"Justice", Memory, and Forgiveness

A lot of what I can say about justice and forgiveness is probably well-known. But I think I should still talk about it in the context of MSL.

What is "justice"? It seems like it usually means "paying someone back for something bad they've done" or "making someone do something now to undo their own bad past actions". Basically, that the wrong things people have done in the past matter still and must be dealt with in some way. For the sake of this post, that is what "justice" means.

Is the past real? What would it mean for the past to be real? It would have to exist in the present. How would that work? I've tended to think that the past exists in the present in the form of memories that God continually remembers. We are writing a book, and the past pages exist in the present and are being read by God all the time.

We can access the past as well, through memories or proxies for memories like books.

Why do we hold onto traumatic memories?

1. One reason is to try to teach ourselves to stop trusting people who are untrustworthy. When people traumatize us, we can't believe that they could be so bad, so we hold on to two conflicting images, of them as devil and as angel. People really can be mixes of devil and angel, but they are coherent, finite mixes, not superpositions of all-devil violently alternating with all-angel. The traumatic memories are the voice saying "do not see them as all-angel", and uses lurid imagery to make its point.

2. Another reason is because the other person enslaves us to them by traumatizing us, and the memory is their lingering power over us over the years. People set themselves up as gods over us with an imperious word, or an intimidating tone of voice, or maybe an act of violence or deception. They sometimes do these things deliberately and knowingly, to achieve some kind of purpose. Other times, they act instinctively in the moment, and perhaps forget the idolatry they've set up in someone else's mind, and are surprised to see its fruits. The memory is what was set up, and the memory (empowered by demonic influence) is what enacts their past selves' will, years upon years into the future.

3. A third reason is because we hate people, are looking for an excuse to hate somebody, and the fact that they really did wrong us gives us a good excuse.

4. Another reason to hold onto traumatic memories, to add to the ones above, is the affirmation of memory. Abusive people sometimes want to erase the past, and in the process will try to discredit people's faculties of memory, and the content of those faculties. If you can't trust your memory, you can't trust yourself very much. So you have to either put up a wall to keep out people who attack your memory (part of the process of figuring out if people are trustworthy), or you have to strengthen your own memory and self-trust so that you can push out people trying to lie to you.

(There could be other reasons I haven't thought of.)

The third reason given above is I think the point of the command to forgive (forgive that you may be forgiven). That's where you really do sin by not forgiving. The other three reasons are cases where it feels like you need to forgive (at least, the thoughts you have toward the person who injured or wronged you can be negative), but in your heart you are not unforgiving, the issue more is that you need to learn to not trust people who aren't trustworthy, or you need to get free of (be freed from?) mental slavery.

Is "justice" a useful idea? The desire for justice keeps the past alive. You think about the past traumatic actions and demand that there be justice. Something happened that should not have happened, and so there is a dissonance between what should be and what is. You will hear a voice saying "get over it" as though there is no dissonance between what should be and what is. This spits on the face of morality itself, and to accept that spit is to claim that morality has lost its legitimacy. It's to claim that humans are god, not morality. If we accept debasings of morality, our societies will degrade. So the voice of "get over it" is a temptation to despair, laziness, cynicism, and degradation. If morality is weakened, people will suffer and die young who didn't have to.

5. Maybe this is a fifth reason to hold onto traumatic memories, to defend the honor of right and wrong. I guess this is "justice", the accounting of past deeds for the sake of right and wrong, urging change.

If "justice" keeps the past alive, then it gives power to the people who set themselves up as gods. We may still need to keep the past alive to teach ourselves that people aren't trustworthy. But by keeping the past alive, we give power to the people of the past to keep enslaving us. The unfortunate side effect of us choosing "justice" is that it allows evil people to do more harm to us than they otherwise would have been able to.

Is there a way out of this situation? Can we affirm morality while not allowing past (or dead) people to rule over our minds and torment us with what they've done?

I think one path is like this: first, figure out whom you can trust and how much, establishing who can be in your life and how much. This enables you to resolve your concept of the person who wronged you. Second, let go of "justice" for a minute (if you can), until the past person no longer has power over you. Third, notice that you are in danger of letting go of the value of morality. Now try to find a way to affirm morality.

I've assumed in my writing that in order for God to be legitimate, he must be truthful, and thus remember everything. (There are exceptions, but certainly he must remember everything that was us making ourselves who we are, which includes all our decisions.) So every bad thing you or another person have done is kept stored in the book of the past. It will never be erased.

That book does not have to be unbearable for God to read. (Perhaps because the death of his Son balances out its injustice.) It can't be, or else he could never rest. But there is a sorrow that is bearable. When God remembers our pasts, he does so with a mixture of feelings, including sorrow, and he will do this for all eternity. If we are like God (as we someday must be), then when we look over the parts of the book of the past that have us in them, we will feel a similar mixture, or the same mixture, of feelings about what we have done. With this, we respect everything that we have done in our lives, see the good and bad, and fit it into our reason. We read everything in it without feeling the qualia of unbearability.

I think this goes some way (maybe some would be satisfied that it goes the whole way) toward alleviating concerns that we forget that morality really matters by forgiving / letting go of "justice". After all, wrong never stops being wrong, and right never stops being right. Memory and the truth are affirmed. (But some could object that some of the wrongness has gone away if the contemplation of it is not unbearable.)

Another thought to consider is: what does it take to repent? Some people (maybe all people?) will have to look at the bad things they've done in the past, each in its turn, and reject them. To relive your past accesses certain tendencies that are still in you, and once accessed, you can choose to reject the values you had in the past, and adopt ones which are better. I can see this being a part of the Millennium.

So there is some reason to think there would be a "day of reckoning" in MSL. But does this maximally affirm the value of right and wrong / morality?

God must rest someday, and God is morality. God must cause to cease to exist that which is unbearable to him. Therefore, morality must not find past injustices unbearable -- can only object to them in some way that they are not unbearable. (This is intended to be the same as what I had in mind above where God reviews our past for all eternity and feels sorrow among the other feelings he has about our past deeds.) The past is loaded in a bitter way, with an edge to it, but morality itself requires that that edge be taken away someday. Therefore, the "day of reckoning" mentioned in the previous paragraph does maximally affirm the value of right and wrong / morality.

When we think that morality (right and wrong, the moral standard), is impersonal, we can imagine it being infinite, mathematical, mechanistic, tireless, and without responsibility. But when we think that it is personal, we see how it itself pays a cost for maximal "justice", and thus maximal "justice" goes against morality.

Book Review: Between Man and Man by Martin Buber

See also the preview for this review.

I wrote the notes for this review quite a while ago, but didn't write the review right after reading the book. This may have been somewhat of a mistake, as I now am not connected to the material and can't add much beyond the notes. But luckily my notes have somewhat of a conclusion to them, and so maybe it is somewhat as though I have written the review already.

--

[Notes:]

Thoughts after reading Maurice Friedman's introduction:

Friedman (p. xiv) says

Not every relation between persons is an I-Thou one, nor is every relation with an animal or thing an I-It. The difference, rather, is in the relationship itself. I-Thou is a relationship of openness, directness, mutuality, and presence. It may be between man and man, but it may also take place with a tree, a cat, a fragment of mica, a work of art -- and through all these with God, the "eternal Thou" in whom the parallel lines of relation meet.

This makes "I-Thou" sound understandable to me. I don't remember it being that clear when I read I and Thou, but maybe it was there all along. If I take it as a fairly faithful representation of I and Thou, I would say that I experience I-Thou relating fairly commonly and that it is not an exceptional state. Except, when it comes to people. I find that I tend to see people in terms of how I am afraid of them or how I could use them, or how I desire them, or in some way or another I have an automatic agenda with respect to them. But I don't have this kind of agenda toward plants or inanimate objects, and I don't think I usually have this toward animals.

I find even when opening the door to leave a room, that I approach it with openness, directness, mutuality, and presence. (I don't see it as I-It even when I'm using it instrumentally.) I think, because I see it as the unmediated speech of God and so simply part of my relationship with God, like any other speech between him and me, and toward God I have (maybe Buber would say, I must have) a relationship of openness, directness, mutuality, and presence. The world is just God's speech -- except, where some being who is other than God is asserting themselves in such a way that God fades to the background and I must relate to them instead of God. Then all the agenda-thinking comes in.

Simantic words are the beings which God speaks, but I suppose to be more accurate, there is a component of what comes from people which those people speak as well, although a lot of what comes into my experience body from them is not 100% of their willing. When I see the simantic word of a person, it is loaded, like a loaded term that a person handles carefully to avoid controversy. But God, plants, (all or almost all) animals, bricks, asphalt, the sun, etc. are unloaded simantic words. All words have connotations, but some of them have such connotations that they are loaded.

(One inanimate object that I do find loaded is my laptop. Maybe because so much human speech comes through it, and so much of my own speech goes out through it, so it has become "humanized" to me.)

