Bloomfield says.
Kant said that the fundamental
moral imperative is
to treat humanity, whether
in your own person or that of
another, always as an end and
never merely as a means.
That
principle flows from
the idea that people have a special
worth on account of being
‘autonomous moral agents’,
who have the ability to
decide for themselves what
they want for themselves,
who have their own aspirations,
dreams, hopes, fears.
It is fundamentally
innapropriate to treat
beings like that as
if they were machines
or oxen.
Kant called that worth ‘dignity.’
Immorality consists of
acting in ways that discount
that dignity.
The Holocaust did that
egregiously, at least in part
because it was industrialized.
Killing factories were set
up in which people were
exterminated like vermin.
That set it apart.
Massacring people in anger–shooting them,
chopping them up, howling abuse
would have
been superiour, for it would
have been less discounting
of their humanity, more
personal. Millions
were calmly
and methodically treated like
cockroaches–by people many
of whom went home at
night and wrote poetry
or played Mozart on the piano.
(Remember this was portrayed
in Schindler’s List.)
Evil, we might
say, consists in the egregious
and aggressive discounting
of human dignity, and it
becomes exceptional when
it is done largely for its
own sake.
Well, here is a non-theistic
account of evil, and there
are others, I think.
Also, theistic accounts
aren’t without their problems,
as Plato pointed out.
All evil people are bad,
but not all bad people
are evil, I think.
Cowardly, corrupt,
dishonest people are bad,
but evil requires a positive
relishing of harming the
innocent–consider Ted
Bundy. Evil requires
a monstrous arrogance,
as if one harmed enough
innocents one would
become oneself superhuman,
The Angel of Death.
I’ve known quite a few
bad people and even
some evil ones, and it
always consoled me to
think that sooner or
later they would vanish
like the snow… Best, Jim
I don’t think Jim really understands Augustine’s position. His last post is full of arguments for it even if he doesn’t think so. The idea is not that the Nazis were just “unskilled” or whatever but that they were depraved. Depravity itself is a privitive term.
The point is that the Nazis were very very good and what they did and that the use of the word good here is not equivocal. Factories are essentially a good idea. Efficiency is a good thing. Doing your business calmly, rationally, and thoroughly is excellent practise. But the Nazis took these good solid German virtues and used them for horrible horrible ends. Yes, it was evil. But what did the evil consist in? Being depraved, that is, lacking the proper frame of mind. Choosing the wrong goals and then carrying them out. Holding untrue beliefs about race and government and economics and religion and carrying them to their logical conclusion. But it is good to carry out goals, to have a well-framed mind, to hold beliefs and act accordingly. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t do those things. The Nazis were not evil because of that–they were evil because those things are not good enough to prevent great evil in the face of hatred and falsehood.
I don’t mean to trivialize evil or to depreciate how bad it really is, far from it. But the fact that it’s there is no excuse for making us Manicheans or dualists. We can admit that Nazis are evil without saying that marching is evil or uniforms are evil or having blond hair and blue eyes (and even being proud of it) is evil or that loving and defending your country or being German is evil. If these things are good than even the Nazis had good in them that was real. Just perverted.
Thanks, Michael, for the vigorous
defense of Augustine, who is
smiling somewhere, I’ll bet. I think
the nub of our difference is this:
You write of the Nazis:
But what did the evil consist in?
Being depraved, that is, lacking
the proper frame of mind.
I think this underdescribes
what their evil consisted in–
it wasn’t merely a matter
of lacking the proper
frame of mind. In addition,
there was the positive relish
in harming the innocent. That
feature, which I think is
the core of what evil is,
will never be captured
in terms of what is missing.
Thanks again, Jim
Jim,
I don’t mean to nag or sound like a jerk. Tell me and I’ll quit belaboring the point.
You’re right, of course: if reputation and WWII movies are to be trusted (I have no doubt that in this case they are) many Nazis took a positive delight in their acts of evil.
But, once again, positive delight is a good thing. It’s good to enjoy your work. Sometimes it’s good to enjoy destroying things, like sand castles or or mold or an invalid inference. We all admire Indiana Jones and how much he enjoys knocking off Nazis. So it’s not the willful delight that’s bad, but the Object of that will, that is, killing innocent Jews by the million. There is the depravity and it’s terrible. But it’s not “pure evil” in the strict sense, as though every part of the Nazis and every action they ever performed or could have was evil. The fact that they liked Mozart was good! Just not good enough to keep them from being used as examples for the next few generations.
