ultranatural

If we choose to believe, along with the physicalists-materialists-naturalists that “the natural world” is in effect synonymous with “all existence,” then “supernatural” becomes another name for “non-existent,” while “non-existent” stands for “false” or “irrelevant.” The contradiction or apparent contradiction between physicalism and its alternatives disappears, however, if we view the metaphysical or “meta-natural” “moment” – of the thingness of things and being of beings and so on, that the so-called scientific or physicalist-naturalist-materialist worldview cannot account for, and tends to disdain, and that the so-called religious worldview describes via mystery, miracle, and invocation of deities or of the Deity – as no more nor less “naturally” arising or simply “natural” than any (mere) “thing.” That this moment, rather than a happenstance or rarity or occasion would be a universal (or omnipresent) moment, perceptible or describable as a virtual adjacency of all experience as conceivable experience, makes the term “supernatural” misleading: To refer to the incompleteness of physicalism as a reference to the “supernatural,” as though the essence of whatever is might be located somewhere “beyond” or “above” itself, and for “all intents and purposes” nowhere, so never located at all except as on the other side of the “flaming walls of the world,” is to misstate absolutely the absolute matter of matters and states.

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  1. […] problem has been discussed at this blog many times, most recently here and here […]

  2. […] For the neo-Judaics, the “superiority” of the supernatural, always sensed or experienced as a “dimension of height” (Levinas), visualized and realized as above the eyes, as in or above the brow, the seat of consciousness in the face of the divine that resembles the human face that is only already its, or His, inevitable semblance (Rosenzweig), is the naturalness of the supernatural, the where of its becoming real as the becoming real or the coming into being of the always becoming: the super-natural as the most or supremely or superlatively natural, not a “supra-natural” but a “naturalest” as origin and essence of the common natural (of any creation of any world including Creation of The World and Creation of the All): the divine seemingly in the (non-, quasi-) place of the nothing, yet the distinction between the divine and the nothing, or the distinguishing of the divine from the nothing, as the everywhere and always already necessarily presumed status of any statement. When we read the name “God” in the old theologies, before we presume to disclaim His “His-ness” on whatever bases, we are misreading if we begin from a separation of divine and natural, rather than from their mutually presupposed and super-positioned identity as actuality of idea and idea of actuality. Natural and divine are not necessarily for the old theologians words for two different “things,” though old as well as new theologians will from time to time or at all times be guilty of approximation where not willing victims of error. One word is a word for the thingness of the all, the other for any other-than-mere-thingness including a necessary or natural quasi-thingness of any thing. Religion is the intimation of its own necessity as relation of the two and elaboration of that relation. “God” would be in addition to whatever else or not a name that returns us to that never fully displaced, or as-only-displaced, “my” in its universal quasi-adjacency to any all and all particularity or “the any”: the pure or originary natural, the natural itself or ultranatural. […]

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