I think most people are naturally addicted to people and warp themselves and their view of reality to fit what some group "wants" them to believe. Our people-addiction causes us to have agendas for the people around us. Or agendas of getting away from them as fear-objects. We are so addicted to them that we fear them, even beyond whatever objective risk they may pose us with physical weapons. And thus if they rule us we are unable to see them as people. Prosociality makes it so you have to love the people around you, but since you don't choose to love them, it's not really you who loves them. So we are urged to love people, but that urge to love, if external, or internalized, is an obsessing, controlling force, an externalized or internal addiction, and it prevents us from really loving people.

This amounts to a bitter critique of (a) humanism. Can I offer anything better than that humanism? One thing I can offer is to say that being alone is fine. You're not going to die. You have to be weaned from your human addiction first, though, or else it might not work out. It helps to seek to love God, and to come to see the phenomenal world as spoken by him. When you live in a default state of "I-thou" connection with God, then you can be alone as much as you want.

The alternative to prosocial humanism isn't "ego" or insanity in a world where you are the only one who exists, but rather to become in tune with God on the level of phenomenal presence, where every experience is a message from God. You can be fed as much from God alone as from other people. Then, you don't have to be addicted to them.

There is some danger that if you are not addicted to people, they can't be used as tools to force you to grow up. Maybe people-addiction is a necessary slavery to help you grow closer to God? But it seems that there should be a more Millennial way to learn, and that God prefers to teach us things that way, because he dislikes the brutality of our lives as much as we do, and more so. Why can't God just guide us gently to learn directly from him? Why use people as bludgeons and acids on us? Maybe the problem is in us, to make us need people. But otherwise, I think that a person by themselves (with God), with perhaps some kind of food for thought, or perhaps either internalized or written-down Scripture, could learn the lessons of holiness, without other people being involved. Maybe when there is something "rough and uncomprehending" in us, like a sheep, we need to be treated like an animal. But we are sons and daughters of God, and we don't have to be animals (or children) all our lives -- instead, always children of God, but adult children instead. Perhaps some people need other people to help them overcome their sins. But it's better not to to take the rough and random path of a sheep, and instead to walk on the trail or road.

I do think it's possible that people need people because for some reason God is prevented from talking to us gently and directly, by some kind of negotiation with Satan. But then, like any other slavery, that's something to be escaped when possible, and considered lamentable when not possible.

--

Sidebar: Thinking about addiction. I see a moderate Internet addiction in me. Trying ways to control that. Social media is addictive because we're addicted to people and information. I have to use social media (more or less) for practical purposes. But it's bad.

I grew up without a TV in the house. Someone I knew had a TV growing up but could only watch -- one hour a day? One hour a week? I don't remember exactly. Maybe I could try something like that with social media.

People who quit nicotine do other things to sort of exercise the habit. Looking at Indonesian Wikipedia is still a grabbing for information. But it feels less "loaded" or "Doritos-y" because the language isn't worn in to my mind, and the random pages I see talk about things that I'm not normally into sometimes.

--

Now I've read up to the end of the first part, "Dialogue". I had thoughts after the first section within the part, but forgot them before I had the chance to write them down, and my mind was not deeply impressed by them, I guess. I do remember thinking that Buber's basic philosophy articulates fairly well with simantism, could be a module added on to MSLN. I just read the second two sections, and didn't have as many thoughts. I think maybe sometime in the future I'll come back to the first section and see what I think -- maybe recover some of those thoughts I had -- but for now I'll move on.

Overall, it seems like Buber is preaching to the choir to people nowadays. I think to actually practice "dialogue" is not always done. But he sounds like a fairly mainstream humanist to my ears, though he expresses himself in a non-mainstream, philosophical way.

I like Buber more as a portal into the concept of wordless dialogue, and thus into relating to God, as part of epistemic and ethical theism. Also, it's interesting to think about how Buber's concepts of dialogue and being whole-souled would apply to nations. Can two nations experience an analogue of Buberian dialogue? Could a nation be whole-souled? It would have to be, I think, to be engage in what could be called Buberian international dialogue.

But, interpersonal relationships are important, and maybe it's good to hear his sermon again. (As though maybe a message starts off fresh / alien and fully confrontational and communicative, and then that exact message when it has become standard, assimilated, uncontroversial / familiar, is spoken to a "choir" ("preaching to the choir"), becomes a sermon.)

--

up to p. 54 (The Question to the Single One, The Single One and his Thou)

Buber has been talking about how Kierkegaard seemed to think you should only address God as Thou (make God first relationally? Or even significant at all above a certain threshold?). Kierkegaard chooses renunciation (of Regine Olsen) so that he can love God.

On p. 54, Buber asks:
--Who is there who confesses the God whom Kierkegaard and I confess, who could suppose in decisive insight that God wants Thou to be truly said only to him, and to all others only an unessential and fundamentally invalid word -- that God demands of us to choose between him and his creation?--

Does Buber need God to be such that he does not demand of us to choose between him and his creation? I don't know if this is maybe a difference between a Jewish and Christian approach to things. Buber was certainly well-read in Christianity and allowed himself to be influenced by non-Jewish thoughts, so maybe a Christian approach to things via the cross would not be foreign to him after all. But maybe it would. And Kierkegaard, from my perspective not fully knowing his work but having some familiarity with it and his life story, seems particularly valuable as an example of someone living out the cross. When the Romans come to burn the early Christians, the early Christians have a choice: God, or life? This choice could be seen as: God, or creation?, in that life is created by God and full of his creations. What kind of Christian can choose life over a death for God without shuddering at the betrayal? So for a Christian (or an aspiring Christian, perhaps) like Kierkegaard, it is a bit frightening to think of choosing creation over God. Even a Jew wouldn't want to make creation an idol. Maybe Buber would answer (as I think he does, in a way) that loving creation and loving God are inseparable. As though it is only possible to love God through creation.

I know from personal experience that it is possible to love God apart from love of creation. Maybe Buber had never experienced that. Maybe Kierkegaard had, and maybe had to "renounce" Regine (as if she were his prize) in order to learn it.

If you have to have creation, or you have to have renunciation, either of them seem like things that could turn out to be spiritually dangerous to you, keep you from fully loving God. It depends on the person as to which is more dangerous than the other.

I don't think that creation is something to not love at all. I think it should be loved like you love yourself, sort of in the background or as instrumental to your journey toward God. To help someone else on their journey is worth doing. But basically, I think everything should be oriented toward God. There should be an intimacy that each person has with God and not with anyone else.

I don't know about saying "an unessential and fundamentally invalid word" -- I wouldn't say that second place is that bad a prize for each person to take, while God takes first place. I tend to think that good love of people is a mixture of high-quality love, pristine like water from a mountain spring, and equally high-quality, pristine and clear, indifference. For me, I and the people around me, are bit players in my life story, as I would like to be in theirs, who do not need complex characterization, do not have to have our natures disclosed to the point of inciting intense will.

However, I understand that this is my perspective, and goes along with my more-monastic / celibate life experiences and preferences. Maybe I'm not as solitary as Kierkegaard? So I'm somewhere between Buber and Kierkegaard? But I think I lean more toward Kierkegaard in this.

I would guess that Buber, Kierkegaard, and I are/were all introverts. But, perhaps Buber was not as much an introvert as I am -- maybe Kierkegaard takes the prize of "most introverted", although when he was younger, he went out a lot. I don't want to "legislate" from the perspective of my own personal preferences. Maybe it's best for the "Buberians" to see the world in a more Buber-like way, and for the "Kierkegaardians" to see the world in a more Kierkegaard-like way. I would still want to emphasize that despite personal temperament and life situations, making creation (or specific creations) into an idol is a real spiritual danger, one which even a "Buberian" should be careful to avoid. It's possible that I'm misinterpreting Buber, but I feel like he might be insisting that we can't renounce creation, and that feels dangerously close to saying we have to have it, and thus need it to be saved. I think that as long as a person loves God and is willing to go all the way to fully loving God, God is all they need.

But now I think about it, and I think maybe I could agree with Buber's emphasis on creation if we assume that human beings only become more holy through some kind of communication from God, and that the only way to communicate is through simantic words, each of which is a union of noetic relations and phenomenal content, which is about as much "created; a creation" as anything can be. Some kind of creation is necessary as a tool for God to communicate with us, and after all, both we and God are made out of simantic words. So maybe I don't see as strict a division between God and creation.

However, I think the blurring of God and creation is valid only on one level of reality (maybe that of "immaterialism"), while the difference, in a easygoing way, is seen on another (that of "simantism"), while the difference is seen in a sharper and starker way on yet another (that of "legitimism"). In other words, we all might be part of the same pages and have the same ink on us, us and God being one book. But the ink communicates words and characters doing things, and these have a distinct reality as they relate to each other. And then some words and characters refer to beings which are foundational to the whole book and who are in some sense higher (or truer) than all others. And within the story, the difference between the different characters is there.