Yes, Mike! Do belabour the point. Jim deserves it. And let me tell you, Jim: Truth is fleeting, error is permanent. 
And, Jim: This is not the first time you’ve have ridden rough-shod over Kant. 
So the dignity bit is nice and chimes with a fuzzy humanist feeling of friendliness and benevolence. You may even be right that it is not “theist”.
But it is clear that Kant is a “deist”, which is closer to theism than to atheism. (Deism is a view that postulates not The [Judeo-Christian] God, but assumes the existance of “a” god, often in the form of a first-mover/creator deity.) So citing to Kant is not going to be sufficient to reject “divine good”.
Also, Kant does not just posit human dignity as self-evident. He deduces it apriori and grounds it in his notion of freedom: This particular notion of freedom has little to do with being able to do as you like. It is about the ability to realize what is Right and to act accordingly, thereby attaining a higher state of human existance. It is clearly transcendental. Humans have dignity because they are transcendental beings (like angels and unlike animals, according to Kant).
So don’t let me catch you trying to saddle Kant with an imminent (that is, non-transcendental) conception of evil.
Best!
/bloomfield
[ This Message was edited by: Bloomfield on 2002-11-01 15:02 ]
On 2002-10-31 09:22, cskinner wrote:
Think about this: What if memory is not an element of our natural existance, but something later and extrinsic? What if memory is a deficiency, a decadence of our minds? Like a certain posture or limp that one might develop because of an injured leg.
Bloomfield,
That’s an interesting “what if.” I’m curious to know more about what you meant.
Carol
Carol, I gotta warn you: this is going to take me afield a bit.
Lots of cultures have stories and myths about the origins of mankind that involve the loss of a perfect state of existance. For example, the Fall in the Judeo-Christian tradition or the Fall of Lucifer and the other angels. (Have you ever read Tolkien’s Ainulindale? brilliant stuff: music as creation of the World.)
Anyway, let’s assume that there was a perfect, pure state of existance in which there was no evil and no suffering. Then, through man’s actions that state was lost. Now: Is time a result of the Fall, or is it Fall-neutral, having existed before and after the Fall in the same way? Put another way: Is the fact that time exists for us the result of our loss of the purity of “paradise”?
If this were the case, then time is a product of the same actions that produced evil or discord. Time itself then is a separation from the pure and eternal.
Several interesting things can follow from such a view. For instance, good might be perceived as necessarily eternal (that is timeless) and evil might be perceived as nessarily temporal (that is, existing in time). A view that would be rather more cheerful that Jim’s Eternal Auschwitz.
(How did I get to memory, though? Memory might be the faculty by which man interacts with time. If time operates fundamentally differently for Good or Evil, then memory would work differently, too. Perhaps only the Evil is remembered, or remembered in a different way? Can angels remember things?)
Oops, sorry, the warden is here to take me back to my cell now.
/bloomfield
[ This Message was edited by: Bloomfield on 2002-11-01 18:27 ]
No, Michael, you don’t sound at
all like a jerk or a nag! We are
now taking this stuff deeper
than I’ve ever thought about
it, so what follows may be
even more inadequate.
One might think of delighting
in harming the innocent as
having two components.
There is delighting in–which
actually is good. It’s good
to delight, it’s pleasant.
Pleasure is good, after all.
The second component is the
object of delight–harming
the innocent. That is not
a good object, of course.
Too bad the Nazis didn’t have a
better one.
So the Nazis’ delighting in
harming the innocent had a good
part–they had a thumping good
time, after all–and a bad
part. We must subtract the
good part of delighting in harming
the innocent from the bad part,
which leaves much bad left over.
Well, I don’t think this
is right. Delighting in harming
the innocent is worse than harming
them because it’s your job.
Indeed, it’s perfectly monstrous
to take delight in such an object.
It makes one a much worse
person than if one does it
for money or out of indifference.
So there isn’t a good part of
delighting in harming the innocent
(the delight) and a bad part (the
object). It’s all of it bad, and
the positive delight in that object makes
things much, much worse.
