Edition #16
Lisbon, 2011
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TAGS: bible, culture, philosophy, lgbt, nietzsche, religion
"Evil, I call it, and misanthropic—all this teaching of the One and the Plenitude, and the Unmoved and the Sated and the Permanent! All that is permanent—that is but a parable!" -
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche
A long time ago, in Ancient Greece, society was divided into two major groups: there were the followers of Apollo, representing the patriarchal society, the Concept, the Rational, the Straight; and there were also the followers of Dionysus, the god who represented the Metaphor, the Adaptable, the Mutable. Dionysus was the god of pleasure, festivities, and wine. There was a kind of rivalry between them, but the ideal was to have a balance between the two.
With the advent of Judaism, which emerged after the Hebrews liberated themselves from the Egyptians, and with Platonism, which spoke of the world of ideas and transported the real world to the afterlife, Christianity emerged from these two great streams, as a fusion of Judaism and Platonism. With Plato, Apollo triumphed over Dionysus... And because Christianity drew from Plato, it is a powerful remnant of Apollo.
A strong characteristic of the Apollonian cult was the solidification of established Concepts within a patriarchal hierarchy that started with the Athenian man, where everything else—women, slaves, foreigners—were considered the "other," the barbarian. In this society, women had no place and were confined to the back of the house. In fact, anyone who was not an Athenian man was "already wrong even when silent."
Since Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it turned into the inquisitorial Conceptual Religion of our era, with its conceptualism tracing back to Apollo, and has since then been suffocating the existence of Metaphor (or everything that is not Christian) in every possible way. Today, it is no longer the Athenian man who holds the Apollonian Concept, but in Western society, it has been the White Heterosexual Christian Man, with everything else existing only to maintain this singular structure of domination.
The Concept petrifies all possibility of progress because it is already convinced that it is the Truth itself; therefore, it does not need to search any further and is content with its salvation board. When Concept is privileged, there is a risk of delusion, of believing that one has reached the truth, and so the person starts to think they have “found themselves,” that they are “saved.” This happens because people feel insecure about their nature and their destiny and need to cling to something “solid” to support themselves (idols are built upon this). The problem is that life is a river in constant flux, and the person becomes inert, trapped in the Concept when they should be navigating this river of Metaphors and transformations that is life.
Why has the Bible endured for so long? Because for almost two thousand years, if you opposed the Bible, you would be burned alive at the stake. The Metaphor of fraternity became generalized during the Renaissance and the French Revolution, as awareness arose that the mummification of Concepts kept everything stagnant, leading to a frontal struggle against the prevailing civil law—Absolutism and Christianity. The Church (the Concept) ceased to have so much power over everything else. But on the timeline of human history, the Renaissance and the French Revolution were only yesterday...
We still feel the heavy influence of the Great Concept, Christianity, on society; that's why the Bible is still read by so many, still considered the most important book in the world, the word revealed by God. And when it presents itself as the Eternal and Immutable Truth of God, it proves, in all its terms, that it is a Great Concept.
However, every day, more and more people are gradually allowing the Metaphor to be reborn in their lives. Society, as always, evolves, even if through conflicts, and will increasingly create space for the flourishing of the Metaphor. This is inevitable! For a long time, the White Heterosexual Christian Man has dominated the Western world, but he has been losing his ground. The spirit of our time (Zeitgeist) is the blossoming of the Metaphor in society. You can see it for yourself: the current President of the United States is Black; there is civil union for same-sex couples in countries with a strong anti-gay Christian tradition, like Portugal, Argentina, and Brazil, among others. For the first time, there is a woman as President of Brazil (and to think that a hundred years ago, they couldn't even vote). Even animals are gaining their space, as shown by the recent example of banning bullfights in a Spanish city. Countless other minorities now have their space, and their voices are finally being heard after millennia of being suppressed and silenced. But of course, this does not mean there is a “victory” of the Metaphor over the Concept.
Until we find the balance between these forces, there will still be a lot of strife. Look at the case of Brazilian politics, where the Evangelical Phalanx increasingly dominates Congress. The Concept wants to dominate everything and cannot stand to see the Metaphor finding its space in society. They were so outraged by the Supreme Court’s decision to recognize civil unions between homosexuals that they decided to unite and try to pass a law allowing their religious groups to declare any new law that contradicts their precepts unconstitutional.
But the Metaphor is inevitable because Eternal and Immutable Truths do not exist; all that is claimed as Truth is nothing but fiction. What is considered an indisputable fact today may be proven wrong tomorrow. Humans are cast into a world without names, without access to the truth of things, so they invent names and baptize things. The classical issue concerning the Metaphor is a matter of proximity or adequacy to the truth. Even words that we call Concepts are Metaphors, as language is a Metaphor that transforms objects and ideas into sound and visual signs.
"Values have only been placed in things by humans, to preserve themselves—humans alone have created meaning for things—a human meaning!" says Nietzsche in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra." In another passage, he says: "Were not names and sounds given to things so that humans might amuse themselves with them?" Humans need to invent and be aware of the adequacy of these names, or they would not communicate and would live isolated. The problem is that, over time, the agreement forgets its agreed origin and starts to consider itself immediately adequate to a truth. The agreement erases its metaphorical past and begins to believe it is not a Metaphor. The great problem is the forgetting of the originality of the Metaphor.
People think the Concept is "the thing in itself," but it is not... Everything that self-proclaims as Eternal and Immutable Truth is ignorance. We do not have access to the thing in itself. It exists, of course, but we have forgotten our origin and no longer have access to it. Everything is fiction, everything is a story. Everything we speak and think about concerns only cosmological phenomena. We know nothing about our metaphysical origin, and we have no idea "why there is simply being and not Nothing instead." We cannot take seriously anyone who says they have “found the way and the truth.” Anyone who believes that is just deluded! The Concept establishes itself as immutable truth, but immutable truths do not exist. Life itself is constant change. We live in a sea of Metaphors, of transformations.
Nietzsche, in "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense," explains this better: "What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms; in short, a sum of human relations that have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long use, seem solid, canonical, and binding to a people: truths are illusions that we have forgotten are illusions, metaphors that have become worn out and without sensuous power... Everything that distinguishes man from animal depends on this ability to dissolve metaphor into a schema, to dissolve an image into a Concept. Every intuitive metaphor is unique and unparalleled and thus escapes all classification. The Concept is only a residue of the Metaphor."
Religion stifles progress because doubt is illusorily annihilated in the name of a firm and secure Concept, but nobody knows anything for sure. Therefore, we should destroy all Sacred Books, the primary culprits for the existence of the Concept that suffocates the Metaphor. Is there any doubt that they are the greatest obstacle to humanity?
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