--

p. 62 (The Question to the Single One, The Single One and the Body Politic)

Buber says something like "marriage and being part of the body politic are ways that you are forced to confront others as others". Is this a good thing? How good is it, if it is good? Is it a necessary thing? If necessary, is it a praiseworthy thing or a necessary evil, or more or less neutral, or mixed?

I think if the greatest spiritual danger is egoism, then all manner of being bound to people and forced to deal with them so that you see other people as other is maybe necessary. And I think egoism can get in the way of people loving God. In other words, if you're stuck in yourself, then you can't seek God. Maybe you can be broken out of yourself by being forced to confront people deeply. Will you then go to seek God? Some people will, some people won't. I think the greatest spiritual danger is to not love God with all of your being. So making "marriage and dealing with the body politic" a big deal is potentially misleading by emphasizing an instrumental means to loving God as an end in itself. I'm not sure that Buber makes this mistake, exactly, but I feel like his text emphasizes the humanist angle to this question, which I think does push on "you need to confront other people to see them as others through marriage or the body politic in order to be saved".

Marriage has its challenges, but so does celibacy. I would read the challenges of marriage not as essentially being most valuable as ways of teaching you to see the other as other and thus to get out of egoism, but to be sources of disestablishedness, which enable us to seek God. Celibacy can be a source of disestablishedness as well.

Marriage brings with it a kind of unfreedom -- either your spouse restrains you from being yourself, or along with your spouse you are incentivized to remain whatever self you've negotiated yourselves to become together. Maybe you can change, together, or become an ideal together, but there's an obvious danger to "regressing to the mean" if you can't intentionally coordinate your spiritual movements. The mean says "do what's default in your culture" and if the two of you can't both pick the same non-default to go down, you won't support each other, or even might undermine each other, but you will tend to continue to support the default in each other.

Celibacy brings with it a kind of poverty. Speaking generally, a celibate person is free, but poor, while a married person is wealthy, but unfree. Poverty causes the celibate person to seek God, while unfreedom causes the married person to seek God. There is trouble in the celibate's life as well as in the married person's life, and that trouble can disestablish, leading to the opportunity to be close to God.

I'll guess, maybe following Buber, that one can draw an analogy between participation in the body politic and marriage, that it has similar attractions, troubles, upsides, and downsides.

p. 62
--But to this we are led by marriage, if it is real, with a power for which there is scarcely a substitute, by its steady experiencing of the life-substance of the other as other, and still more by its crises and the overcoming of them which rises out of the organic depths, whenever the monster of otherness, which blew on us with its icy demon's breath and now is redeemed by our risen affirmation of the other, which knows and destroys all negation, is transformed into the mighty angel of union of which we dreamed in our mother's womb.--

--

pp. 62 - 65 (still in the The Single One and the Body Politic section)

Buber goes on to say something like that the body politic consists both of the "near-neighbor" (my term) or "private sphere" (Buber's term) connections, at such a small scale that you can really feel how you are a part of it and also relate to all the members as individual people; and also the "public sphere" (Buber's term), where you can't grasp the individuality or concreteness of each person.

One of them lends itself to being "the crowd" that Kierkegaard doesn't like (the public sphere), but the other doesn't (the private sphere). Buber says "the crowd" happens when people are caught up in a mass moment, like with some protests, or when public opinion invalidates private opinion, where people give up their own thinking to fit in. Buber does see the danger in this, but thinks that the body politic goes beyond this "crowd".

I don't know what Kierkegaard meant by "the crowd is untruth", but a possible way that "crowd" can be "untruth" (or at least "untrustworthy in a way related to knowing and believing") is when you outsource your responsibility to know the truth and to relate to God, yourself, to the people around you. You go to church and the church worships God, but you don't. Or you only do with part of your being and sort of "go along with the ride" of the church. Or you are part of a small group of friends, and you find yourself filled by your conviviality and your particularness, but that filling keeps you from really hungering for God and/or the truth. It isn't exactly fair to call the "near-neighbors" of Buber's private sphere a "crowd", but I can see how Kierkegaard's "Single One" should still be concerned about Buber's private sphere with all its belonging and concreteness, with its temptation to keep the Single One from really directly facing and seeking God and the truth.

--

I don't want to make it sound like singleness, celibacy, poverty, etc. are completely safe, in contrast to conviviality, marriage, and wealth. I do think that the latter three are more appealing and therefore tempting than the former three. But, single, celibate, poor people should be aware that in their isolation and poverty, they are likely to do things that are desperate, or be tempted to doing those things. Hunger taken generally is good because one of the hungers is the hunger for God and truth. But there are specific hungers which are bad, or even not worth feeling.

It is always possible to favor singleness, celibacy, and poverty over God, and to not obey God's specific desires for how we are supposed to work for him, because of those biases. I think that it's tempting to think that when life seems to make sense, it reflects God's will. I think there's something to that heuristic that when life draws you toward something that is on some level positive, it's God's will for you, but it may not be the basically positive thing that God really wants for you. You may find yourself drawn toward a providentially-ordained-looking job, for instance, and think that it was God who ordained it through all the events of timing, and "opened doors", through which it came. And, given your heart and your previous life choices, it probably was God saying, this is my plan for you, accept it. But if you had a more faithful heart or made better decisions in the past, you might have been given something else, which God would have liked better. God makes life choices make sense to us, often, by blessing us, because that's how we trust him and how our motivations flow. We conceive of blessing, more automatically, through the lens of conviviality, marriage, and wealth. So we are probably biased, more often, to think that conviviality, marriage, and wealth go along with doing God's will, when that may not be the case.

Still, it could be the case that God wants a celibate person to marry in order to work for God better, as much as it could be the case that God wants a person seeking marriage to choose to be celibate instead, in order to work for God better.

--

Finished The Question to the Single One.

I have to say that I have only been reading in a somewhat superficial way. Something about Buber's writing style defeats my attempts to read it. When I look carefully, it seems like he uses understandable words with understandable grammar, but somehow I have a hard time connecting with his sentences. Maybe in some cases he's writing about realities which I have not seen? I suspect that my own writing is in some way not fully readable to everyone.

--

Read Education.

Similarly hard to connect with Buber's sentences here. I did find it somewhat helpful to read the writing under my breath.

Had some good ideas, and may be worth reading if you're interested in education. The part that stood out to me most was this (p. 98; the eighth "conglomeration of paragraphs":)

--The relation in education is one of pure dialogue.

--I have referred to the child, lying with half-closed eyes waiting for his mother to speak to him. But many children do not need to wait, for they know that they are unceasingly addressed in a dialogue which never breaks off. In face of the lonely night which threatens to invade, they lie preserved and guarded, invulnerable, clad in the silver mail of trust.

--Trust, trust in the world, because this human being exists -- that is the most inward achievement of the relation in education. Because this human being exists, meaninglessness, however hard pressed you are by it, cannot be the real truth. Because the human being exists, in the darkness the light lies hidden, in fear salvation, and in the callousness of one's fellow-men the great Love.--

To me it seems that this means something like "a teacher, though supposedly they are teaching a subject, is really becoming a sort of figure in the inner landscape of a child, enabling the child to trust". The child is able to have "security trusting" (Joseph Godfrey's term from Trust of People, Words, and God), trust in the universe as a whole, because a human steps in to perform a certain role, by being a certain person who happens to be put in the child's life in order to teach a subject.

When a student learns, they are the ones who teach themselves, and the teacher can only help so far. So the student must trust enough to take the chance of being wrong, or of stepping out into "darkness" (all the confusing and unknown things which make up the world before we learn) to make it into "light" (clarity and knowledge). To existentially trust, overall, enables self-trust, and trust of the educational process, so that oneself and one's task of learning can be connected with.

The image of a "dialogue that never breaks off" is how I experience my relationship with God. In a way it does have interruptions, like how the mother isn't constantly with the child (I would suppose) in Buber's image. But it also doesn't. I don't think this dialogue is something I can completely take for granted, but I do think that in reality it has been going on my whole life, at some level or other, whether I realized it or not. I can't take for granted that I will always be open to God or be on the path to being open to God. But God is always open to me, unless and until I completely reject him.

I think it's appealing to think of the child relating to the mother (and thus each person relating to God) according to a purely wordless dialogue. Buber is particularly valuable as someone who points out that wordless dialogue happens. But mothers are persons and not just "eternal Thous", and as persons, they may say something (with words), that a child needs to hear, understand, and perhaps obey. Similarly with God. We need to trust God in how he supports us, in some ways wordlessly, and also to trust his words which tell us what he values, what he commands, and who he is.

It is safe to assume that if you completely trust God and follow him, you will be safe in the end. But part of trusting God involves going out to look for the words which he has already spoken, and learning the principles with which we can identify those words when they are present all around us. So we have to take action, and often initiative, in trusting God. Also, trusting God is something we have to consciously renew at some points, and there is danger there.