I mentioned earlier that I think
arrogance is part of paradigmatic
evil. One doesn’t delight in
harming the innocent because one
is unfortunately wired that
way. Rather one relishes it because
it makes one feel powerful, it
makes one feel above morality,
beyond good and evil, superhuman,
a veritable god. At the heart
of the truly evil delight in harming
the innocent is the will to
power untrammeled by all constraints;
one knowingly and gladly
becomes a monster of arrogance and
self will. Ted Bundy was like that,
in fact. I don’t think the problem
with such people is merely that they
are lacking in humility or that
their will is directed at an unfortunate
object.
For what that’s worth, Michael.
Bloomfield, however much violence
I’ve done to Kant, there was in
what I said a non-theistic account
of evil. If you want to call
the account ‘transcendental’
that’s fine with me. If you
think it’s inadequate, probably
you’re right. Nobody has given
an unproblematic account of
the objective ground of good
and evil, including theists.
Still we know evil when
we see it–and there are all
sorts of things we can’t
give an adequate account of
(e.g. truth, causation, beauty,
time, and so on). It hardly follows
that theism is (or isn’t)
the solution.
Shall we take this
off board now? The distance
from whistles and music
is becoming impressive. But
if you want to respond, here
or there, please do. Thanks, Jim
I don’t think we’re getting off topic at all! Didn’t Bloomfield just mention Ainulidale? Surely at least a few of the Valar were playing whistles!
Jim, it’s a truism in the sectors of thought I frequent that the greater the existing good, the greater the possible evil. A bad dog is an unpleasant thing but not evil in the way a person can be evil. A bad tree isn’t all that bad or much of a problem–just cut it down! The very idea of there being such things as bad rocks is problematic.
Again, among human beings, the great are more able to be either good or evil than the small. An intelligent, powerful, rich man can do a lot more good or a lot more harm than the illiterate peasant. The intellect is more productive of wickedness than the passions. You can kill a single person in a fury of passion, or even a few, but you don’t commit genocide without deliberation.
Drudgery is a lesser thing than delight. It’s better to enjoy your work than to do it out of duty. But it’s for that very reason that enjoying an unworthy task is degrading. There are some things that we just have to do but should not enjoy–breaking up with a lover, for instance. Sometimes this can be necessary, but one should not relish the task. And the worse the task, the greater the evil there is in relishing it.
All of this depends on good being prior and absolute and evil being secondary and derivitve. The possibility for evil stems from the possibility in things to go one way or the other, the right way or some other way. But before they go either way the things are good.
The only place (according to the same line of thought) where this is not a danger is with God, for whom there is no possibility. He is already everything that he can be so there’s no way to go wrong.
[ This Message was edited by: Michael Sullivan on 2002-11-02 12:41 ]
Bloomfield,
while it’s true that memory is the faculty which links us most closely to time, it is also that (along with the understanding) which brings us closest to eternity. Memory makes us aware that the world and we change and informs us of the difference between now and then and not yet; but at the same time it allow us to survey all the past in a glance in way that is impossible while events are being experienced. If not for this ability to sum up an hour or a year or a lifetime we would have no way to gain insight into them, to distinguish the ephemeral from the permanent, to pick out eternal truths and values from the mass of mere instances.
I’m not sure how much sense it makes to think of the fall as a lapse into temporality. Surely the story has Adam and Eve acting, meeting each other, naming animals, receiving instructions and so forth? These are not the sorts of experiences one can have in eternity. Also the very fact that there was a fall, that from one state they entered another, itself implies motion and therefore time. It would be more plausible to suggest that the prelapsarians were tending towards the achievment of eternity and got derailed than to claim that they had reached it and lost it.
It has been suggested that the experience of the animals is a kind of eternity, that their primitive consciousnesses do not admit of reflection on the passing of time and so everything is a kind of now to them. This may be so, but I hope this is not what you’re suggesting. Any account which makes the transition from animality to rationality a descent misses, I think, the whole point of the story of the fall, which presupposes the exercise of the intellect and the will. Whatever is wrong with us humans it can’t be our humanity itself.
Very well, back to the heart of darkness!
Michael, I think I’ve been going
by you. I’ve been responding to
one strand of what you’ve been saying,
that evil is merely a deficiency
of goodness–which I deny for
the reasons I’ve been giving–
just as I would deny that
agonizing pain is merely
the deficiency of pleasure.
But there are some other things you
are saying, I now see.
You are saying that the
greater the existing good,
the greater the possibility
of evil–the exception being
God, who cannot not be
good. I think
there is considerable truth
to this–as you say, the great
are more able to do evil
than the small, the Nazis
were brave, intelligent,
diligent. If they had
lacked all virtue they
would have been much
less destructive.
