Extraordinary Comments

Oh, our conversations will get less frustrating as you learn the other 90% of what I'm on about. ;-)

In this case, although there was a progressive-Enlightenment element among the Founders--primarily Jefferson--the idea of "progress" was more tied up around Protestantism and liberation from papism. In fact, the famous deist Thomas Paine in his even more famous "Common Sense" suggests that Divine Providence created America as the home for True religion, i.e., Protestantism!

http://americancreation.blogspot.com/2010/04/thomas-paines-common-sense-as-heard-by.html

Yes, I know I sound like one of those Christian America cranks like David barton, but the evidence for my thesis hides in plain sight, obscured only by the secular revisionism of the 20th c.

"Even the distance at which the Almighty hath placed England and America is a strong and natural proof that the authority of the one over the other, was never the design of Heaven. The time likewise at which the Continent was discovered, adds weight to the argument, and the manner in which it was peopled, encreases the force of it. The Reformation was preceded by the discovery of America: As if the Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to the persecuted in future years, when home should afford neither friendship nor safety."

Not one American in 1000 knows that's in "Common sense," one of the seminal documents of our revolutionary liberty. [I doubt Paine personally believed that, but it tells you about his audience, the theogico-political landscape of the Founding era.]

There's more of course, my dear CK, at the proper time. While the outlier Jefferson was enamored with the French Revolution, Hamilton, John Adams and Gouverneur Morris were appalled. Even Paine said he went to Revolutionary France to save them from atheism!

As for "Godtalk," carved in the stone of the Jefferson Memorial is the question

"Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift from God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath?"

Yup, even Jefferson.

Interesting. So you're saying that taken to its logical extreme (which could be either nihilistic or fantastical by the way) liberalism ends up having to recognize that there just isn't any way for us to reproduce in a way that's consisted with "right" living. It's all rape. Unfortunately, that becomes a nihilistic justification for borderline reasoning. It doesn't even play both ends against the middle. It plays one end against the middle and then acts as if both ends are being played. What we want to do instead is reject both extremes and then have a dynamic connection to the relative truth that can be worked out well in between. That is better than what I see as Hegelian dualism used in the unconscious pursuit of philosophical unhappiness. But I also sympathies with the notion that human reproduction is a problem no matter what. Lots of great people didn't participate for that reason. But the removal of their genes from the gene pool may also explain why we're so bad off at this point.

@ CK MacLeod:

I was sloppy in my moral/ethical formulation. I agree with your response about the need for actualization up to a point. Although "state of mind" and mental capacity are generally recognized as an aggrevating or mitigating factors.

From a karmic perspective, the state of mind is inseparable from the action. Maybe the end of your last paragraph comes at that from a different angle, but is still similar?

At any rate, a more precise, but maybe not clearer formulation: The moral/ethical dimension resides in what ontological status we attribute to our cyborg selves. I'm thinking of for instance - are we still merely human or do we thin of ourselves as some H+, Transhuman, post singularity consciousness, global or universal perspective?

"Shared identity" seems to me more a product of primate evolution than that of the "imperial nation state". What's a difference of at least degree and maybe kind is our cyborgization leading to the NYTE image at the end.

A similar, but more developed image shows all the class C networks of the internet in 2003.

If this principle of thought is to be realized enough to end history, then maybe we are inadequate to the task. The internet images look quite organic. It is becoming more reasonable to ask who is driving information tech growth, evolution - us or the machines. Soon maybe we will be their neurotransmitters, their arms and legs while they are the locus of impossibly abstract thought of the Hegelian real.

Then we will be left once again with our mere human consciousness, asking ourselves was it ever anything else.

Scott Miller wrote:

It is destructive, not comforting.

...destructive sometimes to what we think we are or prefer to think we are, and to the goals and interests based on those conceptions... this fundamental problem is what Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, whom I majorly dissed in the essay, tried to grapple with: That the "truth" about human existence might not be something that served human happiness. Schopenhauer was convinced that the truth of human life on Earth was pain and frustration on the way to death. It led him to an interest in Buddhism (we can acknowledge disagreement about whether what he was interested in was authentically Buddhist), and to a philosophical position based on the negation of life, as against transcendence intimated chiefly through art. Nietzsche adopted and expanded upon this view, especially early in his career, during his Wagnerian phase, and never completely let go of it, even after - we could say inevitably - he had converted it into its complete contradiction (but always implicit within it), the unbounded yes to all that was and is/willing the eternal return.

If Nietzsche hadn't been nearly blind, and beset with other chronic ailments, or had decided to devote himself with his limited energies to contemplation rather than writing, or hadn't been obsessed with the ambition to be great, he might have undertaken a systematic re-examination of philosophy - not just Hegel, though Hegel had examined the syndrome carefully - and have seen such total negations and affirmations converting into each other, as, in a sense, they always already have. (Schopenhauer is; Schopenhauer negates; Schopenhauer still is, despite the negation; Schopenhauer is, therefore, the affirmation of what he supposed he negated, and his importation of an aesthetic transcendence becomes the unbounded yes to all of the negation that ended up requiring it.)

The unbounded yes is always already an unbounded no, and vice versa. They sometimes make for appealing poetic gestures, but both embody the fallacy of an immediate confrontation with the absolute. From the perspective of the absolute, they amount to the same thing, just with a negative or positive charge.

Since we're telling tales out of school, it was a description of this fallacy that was my first useful encounter with Hegel's thought.