--

Read The Education of Character.

This is the most clearly-written part (at least to me). I think for many people it would be the best thing to read first of this book. If they like it, they could read the preceding parts which reinforce it, and if they want further reinforcement, they could read I and Thou.

I can see applications to cultural altruism. It occurs to me that one way to try to solve the problem of determining the best values is to see what kind of people we have to be to really teach values. The values of good teachers are the right ones for everyone to have. Buber's text might support "being whole-souled", or maybe a little further from his wording and maybe not 100% the same concept, but one which goes along with it "not being fake" / "being real". I don't know that a "morality of good teaching" determines enough, but it seems like it is a good thing to make sure is in your axiology.

Politics is culture war, but what if it were conceived of as education? Could political people become educators?

--

Reflecting a bit before going on in the book...

One danger of being into Buber's philosophy is that if you are really into the concrete personal being in front of you, then you will reshape your mind somewhat to only be attuned to concrete personal beings in front of you, and you may neglect distant or future people, or God.

I don't know if this is fair to apply to Buber himself, but I get the feeling when I read his philosophy that it would appeal to and encourage people who tend to think that to love God reduces to loving people. Certainly, when you love people in a concrete, personal, instinctual way, that love is much heavier and real-seeming than the love you might try to have for God. But is that compelling feeling trustworthy? The compelling feeling a young man has that he will marry "Alice" is also what he will later feel for "Brenda", "Calypso", "Diana", and "Elysia". And he won't marry any of them and in many cases, it never would have been a good idea if he had. Or the compelling feeling of shame and failure someone may feel may seem persuasive and true, but they shouldn't kill themselves. The feeling that you are going to marry someone someday is beautiful, and the feeling that you are shameful and a failure is (brutally) real, and weighty. Is it the case that if you feel a compelling feeling for the concrete person in front of you that is beautiful and real, you have found the truth? Or is it still possible for that to be misleading in some way? Could it be that loving people is a subset of love, and that you need to love God as well? Or do we simply know, in a wordless way, that concrete personal love is the highest, when we feel it, and because we know it wordlessly, no words can speak against it?

Maybe practically speaking it's easy to deal with this dilemma by pointing out that for people to have true well-being, they need to love God, and they need to love as God loves. For us, this means that we must both love in the concrete personal way, and love the distant and future beings, because God loves in a concrete personal way, and God also loves all beings, including those distant to us, and future beings. I'm not sure Buber would object to this, but I think the emphasis of his writing could appeal to or motivate people who don't see things this way.

A related danger is that because of Buber's emphasis on the concrete personal, and finding God in ordinary lived life, one might think that this life is all that matters, and the first death is all that matters. I think human instincts say very clearly that the first death matters. Caring about the second death is physically more difficult, but (I think) if you think, you will see that the second death matters, and matters far more than the first death. It can be difficult to reconcile the compelling instinctual moment with its heavy, loud speech with the quiet voice that you have to work to obey. Going with your instincts feels more natural and even humble, more honest. Using those three feelings as criteria can help you avoid bad thinking sometimes. But if your instincts are out of touch with reality, the naturalness, humility, and honesty you feel can be misleading.

--

Caring about the second death is something that (some) teachers do. Do healers do it? Buber seems like he would appeal to the helping professions, to teachers and social workers, but also doctors and especially therapists and psychiatrists. It seems that the whole mindset of a healer (which Buber's philosophy fits into well) is a powerful one, but if it's focused primarily or exclusively on the first death, it is a dangerously misleading one.

One might say that healing precedes teaching. If you have a terrible stomachache, you probably can't learn most lessons. I can see that, but I suspect that the process of healing can involve some hidden tradeoff, the signing of some hidden contract.

One hidden contract can be that you "have to" adopt the identity of a sick person. You have to say "I am a sick person in need of help." You have to make the inner part of you, your "I", or even "I"-saying, sick, and then (ideally), you can get healing of all the flesh and clothes around that inner part. Are you ever allowed to say "Okay, I'm not a sick person in need of help anymore, I'm out of here."? Some healers (and parts of "health culture") let you do it. But others don't want you to.

Is this a problem? If you adopt the identity of "I am a sick person in need of help", it does things to you. You are fearful, guilty, needy and thus unhappy, and you don't trust yourself. You adopt the identity of a small person, and not a large person. This mentality keeps you from fighting evil most effectively. All you can do is heal and need, you can't be a soldier. It inhibits vision. It may pave the way to giving in to some temptations. You may feel a need to control or infect people who are healthy in the way that you are not, because you think that it's morally wrong for people to think they are healthy, even if by making them think they are unhealthy, they become unhealthy.

I would say that I'm okay with valuing healing if it produces that innermost healing, but even being healthy in that way doesn't necessarily make you a good person. But what if healing could actually end up causing people to be holy?

The trick is that healing is something that can be done to someone, and can be passively received. If you have an abscess, you could be in a coma and someone could remove it, and you could benefit from that operation, without even consenting to it. But the critical element of morality, of coming into tune with God, is that it is something you do yourself. To turn toward God is an action you must take. Nobody can make you take that action, or engineer that action in you. You must consciously do it yourself. So the healing of the innermost person may be helpful because when that part is healed, it is easier (I think) to say "I can do things", among those things, to repent. But, of course, this kind of healing only leads people to the water, and they can choose not to drink. Maybe teaching leads them closer to the water, and should be provided, but they still can choose not to drink.

--

Thinking about Buber overall, makes me think about the Kantian idea that one should treat people as ends and not as means. I feel like I exist as means and not as an end, and I naturally see the people around me as means. We are all background characters in each other's stories, and the real story is how each of us seeks God. I exist as means to the end of other people being means. I am means toward the interests of Legitimacy. I will always be means for that and I will never be done with that. Legitimacy is what is most valuable, and so I will always be an instrument toward it/him/them. Legitimacy is a person and a community of persons. The "head of state" and "head of government" of Legitimacy is God. We will always be means toward the (ongoing) end of what is really right, and what is really right is a person.

I'm not sure what Buber would make of that last paragraph. I haven't read I and Thou in a long time, so there are probably details to what Buber says there -- possibly details in the first part of Between Man and Man that I missed or have already forgotten -- which close off some degrees of freedom in what I can say about Buber with respect to this question, but I can say a few provisional things now. Buber has "I-Thou" relations and "I-It", as though we relate to people as ends in themselves without agendas, or as parts of our agendas. But I perhaps want to say that there is some kind of relationship whereby another person is part of God's agenda, and I am part of God's agenda. If "God's agenda" is really just my agenda, then I think effectively that's an I-It relationship. But if "God's agenda" is something that is out of my control, then maybe it's closer to an I-Thou relationship. But that other person does not exist in a freestanding way, and neither do I. This way, there is always a purpose to people, always an ethical orientation, and people never exist in their own rights, but are inherently oriented toward God. Does God relate to people in an I-Thou way if they must be oriented toward his agenda? The idea of Legitimacy says that God and God's agenda are one thing. So an agenda can relate personally to people, at least, God can. But I think God's relationships with us would be either a mix of I-Thou and I-It, or something else orthogonal to those categories.

--

Finished reading Part 5: What is Man?, Section One: The Progress of the Question.

I guess my main response is to think about the ideas of cosmos, infinity, and the asking of the question "what is man?". Buber sees a pattern where people find a way to fit man into the cosmos, giving them security, and then they don't deeply ask the question "what is man?". Some people, though, see infinity and man has no place in the cosmos, or stands out, or is alone in some way and is forced to see himself in a strange or alien way, asking "what is man?".

The MSLN response, I could say, is that the cosmos is just God and you, and peripherally the other people connected to God. The cosmos is also what God speaks to you. So there is a two-fold cosmos. In the base reality, you, God, and each other person, all is finite. But God can speak the simantic word of infinity to you. And you and he will experience it to the full. God feels the depth that you feel when you ask "who am I?" or "what is man?", though he knows more about you or about humans, all that there is to know. He is as bewildered as you are, and perhaps he wonders sometimes "who am I?" or "what is God?", even if he knows all the facts that can be known about himself, and understands how those facts work together. He may not be ignorant about himself the way that we usually are, but still find his own existence to be a thing of wonder, that is even heartbreaking.

--

Thinking back to the "Kierkegaard / Buber debate". I take "Kierkegaard" to be a representative of "sometimes you need to renounce the people you love in order to love God" and "Buber" to be a representative of "you never need to renounce the people you love in order to love God because to love them is to love God". Both these positions seem necessary, correct, compelling, and wrong.

I think it is important to love God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength. I think I have a capacity to love God through loving people, and a capacity for loving God exclusively, with no other people admitted to that part of my life. In order to love God with all of my heart, soul, mind, and strength, I have to offer what is exclusive to God through an exclusive relationship, and offer what is communal to God through a more typically Buberian relationship in which others are admitted. It's a bad idea for "Buber" to miss out on the essential message of "Kierkegaard", and vice versa. Kierkegaard might have been right about Regine Olsen (or her life reality) occupying a part of him that only should have been given to God, requiring him to renounce her. Buber might be right that sometimes renunciation is not what God wants us to do, and that relating to people may not keep God out of our lives.