Two points about this:
First, there may be counter-instances
other than the case of God.
Traveling in South America
I’ve met in villages
exceedingly gentle
and kindly women, the truly meek,
with very good hearts, who
have spent their lives happily caring
for others, especially for
children. Often they
are named ‘Mary’ or ‘Theresa.’
Suppose such a
lady, extremely good hearted
but (this one in particular)
not particularly intelligent
or deliberate or even brave…
Indeed, now she is old and
feeble, dying in a few moments,
drifting in and out of
consciousness, recalling
the generations of children she
loved, secure in the love of Jesus,
unable to even consider
doubts about
the religious faith that a lifetime ago
became her second nature.
This dying old woman, just as
she is now, embodies
extraordinary existing
good–but I think we will have
to be very clever
to find the extraordinary
possibility of evil
she represents.
Second, even if it is true
that the greater the existing
good, the greater the
possibility of evil,
it doesn’t follow that (a)
evil is merely a deficiency
of good, or that (b) there cannot
be evil without good. (Note, too,
that b doesn’t entail a.)
So far all we have is that
to really screw things up,
you have to have some virtues.
We haven’t supported the
idea that good is prior
and absolute, and evil is
secondary and derivative.
Perhaps moral evil requires
free choice between good
and evil–a virtue; yet this is
odd because moral goodness
doesn’t seem to require
free choice. God cannot do
evil–he is necessarily good–
yet he is morally good. His
very nature is love.
Couldn’t there be a being
whose nature is malevolence,
who cannot do good. Wouldn’t
he be evil–as God, who cannot
do evil, is good?
The point is that a morally
evil being who cannot do good
seems conceivable.
Setting aside moral good and evil,
in Advaita vedanta reality consists
entirely of a ball of undifferentiated
bliss. Well, I suppose we could
imagine a world consisting entirely
of a ball of agony, enduring forever.
That awful world is at least
conceivable. It would be a very
bad world, indeed. Much better
nothing than that!
Now we might
say that there is nonetheless being
in that world, which is good.
So there is something good
about it, anyway. Yet in a world
so awful that it would be
better if it didn’t exist,
it’s implausible that its
being is good. To the
contrary. Existence is
a good thing in a good
world, and a bad thing
in an unspeakably bad
one. The claim that
existence per se must
be good is implausible
in the case of such
worlds. Well then,
if such worlds are
metaphysically possible,
it isn’t necessarily true
that good is prior and
absolute, and evil
secondary and derivative.
The world I described
would just be bad.
Finally, suppose for argument’s
sake that evil isn’t merely
the deficiency of goodness,
as I’ve argued in earlier
posts. Well, then, evil is irreducible,
not derivative, and frightfully virulent,
as the last century demonstrated.
Even if evil cannot exist
without something good in
the background, finally
it can’t be explained by talking
about the good or its absence.
It’s something extra.
If you believe that God created
the universe, you may well get
the relation between good
and evil that you have
ably represented. But I think
that without that underpinning,
that relation isn’t so obvious,
nor does it seem to be
a matter of metaphysical
necessity. Best, Jim
On 2002-11-01 19:48, jim stone wrote:
Bloomfield, however much violence
I’ve done to Kant, there was in
what I said a non-theistic account
of evil. If you want to call
the account ‘transcendental’
that’s fine with me. If you
think it’s inadequate, probably
you’re right. Nobody has given
an unproblematic account of
the objective ground of good
and evil, including theists.
Still we know evil when
we see it–and there are all
sorts of things we can’t
give an adequate account of
(e.g. truth, causation, beauty,
time, and so on). It hardly follows
that theism is (or isn’t)
the solution.
Jim, let’s stay in the thread rather than go pm: That way we might get a post from Wambot, too, or somebody.
Now I don’t think that you can concede that you account of evil is transcendental and still maintain your position that you want evil to vanish like the snow with the passage of time. If something is transcendental, it transcends time and space. It is therefore not-temporal. Snow is imanent (non-transcendental), and it vanishes. If evil is transcendental it does not vanish "
like the snow." (Might vanish in other ways though, perhpas through forgiving, but that would require evil to stick around until it was forgiven. This is just a thought).
