SPEAKER_00 0:23

Animism is the beginning of a human sense of religiosity, symbolic behaviors, cave drawing, burial practices, orientation. They often get gripped in with culture or art. You know, there might be ways of dressing that with Mark, some sort of religious category of persons. It's very difficult to separate out what's a religious impulse versus what's a purely artistic impulse versus what's a purely sociological or cultural impulse. Some kind of a way, symbolize things that are in the natural environment, atmospheric things like the weather, stars at night, and the sun, and the water, and oceans, rivers, mountains, the moon, forests and rivers, valleys, you know, you name it, all these geographic, environmental, atmospheric features that are picked out as objects of some kind of veneration or wonderment. Not just because of their practical relation to survival and reproduction, but also because of a basic spiritual or religious impulse that is just a kind of world full of intentions or purposes that are unknown and maybe even unknowable. So looking at these things and perhaps even wondering what are they all for. In the history of philosophy, this is kind of like considered the encounter with the other, the inscrutable other, the fathomless other. So that at some moment in the history of human evolution, tensionality was ejected onto the objects and the activities of the world. Modern scientific humanity does not see nature as anything but blind forces. And so there has been a meaning crisis declared this callback to when there was supposedly a more uh enchanted world full of purposes, full of meaning, full of intentionality, uh, that is lost by the material reduction of the modern science. Why is there this sense of loss, this sense of craving for a larger meaning and purpose in the world that used to be provided by such things as religion? Or it might be a kind of paranoia of seeing patterns where there aren't any. So the enchanted world versus the disenchanted world, and the disenchanted world is this scientific rational world that we supposedly live in now. Something else that was served by seeing the world as full of independent intentionality that had to be imagined because they couldn't be directly known. Some yearning, some desires. So in general, you get this reduction of otherness, this reduction of unknowability to the knowable. These animist gods are transformed into the gods of pantheon. So that the sun Helios is this, you know, guy in a chariot who makes the sun a little less inscrutable by personifying the sun as a guy in a chariot who uh to drive himself across the sky every day in order for there to be there. And then you get personifications and many cultures of all kinds of things like sickness, death, agriculture, war. And in general, these pantheons are associated with sedentary rather than nomadic peoples, peoples who are to some degree urbanized because they can stay in one place because of the greater and greater possibilities with agriculture. And so pantheons in general reflect a greater need also for hierarchy and organization, and there to be a stratified society, and the gods uh in their little boxes and in their little zones, and you know, they all reflect that stratification, uh, but they also reflect uh a greater personification or a greater humanization, uh become more and more anthropomorphic, which you can see in the shift from the uh Titans to the Olympians in Mycenaean Greece. The Olympians are certainly more human-like and also more involved in human affairs in general, oftentimes in detrimental ways, but also as helpers, as uh Athena is obviously a great help to Odysseus. But there is still a lot of otherness about these more humanized gods. They are capricious, they are unpredictable, and in general they are not great for uncertainty reduction. So you need a specialized class who can figure out the unscrupulousness of these gods. They can figure out how to correctly propitiate them so that you get the correct outcome. And they can explain to you why when things are going super shitty, it's because uh some god is against you and you need to sacrifice in the correct way to that god to uh fix things up. But thankfully, that priest knows just how to do it. They are specially trained and have been specially chosen by that god to perform the correct ritual for uh the proper price. And so you can see just the continual stratification and specialization of society to get a specialized priestly class, often hereditary, but then you get this uh educated class that gradually rises up to challenge their authority. In particular in Athens, you get the development of philosophy, beginning with the so-called pre-Socratics, and then Socrates himself, and of course, Plato writing down his doings, uh, perhaps fictionalizing them a bit, and then his student Aristotle, who in many ways is the precursor to modern science. But famously, these philosophers, particularly Plato, rejected the mythology, the ritual practice, the authority of the priests, as well as of the poets and their Arctic presentations of these pantheons in favor of rational thought. But first through polytheism to monotheism. Famously, the god of the philosophers is not really a personification of human intention. In Plato you get the concept of the one where the eternal forms reside as if in the mind of God, pristine and perfect, unlike this fallen world. Uh, whereas everything else is a contingent being. And then these developments in Athens get joined together with monotheistic developments in the ancient Near East. Sometimes we say Jerusalem in the metonymic sense of Jerusalem representing the idea of what had been a pantheistic god. So, for example, Yahweh having been a regional storm god to a particular group of Canaanites, through a very long process becoming the only god, the one god, which seemed to devote all the other gods either to complete non-existence or to the realm of demons. In the Hellenization of the ancient Near East, you get the joining of Jerusalem and Athens, and so you get the intermixing of Greek ideas about the One, mixing with Yahweh to become the One God. And this intention of the One God is further purified by the sciences so that you get somebody like Barokus Spinoza equating God or the one with the material or the physical universe. There is no personal intention, there is no subjective intention from which being or from which whatever there is comes. There is only the blind intention of physical causality. Which was what Einstein meant when he said that his god was Baruch Spinoza's God. In other words, his God is the natural world. And then you get somebody like Louis Feierbach, who looks at the god of monotheism and sees it as a projection of human value, a projection of human intention, so that God is like the maximal or the ultimate human in some kind of a way, or ultimate personification of what human beings take to be valuable or ultimate, you know, absolute. The pantheons of polytheism are used to explain all kinds of personal intentions behind the world and its happenings, which both reduces uncertainty but also increases it because oftentimes these personalities are quite capricious, quite fickle, hard to propitiate, and hard to control in general. So, in a sense, the otherness of the external or the outside of the self or the outside of the intention is reduced, which means that it's more coherent in a sense, or more readable in a sense, or more knowable in a sense, the specific sense that it seems more human. But it retains this uh completely uh irrational, inhuman, unpredictability, this resistance to systemization, this uh utterness of the other uh that Jacques Racan calls the real. So there is plenty of room for imagination still because there's all of this unknowability plus all of this imagined intention uh behind uh the utterness uh of the exterior world. And then all of this polytheistic uh uncertainty, all of these many purposes of polytheism, many intentions uh of the many gods gets projected into the one intention of the ultimate uh exterior other, the ultimate big other, which is the god of monotheism. And then whatever appears to happen outside of that one intention is just because of the inscrutability of that one god and the mystery of his uh intentions. The many intentions of polytheism is the rational dialogue, the rational thinking, the rational inquiry of philosophy, which eventually results in the total rejection of intention in the rational and empirical sciences. But nowadays you are seeing a sort of realization of the problem with reducing all intentions to physical causality, and any perception that there are any degrees of freedom like choice or a conscious decision or a conscious intention, or any degrees contained within an imaginal projection are illusions, illusions that are physically necessary. But this has left many cold and longing for the return of purpose, the return of the gods.

SPEAKER_01 44:00

She didn't know.

SPEAKER_02 44:16

She did not know that.