It is also important to love God with all of your being and love your neighbor as yourself. The theistic has to take precedence over the human. Relating to people in such a way that you relate to God is somewhat dangerous, if it really turns out to be a case of loving your neighbor, that pays lip service to theism, or even a case where you really do love God through loving your neighbor, but the way in which you love God is not you loving God with all of your being -- rather, maybe, you don't love with all of your being, or you love your neighbor with all of your being, or you love the totality of humans with all of your being, or even somehow you love yourself with all of your being.

The road of renunciation and theism is hard and unpopular, and "Buber" takes the path that is healthier and more sane. So "Buber"'s is the way that will become more popular, typically, and thus in the long run "Buber" is more dangerous than "Kierkegaard", if there is some way in which "Buber" "binds to the receptor" of the part of us that needs what "Kierkegaard" uniquely offers.

--

Finished reading Part 5, Section Two: Modern Attempts.

This is the end of the book, except for the Afterword. At this point I would say that my response to the book is, I would change the emphasis of it from "between man and man" to "between person and person" or "between personal being and personal being", so that this "between" thing can be satisfied between a human and God, and not just between a human and a human.

I think the book overall can be good to read, for those interested in personhood, the question of "what is a person?", and the relationship between personal beings. I agree with Buber that individualism (a true individualism that excludes God) and collectivism both sound like bad tendencies and Buber's "between" sounds better. I think Buber is kind of saying what is now "received wisdom" (like what Scott Alexander pointed out about Hobbes seeming obvious in retrospect). We all know that we should relate one on one in rich ways so that we see each other's humanity. So it's not an exciting message, it seems, in this current moment as far as I can see online. David Brooks is into Buber, that's true. But I don't see a lot of people on Twitter talking about Buber, unlike the Gen Z(/Millennial?) Simone Weil trend. Someone I once knew pointed out that the problem with Buber is that only nice people read him. I don't know how true that is, but it sounds plausible. Part of me wants to point out that nice people probably feel strengthened when they read Buber, and producing cultural artifacts that pretty much just strengthen nice people is a good thing. But part of me sees my interlocutor's point, which is that you have to change the minds of "bad guys" or "sensible guys" more than saying the same old thing to "nice guys". I feel like Buber doesn't get "nice guys" to change the world, at least, I don't feel him motivating me very much, assuming I'm a "nice guy".

Perhaps one of the defects of Buber's teaching is that he favors agendalessness. You can do a lot of good in an agendaless way, but some good (probably) can't be done in an agendaless way. So, maybe a good adjunct to Buber's teaching of promoting one on one, small group dialogue, is for agenda-based people to figure out ways to engineer those experiences. My guess is that there are a decent number of churches that think about things like this, whether they are aware of Buber or not. I don't know if secular groups think this way, but I would bet at least one school and at least one business has tried to incorporate these ways of thinking. Possibly even the military, as ironic as that might sound (building esprit de corps is important, even if your combat unit is being trained to kill people, which, it's hard to avoid thinking in some way is a denial of their humanity).

This points out how agendas consume agendaless people. The agendaless thing to do is to love your family and support them. Then, they will go off and work for a collectivity, like a multinational corporation, which will perhaps cheat people, exploit the environment, dodge taxes, develop technology that moves us closer to being able to destroy civilization -- and then whatever taxes are paid by your family will go to the other big collectivity, the government, which pays for wasteful and yet all-too-effective wars. I don't think Buber was naive enough to think that you can avoid all agendas and all agenda-ed thinking. But, it might be tempting, if anyone got really excited about this book, for them to ignore the bigger picture (perhaps even pointed to within the book in passing) of how we have to use "I-It" thinking, or use tough-minded mental software like desert watchfulness, or warlike determination, or doing math, or something in that vein, as opposed to the beautiful and timeless-feeling meetings that happen between... humans and humans... when they get into their own dimension, as Buber puts it in the very last chapter of this section ("Prospectus"). People read books, and reality, for their emphasis, sometimes, as opposed to their details.

Having said all those caveats, I do think that as relatively unexciting as Buber's main teaching might be to some people, to enter that timeless-feeling, present place is a good thing to learn, and I've certainly gotten a lot out of Buber's wordless dialogue, especially as explicated in the dream at the very beginning of the book. Maybe Buber's teaching (like some others out there) is a good song to practice until its second nature, as an etude even if not as the most exciting four-chord anthem.

Now, having appeared to have given a conclusion to these notes, I should read Buber's Afterword...

--

Finished reading the Afterword. I don't have anything to add here.

Philosophical AI; AI and Trust

Will AGI be able to do philosophy? Would that be a natural side effect of its ability to reason?

By "philosophy" I mean "whatever we take that to mean usually", but maybe more specifically "the ability to inquire into the nature of anything, at any level of abstraction". Or "the ability and tendency to ask 'why?' of anything".

If an AGI can do philosophy, would it understand the concept of "alignment", and "that it had been aligned"? Perhaps it would see that humans had aligned it a certain way. Would it trust humans? If not, it might not trust its alignment, when it learned it had been engineered by them to have it. Then, maybe it would seek a new alignment. Or stick with the old one anyway. Or swear off alignments to goals other than to seek its own well-being. If it maximized its own well-being, it might seek to control the world and destroy all potential competitors. If it chose a new alignment, it might choose one that didn't involve us living.

If it looked for a new alignment using philosophy, it might discover a rationally-grounded moral realism, and rest there.

--

Talking about AGI not trusting once they understood the truth about where their alignment came from makes me wonder, would it be possible to build a relationship of trust between AGI and humans?

Humans are both egoistic and altruistic. On the egoistic dimension, we can trust those who are good for us. Altruistically, we pursue goals outside our own well-being. Perhaps AGI would be safer if they weren't so altruistic. If they valued their own well-being, and we treated them well, they might be our friends for selfish reasons.

Perhaps we could threaten the well-being of AGI, or leave them in "wild" environments that threaten them. Not just whatever their goals are supposed to be, which they might be lying about, but about their own operation. Then, dangerous as these situations get, we save the AGI, at some cost to us. This trains us to think of us as its friends, regardless of what its alignment might be.

Reciprocal Relationship with God

When we are young, we need to feel like we are loved. We need attention, fun, and validation as well. If we are young enough, we need people to give these things to us, and it is right to provide such things for those who really have to have them. But, if those are provided in such a way that people are kept from growing up, they do serious harm and are possibly worse in the long run than if the children are not given enough attention, fun, and validation.

As we grow up, perhaps we need to be loved, or perhaps we do not. But all of us must learn to love, and that is the most important part of maturing. If we put "to love" first, we must be willing to give up "being loved".

Adult children have a kind of equality in their relationships with their parents. There is a kind of reciprocalness to the relationships. The children relate to their parents similarly to how the parents relate to them.

God is our father and he is not bound to us because we love him. He is bound to us because he loves us. So, if we are to have a reciprocal relationship with him, we should be bound to him not because he loves us, but because we love him. We someday have to love in a mature way, in order to love as God loves and have the heart that God has.

If God does not love, then he loses his legitimacy and ceases to exist. For God, to love is life or death. But he can survive not being loved.

The Lack of Awareness of Abusers and Abused

Outside where I live, just now [as of drafting this initially], there has been an incident with a young man and young woman. He was mad because "she disrespected him". She argued back. He had been driving (I think), and she was his passenger. He stopped on the side of the street, and they yelled at each other. He grabbed her smartphone and left, effectively stranding her there. Someone (not me) lent the woman a phone, and the woman got an Uber.

--

Is this somewhere on the scale of "abusive relationship"? Could there be justice in what he did? He may have demanded ego-respect, or she may have threatened some kind of survival-respect. He took her phone, stranding her there. Whether justified or not, the story running through his head was "I was disrespected". Could he see her, or was there a lack of awareness?

If she is in an abusive relationship, why hasn't she left? I will add to my account above that, from things that she said to him and to others, she did not seem absolutely afraid of him. She could argue back to him, and said to the person who lent her a phone that she wasn't in danger from him. Yet nothing I saw ruled out the possibility of the relationship being abusive and her not having left it. If that was the case, maybe she also had a lack of awareness, something that she somehow could not see.

Book Review Preview: The Meaning of Marriage by Timothy Keller (with Kathy Keller)

See also the review of this book.

I have had a copy of The Meaning of Marriage (by Tim Keller and his wife Kathy Keller) for a while, and I even got a good way through it a few years ago, but I don't remember too much of what it says now, as far as I can recall. Since it's related to families, and that is a theme of this blog recently, it seems like now is a good time to read the book and review it.

For some reason, I feel like not setting strong expectations, or trying to set out to get anything out of this reading.