And by the way: I think you are beginning to misrepresent the Nazis: You may have seen in your movies the sadisting camp guard and SS-man, who delight in torture, killing, suffering. And I am sure there were those. But I doubt that the number of the purely sadistic Nazis was significantly greater than elsewhere in time or space. The horror of Nazi Germany was the widespread complicity, the backdrop of approval that permitted the whole awful business. I don’t think that most Germans did delight in the evil they were doing: No, they did their duty and part of their duty they perceived to be to deaden their conscience and pure human empathy & sympathy. If I could believe that the Germans were just depraved sadistic monsters, that would make the Holocaust much LESS scary.
Suppose, Bloomey, that there is
a transcendal Platonic form of evil,
Evil per se–which is as trancendental
as things get without being theistic.
The form is indestructible, it will
be with us always. Well, I can live
with the Form–it’s the instances that
bug me! I want the instances
of evil to vanish like the snow.
Yes, you recall Hannah Arendt, talking
about Eichmann, coined the phrase
‘the banality of evil.’ Grey,
faceless individuals doing their
jobs… It’s perhaps what is
most horrifying, as you say.
Still I believe there were
the SS people who had metal death’s
heads on their uniforms, and
I don’t see them all
as sadistic goons. They played
the piano and wrote poetry;
they weren’t just people
wired so that they enjoyed beating
people up.
I do think some of them
felt they had become
the Angel of Death.
I don’t like the death
penalty, but I think
that execution is good
for such people.
Not merely out of vengeance, but
to give them the opportunity
for redemption.
Ted Bundy–who was highly
intelligent and educated,
an upper middle-class law student–
kept the Florida courts busy
for 5 years with appeals.
Then he ran out of appeals,
he was going to be executed in
two days,
and something good happened.
He broke down, wept, begged
for forgiveness for ‘all
the beautiful children I
killed,’ and told the police
where to find 20 more bodies.
It was his redemption, I
think. If he had been
sentenced to life
in prison he would have
been arrogant till the
day he died.
On 2002-11-02 19:06, Bloomfield wrote:
On 2002-11-01 19:48, jim stone wrote:
Bloomfield, however much violence
I’ve done to Kant, there was in
what I said a non-theistic account
of evil. If you want to call
the account ‘transcendental’
that’s fine with me. If you
think it’s inadequate, probably
you’re right. Nobody has given
an unproblematic account of
the objective ground of good
and evil, including theists.
Still we know evil when
we see it–and there are all
sorts of things we can’t
give an adequate account of
(e.g. truth, causation, beauty,
time, and so on). It hardly follows
that theism is (or isn’t)
the solution.Jim, let’s stay in the thread rather than go pm: That way we might get a post from Wambot, too, or somebody.
And by the way: I think you are beginning to misrepresent the Nazis: You may have seen in your movies the sadisting camp guard and SS-man, who delight in torture, killing, suffering. And I am sure there were those. But I doubt that the number of the purely sadistic Nazis was significantly greater than elsewhere in time or space. The horror of Nazi Germany was the widespread complicity, the backdrop of approval that permitted the whole awful business. I don’t think that most Germans did delight in the evil they were doing: No, they did their duty and part of their duty they perceived to be to deaden their conscience and pure human empathy & sympathy. If I could believe that the Germans were just depraved sadistic monsters, that would make the Holocaust much LESS scary.
Thanks Bloomey. I bet Michael is still interested too. Those who aren’t will have left quietly by the side door long since.
It’s a bit hard for me to comment on quite a bit of what’s been said lately but I’ve been reading with interest. I’m not much in sympathy with St.Augustine’s position as expounded by Michael and, although I love Kant’s metaphysics in general, I don’t like his metaphysics of morals much.
I certainly agree that one of the truly chilling aspects of the Holocaust was the banality of many of the people responsible for the atrocities. This (ethno-nationalist violence) is an area I’ve had the opportunity to research a lot in my day job. So I thought I might mention a few very good books I’ve read over the years and which have helped me form my own views on the causes of mass violence and atrocity. Robert J. Lifton’s ‘The Nazi Doctors’—great for case studies but theoretically a bit dodgy. Elias Canetti’s ‘Crowds and Power’. Stanley Tambiah’s ‘Levelling Crowds’. Leo Kuper ‘Genocide: it’s Political Use in the 20th Century’ Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Modernity and the Holocaust’.
Think about this: What if memory is not an element of our natural existance, but something later and extrinsic? What if memory is a deficiency, a decadence of our minds? Like a certain posture or limp that one might develop because of an injured leg.
