Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Yes, my vacation went well, thank you. (I'm optimistically assuming it will have gone well and have concluded uneventfully before you read this.) Happy Easter. For the religious Christians among you, some thoughts from Albert Schweitzer for this day. This is from The Mystery of the Kingdom of God . All italics are from the original. "Jesus, however, reached back after the fundamental conception of the prophetic period,  and it is only the   form   in which he conceives of the emergence of the final event which bears the stamp of later Judaism. He no longer conceives of it as an intervention of God in the history of the nations, as did the Prophets; but rather as a final cosmical catastrophe. His eschatology is the apocalyptic of the book of Daniel, since the Kingdom is to be brought about by the Son of Man when he appears upon the clouds of heaven (Mark 8:38 - 9:1) . " The secret of the Kingdom of God is therefore the synthesis effected by a sovereign spirit bet...

A Hillel Schwartz essay, originally written in the late 1990s, when millennial thoughts had a calender-driven appeal, and had become enmeshed in a technical issue concerning computer dating, has the title I've provided for this blog post. Schwartz starts off  in a self-conscious and jokey manner. It takes him awhile [a while?] to settle down and warm to his own topic. When he does settle down he says that eschatology is.... apparent in the fairy tales of Charles Perrault and in the Penny Merriments collected by Samuel Pepys, so many of which have to do with acts of inversion, mistakings of low for high and high for low, and the triumph of a youngest child (like Perrault) over elder siblings. It was apparent in the alembic by which alchemy subsided into chemistry, where hermetic procedures became basic laws of often inverse relationship among qualities (volume, temperature, pressure) and states of matter, such that liquids could suddenly if more explicitly transmute into gas ...

I'll have nothing to say in this blog over the next couple of days. So this will be our last pre-Christmas post. On Christmas Day itself I'll post the lyrics of a favorite Christmas carol, largely because that's easy to do and I'm holiday-lazy. See you then! The following is a fine statement by John Milton of the eschatological hope bound up with Christianity, and for that matter with the Jewish messianic tradition. enjoy. Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold, And spekl'd vanity Will sicken soon and die, And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould, And Hell itself will pass away, And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day. Yea Truth, and Justice then Will down return to men, Th'enamelled Arras of the Rainbow wearing, And Mercy set between, Thron'd in celestial sheen, With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering, And Heav'n as at some festival, Will open wide the Gates of her high Palace Hall. John Milton, Nativ...

What is the point of human life? We're all going to die anyway, after all, inhabiting thereafter an everlasting nothingness. Here's an answer to that question that doesn't try to deconstruct it. The point may involve saving the universe from itself. The Big Bang of contemporary astronomical theory, combined with the conventional understanding of the 2d law of thermodynamics, leads to a rather dismal prospect of a universe that expires slowly but inevitably into nothingness, by spreading out and cooling off until nothing is left. Like a clock that can never re-wind itself. Like our own lives, but on a really big scale. And with nothing left to carry on, nor any project left to be carried, or any place to carry it.   Can the universe avoid that fate? Perhaps -- I suspect that advanced species can and sometimes do get far enough in their own scientific development to figure out how to beat the 2d law in their cosmic locality. Those localities then become sources ...