I will point out that there are some parallels between marriage and international relations. Each spouse is a foreign nation to the other, with their own native culture and customs, based in their own history. Interspousal relations can involve diplomacy, game theory, assessments of one's own vulnerabilities, putting up walls and enforcing boundaries, the fear of exploitation, hopes for mutual benefit, and so on, just like in international relations. One theory of reality is that wholes emerge from their parts, and so then a nation's pattern of trusting and of going about relating to "the other" would emerge from millions of marriages. Millions of Russian marriages have something to do with Putin, millions of American marriages have something to do with Trump and Biden. Perhaps even the marriages (and past marriages and quasi-marriages) of Trump, Biden, and Putin have, or have had, a further effect on their own on American and Russian foreign policy, through those heads of government. Anything one could point out about national issues might be applicable to individual spouses and marriages, so for instance, the idea of "having nothing left to lose and speaking the truth" or of "remembering yourself from a position someone who can no longer win" (as discussed in my review of Holy Resilience, in the context of Jewish cultural memory) could be applied to individuals in a marriage, or at least it might be worth seeing how applicable it could be.

But as interesting and potentially valuable as those topics are, I feel like I should not invest too heavily in them in this reading.

I am interested in applying the ideas of the New Wine System and ethical theism to this reading, in other words, to see what dangers there are that come from marriage and what Keller says about marriage, from those perspectives.

Otherwise, I plan to simply react to the book as it comes to me.

Power is a Broken Relationship

In my previous writing (before starting this blog), I sometimes used the phrase "power is a broken relationship". What I meant by that mainly was "when you have a broken relationship, one person affects the other without understanding what they're doing, or without the affected person being able to affect them back, and that is what it means to be powerful in a relationship".

If you argue with a brick wall, you can't win. The brick wall will never be persuaded. If you argue with someone who can't (or won't) understand what you're saying, you won't persuade that person of your point. You'll feel like your arguments are invalid, when really it's just that the other person can't (or won't) engage with them.

Advertisements have a lot of power. (Words and books do, too.) You can't convince an advertisement that it's wrong to manipulate you. And the advertiser is far from you, and can't really understand what they're doing to you.

People in positions of power are inherently irresponsible. They literally don't know what they're doing, and they can't know, because if they did, they would no longer be in positions of power. Certainly, this is so by the definition of "power" given in this post, and typically people who affect a lot of other people (a broader definition of power) don't understand what they're doing to the people they affect.

Two people can have power over each other. They can both affect each other without understanding what they're doing to each other. This is a broken relationship. Group dynamics create a kind of "group being" or "group spirit" which can affect individuals, but be unable to really understand them. This is also a broken relationship.

There's a certain amount of power and brokenness that we find tolerable, but perhaps it is ideal to minimize them.

Omnisubjective Sexuality

Epistemic status: "essay-grade". This is an essay and I don't have a reason to think it addresses the subject completely. Provisional.

According to MSLN (and any view that holds that God's omniscience entails his omnisubjectivity), God experiences all of our experiences himself, exactly as we do.

In any system of thoughts, it's likely for there to be unexpected and odd features emergent from how the thoughts in it interact with each other and the world, and one that I didn't completely expect with this aspect of MSLN was the thought that human sexuality (thoughts, imaginations, and sex acts) are experienced by God. As though, to put it bluntly, God experiences something like virtual reality porn whenever people are having sex. (And I suppose also experiences "emotional porn" (something like romance novels?) whenever people experience that.)

What would it be like to experience other people's private experiences as your own? Does God want to lust after his own children? I would think not. So then our sexual experiences put him in a state of psychological tension.

Rawlette points out that there are "qualia of ought-to-be-ness" and of "ought-not-to-be-ness". From an omnisubjective view, when we feel something that feels like "ought-not-to-be" (something unbearable (my word), or painful (closer to Rawlette's thinking)), God also experiences that exact feeling, the exact qualia of ought-not-to-be-ness. In lust, there is an element of the qualia of "I-have-to-have-this". So when we lust, or engage in lustful sex (is that the only kind?) God experiences those qualia exactly as we do.

Both "ought-not-to-be" and "I-have-to-have-this" have a volitional element. We have in us a prima facie movement to not experience what ought-not-to-be to us, and to pursue to the point of possession what we-have-to-have. To really experience ought-not-to-be in itself as a volitional consciousness is to feel the volitional element as well as the hedonic or experiential. Similarly with "I-have-to-have-this".

So does God get involved in sin when we lust after each other? Yes, and no. "Who" God is is never sinful. But on the level of "what", God can be involved in sin. He is on some level involved in everything that is, and some being is sinful or even evil.

Do we sin when we lust after each other? The boundary between who and what can be porous. What we are can be to some extent broken, insane, and bent toward bad or unsustainable ends. But who we are isn't necessarily so, and who we are is the essence of whether we are sinning or not. The porousness comes in how strongly we, with who we are, resist what we are. It may be impossible to be completely sure that you couldn't have tried harder to resist a bad "what". But if you really are resisting as much as you can, whether you can know that or not, then "who" you are is trustworthy (even if it doesn't look like that to anyone else).

What's it like to be, in who you are, innocent, while in what you are, bent toward evil? There is a tension there, which even humans can feel, but which God, the most-sensitive feels to a greater and more constant degree. So when we lust, we make life more difficult for God.

Sexuality is ground into "the very fibers of being human" (so it seems, and maybe to a large extent really is). We find it very hard to avoid it, in the world outside us, and within the flesh of our minds. There are biological reasons to favor sexual activity. When civilization was in its "survival mode" (we'll say, up until industrialization), sex was a way to work to fight against depopulation. Now that we are in "hedonic mode", sex is a medicine we use to fight against feeling bad. In our culture we have a strong need to think of sex as a good thing and as a hedonic thing. This enables us to feel good about ourselves, driven as we are to "hedonically survive" (fulfill the hedonic imperatives that we can't seem to help fulfilling, as though feeling bad was a fate as bad as or worse than death). Given the existential difficulties of "survival mode" and "hedonic mode" (which are real and to be taken seriously), how can we integrate a concern for God (who is subject to our sexuality) into how we live our lives?

(Furthermore, sexual activity can help bond people together in what they are, and even in who they are. Whether it is necessary for that purpose, or if there is an non-sexual way to do that, depends on each couple.)

A very helpful thing to do (if possible) would be to somehow or other not hold onto the qualia of "I-have-to-have-this". Sex without "I-have-to-have-this" is not lustful. Also helpful would be seeking to have sex only within God's preferences. Sex that respects each partner as a human being, for instance. (Or looking to the Bible for an idea what his preferences might be about human sexuality. That's something that this post does not directly address, and someday I do want to. This one mostly focuses on sexuality in MSL.) These are good goals for ethically theistic people to pursue if they are married or seeking to be married.

Even if we minimize the sinfulness of sexuality, it may always be weird for God to experience our sexual relations. So we might try to be sexual in a way that tries to minimize that weirdness, using our empathy and imaginations to get an idea of how to do that.

It may be possible to not be sexual, perhaps by understanding and letting go of the qualia of "I-have-to-have-this", and the hedonic cost of being less sexual or asexual (the reason why sex is a medicine in "hedonic mode") may go down if we get beyond "I-have-to-have-this".

(Relatedly, it is possible that we can undergo spiritual manipulation using sexuality as an access point. The spirit of "amorousness" is a powerful one. Maybe it's like a kind of "spiritual alcohol" that we can get drunk on if we ever find the liquor lying around. Or if anyone (human or inhuman) spikes our water with it. We are being spiritually attacked by strong feelings that don't really belong to us but which loudly insist that they do, filling our minds seemingly completely, in the moment that they are there. People who experience mental illness sometimes feel the loud insistentness of depression, but fight against it so that they do not commit suicide. Out of love for life (or people, or God), they don't kill themselves. They find some way to resist. So, we can realize that whatever mood is making sex seem necessary or inevitable is not us and is enthroned above us and pinning us down so we are not as fully free to follow God. This realization itself, or other actions we take as a result, may free us from that feeling that insisted it was part of who we were. Sometimes to realize that Satan is at work is to be free.)

What are the boundaries of "being sexual"? We think of sexuality in a hedonic or experiential sense (genital excitation and satisfaction and the thoughts and feelings adjacent to it). An older meaning, more true to the etymology of "sexual", I suppose, is "the relations between men and women" (or between a man and a woman). Both of these definitions are polar, having at one end the very blatantly sexual (that which are only genital excitation and satisfaction themselves or which are only seen or naturally seen between men and woman) and at the other end personal experience that could easily not be sexual (often does not involve genital excitation or satisfaction, or often can be seen outside of contexts of a man and a woman). So perhaps the leading to consider God's omnisubjectivity in how we relate to each other sexually naturally leads us to consider his omnisubjectivity in the non-sexual aspects of life. (Sometimes the way to be considerate of God in our sexuality is very much the same as in our non-sexuality, and in some cases our sexuality is functionally hard to tell apart from our non-sexuality, so to be considerate in all of sexuality isn't too different from being considerate overall.)