…
Anyway, let’s assume that there was a perfect, pure state of xistence in which there was no evil and no suffering. Then, through man?s actions that state was lost. Now: Is time a result of the Fall, or is it Fall-neutral, having existed before and after the Fall in the same way? Put another way: Is the fact that time exists for us the result of our loss of the purity of “paradise”?
…
(How did I get to memory, though? Memory might be the faculty by which man interacts with time. If time operates fundamentally differently for Good or Evil, then memory would work differently, too. Perhaps only the Evil is remembered, or remembered in a different way? Can angels remember things?)
Bloomfield,
Or, assume that there was a perfect, pure state of being that included the existence of time, perceived in this perfect state of being as the Eternal Now. In this state, I could hear Vanish Like the Snow all at once, without the melancholy of having to desperately try to stitch it together as it passes away through time. Angels don’t need to remember things, because they experience everything in this perfect state as simultaneous. So maybe the Fall did not cause time but instead only separated us from the perfect perception of it. Then, as you suggest, our memory becomes an inadequate coping mechanism for trying to recreate simultaneity. And maybe forgetting is a better word for it than memory, as Wordsworth would have it:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting…
Carol
[ This Message was edited by: cskinner on 2002-11-03 09:08 ]
[ This Message was edited by: cskinner on 2002-11-03 09:09 ]
On 2002-11-03 09:07, cskinner wrote:
Or, assume that there was a perfect, pure state of being that included the existence of time, perceived in this perfect state of being as the Eternal Now. In this state, I could hear Vanish Like the Snow all at once, without the melancholy of having to desperately try to stitch it together as it passes away through time. Angels don’t need to remember things, because they experience everything in this perfect state as simultaneous. So maybe the Fall did not cause time but instead only separated us from the perfect perception of it. Then, as you suggest, our memory becomes an inadequate coping mechanism for trying to recreate simultaneity. And maybe forgetting is a better word for it than memory, as Wordsworth would have it:Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting…
Carol
Carol, maybe it’s just me, but I’m puzzled by this sort of yearning for everything to be somehow present simultaneously. Being the kind of creature I am, with human processing abilities, I want to hear the different bits of ‘Vanished Like the Snow’ successively and in the right order. I’d hate it to hear all parts together. I think what I’m trying to say is that the unfolding of a piece of music over time is part of it’s own peculiar beauty, part of what makes music so special. I don’t want it to be like painting where you can take it in all at once. I feel the same way about stories. They unfold over time too and that’s part of what I like about them. Does this make sense? I hope so.
Carol, maybe it’s just me, but I’m puzzled by this sort of yearning for everything to be somehow present simultaneously. Being the kind of creature I am, with human processing abilities, I want to hear the different bits of ‘Vanished Like the Snow’ successively and in the right order. I’d hate it to hear all parts together. Does this make sense? I hope so.
Yes, it makes sense, and part of me actually likes that too, limited as I also am in my ability to perceive the Great Now. 
I guess I’m trying to put into words, and then wrestle into this discussion, the feeling I do so often have though, when a beautiful piece of music comes to an end, or a favorite reading experience. It is a yearning for the pleasure and beauty and connection to be felt still, and honestly, with each verse of a song that is sung and then gone, I feel a little loss. And when I imagine hearing it all at once, I don’t imagine that it would be with “all parts together,” as you describe. They would all still be where they are, in the same order, but I’d somehow know how to experience them without loss.
…Misty, at best, I admit.
On 2002-11-03 10:01, cskinner wrote:
Carol, maybe it’s just me, but I’m puzzled by this sort of yearning for everything to be somehow present simultaneously. Being the kind of creature I am, with human processing abilities, I want to hear the different bits of ‘Vanished Like the Snow’ successively and in the right order. I’d hate it to hear all parts together. Does this make sense? I hope so.
Yes, it makes sense, and part of me actually likes that too, limited as I also am in my ability to perceive the Great Now. >
…Misty, at best, I admit.
I hope I’m not intruding on this discussion but I think what carol is longing to experience is a sense of mindfulnes.When we are trully mindful this "all at once"feeling can occur.Every activity can be a vehicle to experience this, and music for a musician offers an irresistable invitation to the present moment, where, simultaneously performing and listening we become both observer and the observed which is a pretty unique viewpoint I think. Mike