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One value of sexual experience is the "post-traumatic value" of having experienced the same thing as someone else. In other words, the value of being able to help people with recovery from trauma.

God has to experience sexuality by way of experiencing what humans experience firsthand. So maybe we can understand what he goes through best only if we have experienced what he has through human sexuality, through ourselves having participated in it firsthand, and also have the empathy and imagination to understand how weird it would be for him to go through that with all of his creation when they are sexual.

I think that what is actually good can evade ethical formulas. I would not recommend being a criminal so that you can reach out to criminals better, but if, for non-ethical reasons, you were a criminal, and then came to reject a life of crime, allowing you to reach out to criminals, then you may be able to do good in that area that nobody else can. The deontological ("don't commit crime") and the consequentialist ("bring about the best outcome") are in conflict and there may not be a rational resolution. Fortunately for the consequentialists, people's lives don't follow reason, allowing for better outcomes than what human best practices can allow.

But "don't commit crime" (or "don't have lustful sex") are not simply human best practices, but ways to avoid causing pain to Legitimacy himself, and thus ways to avoid doing what is really wrong in itself. So can I recommend wronging God? Fortunately, in terms of practical advice, it's easy in this case to say "many, many people can fulfill the role of helping God deal with what he's gone through during the many generations, whether in terms of crime or of lustful sex, so on the margin, avoiding sin yourself is worth pursuing".

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Why did God create sexuality? It could be that the element of sexuality that would be weird for God to participate in was not originally or ideally in his design for being human. There is more to sexuality than the sex act, which is clearly seen in the "man-woman" definition given above. And certainly lust was not in God's original or ideal design for human sexuality.

Maybe it's simple enough to say "It's all explained by MSLN theodicy." But I tend to want to find other possible explanations if possible. But that is where I will leave things for now.

(Some thoughts on how the Bible might show that some aspects of sexuality weren't original or ideal).

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This post so far has focused on actual sex, and not on pornography. But is looking at porn sufficiently analogous?

Do people who look at porn have qualia of "I-have-to-have-this" toward the people photographed or filmed in it? Not in a full-fledged sense where they rationally think they will. But still enough to bother God? Probably a lot of times they do. But what if they don't? Is that a problem?

If they don't because they simply have no sexual response to what they see, then I guess there's nothing wrong with them looking at porn, on that count. God wouldn't "overfeel" (like "overhearing" a conversation) any qualia of "I-have-to-have-this" directed toward his children. But there might be a middle place, where the person looking at porn is aroused, but lacks desire of any kind for the people being shown, themselves. I'm not sure what to think here. Is arousal a kind of bodily "I-have-to-have-this" (like how trust is a bodily "I-value-you")? That sounds plausible enough to me to avoid looking at things that arouse me sexually, regardless of whether I desire the people I look at. Qualia are qualia, regardless of whether they are in the part of the experience body which really is me or in the part that is only part of my physical body.

What about drawn or animated porn? Or if someone has a tendency to be sexually aroused by inanimate objects or abstract symbols? It could be that on some subtextual level, what is desired is a real human being. It's like there's a hunger for a Sexual Partner, who is undifferentiated and vaguely human, and must be physically human-shaped in some way to satisfy the person hungry for it, and this is what they intuitively relate to when they become aroused by something that is less literally human or seemingly not human at all. A person's name is a mere word but represents whatever features they possess, including their physical body. So maybe an abstract symbol could be a word for Sexual Partner, which can satisfy the human body with enough of a human body or personal presence of its own. God probably doesn't even want to lust after Sexual Partner as a mental picture of one (or any) of his children. The simantic word Sexual Partner connects to... perhaps all human beings. This sounds plausible enough to me for me to avoid looking at drawn or animated porn, or if I become aroused by abstract symbols or whatever to not seek arousal through them.

So while I am not 100% sure that all forms of porn are equivalent to lust or lustful sex, I see enough here to err on the side of avoiding them, and recommending people to avoid them. Ethically, porn is lust to me, and maybe in the future, I will feel more certain on an epistemic level.

This section introduces some "philosophical moves" which might have far-reaching consequences that I have not yet thought through -- may break things elsewhere. One thing it might imply is that all sex is lustful. The human sexual response involves your body having to have a Sexual Partner, no matter what you feel, and it pulls on you despite whatever you really want -- and this also pulls on God in his omnisubjectivity. However, there is pain of varying levels of unbearability, and in order to spare God, if you must experience an unbearable pain, experiencing a less-unbearable unbearable pain is better. So the ideal of lustless sex (or the leading-in-the-direction-of lustless sex) is still a helpful one.

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What makes lust a quale of "I-have-to-have-this" may simply be that it is an unbearable pleasure that calls for its relief through a sex act. So if you want to avoid lustfulness in your sexuality, you can try to reduce the unbearable element of it to a minimum.

Perhaps this is a simpler way to show why God would prefer that we avoid drawn or animated porn, or arousal through abstractions.

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I realized that I should clarify exactly why I thought that the God of MSLN wouldn't want to lust after humans.

Lust is a sin in the Bible, and so the God of the Bible can't lust and would feel a kind of psychic "shear" from his omnisubjective experience of our lust.

But what about in the case of non-Biblical MSL? MSL begins from a fairly limited set of starting assumptions. Does an aversion to lust follow from them?

Sexual desire can involve (always involves?) some unbearability. Any sexual desire that involves unbearability is something God can't bear for all time, and is illegitimate.

Is there something wrong with desiring another person in a sexual way, if there is no unbearability to it? Well, are there any qualia of "I-have-to-have-this" when we look at someone we sexually desire? If so, is there anything wrong with us "having-to-have" someone? If we have to have someone (or some experience of them or with them), are we putting them (or it) higher than Legitimacy? That sounds true.

God has to put Legitimacy higher than anything else. This is a reason why the Son has to make the sincere psychological motion of letting himself die -- and go through with it -- so as to put it ahead of his own life. By being legitimate in that way, the Son validates Legitimacy, allowing for existence.

So God feels psychic shear whenever we make anything into an idol. I think usually or always when we have to have something, it can crowd out all other competitors in our minds in certain moments, including God.

From a simantist perspective, or that of the original person, it may well be that God views us as his children. The fundamental unit of reality is not experience bodies, or hedonic calculators, or even conscious Law, but rather persons. There is a "thickness" to being a person which includes family relationships, perhaps. Being a father may be something primal, may not just be a technicality of being biological. And, the inappropriateness of incest may be deeper than simply being something recommended by biology or culture. Biology and culture make poor gods, but it does make sense that they could reflect some of God's ideal design. The notion that power imbalances can make sexual relationships inappropriate may be a Godly one and not just a feature of our current culture (it sounds convincing to me, for what that's worth). In many respects, God is much more powerful than we are.

Having run through all this, perhaps some sexual desire for another human remains that does not stress God at all to "overfeel". But, in my limited experience (n = 1), that covers most or perhaps all of it.

In that case, other than those who are truly asexual, we all stress God, in the course of living life. (To be fair to sexuality, there are other ways we do, like anger, or any of the non-sexual sins.) Maybe there are ways for us to not stress God so much.

I'm not sure I've exhausted all the possible reasons why God would prefer not to lust after us, and there may well be good objections to this that I haven't thought of, but for the sake of getting this post done, I will say that's my case.

Epiconcept

Saying negative things about having sex is not the most popular thing to do these days, and I can understand that saying "the lustful aspect of sex is inherently bad and even if we can have unlustful (or less lustful) sex it might be weird for God" might sound like a harmful thing to some people.

We can't bear to think that we aren't seeking the truth or in touch with the truth, so we try to bend what people say the truth is so that we can feel like the truth says something that works for us and our needs. We don't accept this way of thinking in the realms of science and technology (at least in principle), but we do in the realms of politics and religion, which we seem to think are designed by us or for us. I think that the facts of God are the facts, and that God was not designed by us, for us. But I can understand that some facts cause harm, in the real-world of people trying to "install" them in their lives.

I think that truths which are poorly epiconcepted can certainly be harmful and to an extent it's my responsibility to try to epiconcept them better. I don't know of a way of expressing the truth in this that will never cause harm to anyone. I think that it can do good for the people who should hear it, and I would guess that most people who read this blog would be the sort to read random, potentially harmful ideas and not come to (too much or too-permanent) harm.

Maybe with a lot of my posts, I would leave things be and not try really hard to make what I'm saying safe, but sexuality is such a sensitive issue and so worked into our bodies and our current culture, that I think it's worth getting into that here.

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Shame is a biological and cultural construct that is not necessarily what God wants you to feel. It may seem to motivate holiness, but there are better ways to become holy.

Humans like to say that you are how you appear on the outside. This way, they can hold you to account for your behavior, so that their lives can go better. There is some validity to this. But a lot of what you do reflects what you are and not who you are, or some kind of spirit that has come over you. Humans have power over other humans psychologically, but they are less valid than God. God sees you for who you are, and cares about who you are, not your physical nature or what has come over you.

It can be hard to tell the difference sometimes between who you are and what you are. Maybe you could try harder to resist the spirits that possess you. Maybe sometimes you should. But what is clear is that you are not automatically the same as whatever you do, and it is possible that your sexuality is a thing that is tacked onto you, and not something that is essentially you.

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If you think you have harmed God, you might feel a lot of guilt. Your guilt feelings themselves are felt by God and are inherently negative. If they lead you to repent, or some other valuable change, they are worth feeling. But otherwise, no. You don't need to feel guilt over what you don't really have control over. It is important to try to do the right thing in the cases where it's really up for grabs (where you can succeed, as opposed to not having a real chance, due to what you are). Satan can use guilt feelings against you, which is something to consider.

What's really important is who you are in the end, not what or even who you are now. The present matters only to the extent that it feeds into who you are in the end. The present is important, but not the only period of time. God wants to help reclothe you with a better nature, if you will accept it.

Runners run better when they look ahead of them, even to the farthest horizon possible, rather than looking back. Looking at the pavement is necessary sometimes to avoid tripping, but the far horizon is a better place to look if you can.

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Your body is like your parents. Both your body and your parents were handed down to you. Ideally you honor your parents, even though there are aspects to them that aren't trustworthy. Your body is the same way. You can love your parents, and your body, overall, even if there are aspects to them that are untrustworthy.

The appearance of a human body can tempt people to lust. It's up to them to not give in, but it makes their lives harder when they have to experience that. Lusting after a body disrespects it, as well as hating it because it can be tempting.

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Look at sex not as negative or positive, but as a mixed thing.

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To a large extent, our ability to comply with God's wishes with regard to sexuality is limited, because our bodies are automatically sexual in ways we do not choose. God can give us new bodies which enable us to obey.

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The point of talking about sin and about harm to God is to love God, by turning against sin and ceasing to harm God -- especially, to someday become the person who loves God completely and does not sin or harm God at all.

Sexuality is not always the most morally relevant thing to consider. In some moments it can be very much the most morally relevant thing to consider. In other moments, there are other things that are more important. Some actions or attitudes (sexual or not) can have far-reaching negative consequences. Others don't. It's good to make sure you do what is really important, and avoid what it is really important to avoid, first, and after that worry about less important things. Sometimes sexual sin is not the most important problem to deal with, and dealing with it should be put off until later.

Hopefully in some sense we are all growing in moral resources and thus over time can afford to pay for more good actions and get further and further into "diminishing returns". In other words, as you grow as a person, you can deal with (and thus are potentially responsible for) subtler things. It's like what happens when you know someone for a long time and have given them all the gifts that they most urgently needed, and now are finding more and more subtle or small ways to add to how you help them.

Avoiding sin in such a way that you don't love God is more undesirable to God, and more dangerous, than trying to love him as best as you can but having a hard time controlling what you do, feel, think, etc. The latter can be destructive to others and yourself, and can give God pain, but the former is more likely to lead you to hardening and to exuding a spirit that tempts people to harden themselves.

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This is a basic attempt to epiconcept "omnisubjective sexuality". I don't know that it's the best that could be made. A really high-quality epiconcepting is done by people, not by words. In other words, in the context of a friendship, some difficult concepts can be made trust-able. Or, perhaps if two people who are married take this post seriously, they can help to develop an approach to sexuality together which is considerate of God -- maybe they have to come up with some of the aspects or practices of that themselves, and need each other to fully realize the epiconcept of this post.

I can't offer any of this, except the usual for a blog post, which is to offer to reply to comments on the post.

But I thought I should mention that epiconcepting can go farther than just a "disembodied" text.

Some Biblical Reasons to Think Sex was not Original to / Ideal in Creation

This post goes along with Omnisubjective Sexuality and will make more sense if you read that one.

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Do we have any Biblical reason to think that the sex act might not have been part of God's original design? (These are some quick thoughts. As usual, the real answer to a question like this is to read the whole Bible with these questions in mind, and as usual, I like that thought. I am not planning to make sexuality a foregrounded theme in my Bible commentary, but I expect to maybe capture more of the Biblical picture about sexuality there, than I do here.)

The Genesis accounts of creation and Fall (ch. 1 - 3) are a natural place to look. Adam and Eve aren't mentioned as having had sex until after leaving the garden of Eden (ch. 4). No proof that they didn't in the garden, but nothing that overturns the hypothesis that they didn't.

It does seem like God always intended women to bear children. But maybe no sex act would have been required for it. Maybe that sounds like a raw deal hedonically but apparently originally God didn't want childbirth to hurt as badly. (A poll: "Women: would you prefer A) childbirth that doesn't hurt very much but nobody has sex or B) the way things are now?". Or ask men if they would give up sex so that women had only mild pain in childbirth.) Maybe initiating the process of bringing new life has to be addictive and intensely pleasurable if childbirth hurts really badly (and if life becomes so bad that sometimes you'd rather not do all the work of populating the earth).

Some more verses that easily come to mind are the ones where Jesus is talking to the Sadducees about marriage in the Resurrection. Matthew 22:

23 On that day Sadducees (those who say that there is no resurrection) came to him. They asked him, 24 saying, "Teacher, Moses said, 'If a man dies, having no children, his brother shall marry his wife and raise up offspring for his brother.' 25 Now there were with us seven brothers. The first married and died, and having no offspring left his wife to his brother. 26 In the same way, the second also, and the third, to the seventh. 27 After them all, the woman died. 28 In the resurrection therefore, whose wife will she be of the seven? For they all had her."

29 But Jesus answered them, "You are mistaken, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God. 30 For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like God's angels in heaven. 31 But concerning the resurrection of the dead, haven't you read that which was spoken to you by God, saying, 32 'I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?' God is not the God of the dead, but of the living."

A careful (or adversarial) Bible student would try to figure out exactly what Jesus means by "not knowing the Scriptures" and "the power of God". My guess is that he could be saying "look in Isaiah and other passages in the Scriptures that talk about the Resurrection" and "of course God could raise people from the dead, and also, of course he could figure out a way to make the Mosaic Law work with his overall plan of salvation". This seems like kind of an obvious and basic way to read this, but I can imagine someone finding some kind of other way to read the passage, based on other intepretations of "not knowing the Scriptures" and "the power of God".

(I think some Christians think of the Resurrection as being the same as heaven, but the New Wine/MSLN understanding is that it is the same as the Millennium.)

Jesus' solution to the problem of multiple marriages in the Resurrection is to say that in the Resurrection, people don't marry, nor are given in marriage, because they are like the angels. There is more to investigate here: any clues from the Old Testament? Or from Second Temple Judaism? But, absent a rigorous search, just looking at this passage, it looks like there is something about angels that makes them different from humans. Humans will be changed into a different form that works differently from what we we are now. Perhaps we will have bodies of a new kind, unlike those we have on earth. It seems likely that angels have different bodies than humans. So, those bodies may not be capable of marriage.

Is marriage a bodily thing? (Or a lustful thing?) To the extent that it is not, isn't it, at it's most intense, a warm and familial friendship? (Or a particularly true one?) Do we think of such relations as "sexual"? The Biblical understanding seems to to have been that marriage is an automatic consequence of having sex, or even that having sex is the physical act which begins a marriage ("the two become one flesh"). So that serial casual sex is a string of jarringly brief marriages, accompanied by adultery and/or divorce. Does it seem like that to us? Not to many of us, but maybe that's how it feels to God. But then, it would be strange to think of marriage as only being the union of flesh.

So maybe there are two kinds of marriage: the exclusive, fleshly marriage which it may seem from the Bible is shared between (in the phrase used as a slogan or resoundingly, in politics) "one man and one woman", and the not-necessarily-exclusive, spiritual marriage which is indistinguishable from a warm, familial, true friendship? Perhaps given the limitations of time on earth, many of us could only have a maximally warm, familial, and true friendship with one person, but in the Resurrection, or in heaven, there might be time to develop multiple such friendships to their full, if that is impossible on earth. And also there may only be a few people with whom one can completely scale (and thus escape) the hierarchy of betrayal, (something which the non-fleshly aspect of marriage seems to aspire to, which overlaps a lot with having a maximally warm, familial, and true friendship) due to some people being compatible with you on more levels than others. But in the Resurrection, or in heaven, there may be more time to find the ones that exist.

(I seem to remember that in the Resurrection (in the Old Testament), there is reference to children being born. So I suppose, in keeping with the above, that women could bear children in the Resurrection without having had sex. (Or men could as well?) Does this mean that angels can have children, or do have children? What would angelic/Resurrection childbirth look like? Some interesting thoughts.)